Citizenship and Immigration committee  In terms of the processing of the LMIAs and the applications, I'll pass that on to my colleagues. I'm really not in a position of expertise to speak to that. Gilles, did you want to speak to the forecasting of labour demand?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As an example, I believe a chef is what we would call a skill level B, for those A, B, C or D, meaning that it's a technical job. Skilled trades usually call for a college diploma, training or apprenticeship. If you ask me, from a NOC perspective, I would not necessarily say that is a low-skill trade.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I have colleagues that communicate with Immigration and colleagues whom I understand the committee may consider whether they need to invite or reinvite to talk to some of those concerns. Through the Job Bank, if employers don't see skills or job titles they like, they can provide us with feedback.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm sorry, we're smiling because we collaborate on the national occupational classification. ESDC does a lot of the research and we work with StatsCan to publish it. I may, then, take this question on board. The skill levels are about the typical education and training required.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think it was meant to be used for the full range of all labour market information, for all purposes. I would say yes, or that it wasn't exclusively not designed for that. What's important is that when we put this forward, we're not intending to assign any notion of the skill or the value of a job.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In terms of British Columbia, there's a WorkBC provincial website that has really good labour market information. There is also the national Job Bank, which is both a job board for employers to post jobs and the centrepiece where we present the labour market information we produce.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  In terms of the just-in-time and the granular data, that's why actually using the Job Bank, which I'm responsible for as well, is about the closest we get to a real-time source of both employers, and to a more limited extent, some job seekers who actually create accounts. We can find those to be very detailed sources of insight.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not really familiar with that particular project. My main areas of responsibility are labour market information, the national Job Bank and ESDC. I don't know much about that design of the pilot.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the information presented by my colleagues from Statistics Canada demonstrates the important role that immigration has played recently, and is projected to play, in terms of overall workforce growth, and continuing to support economic growth. The data shows a question around whether it's sufficient.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Again, unfortunately, I'm not in a position to comment as an expert in that area. I'm in the skills and employment branch at Employment and Social Development Canada. I could speak a little bit about our transfers to provinces and territories and other things for adult training and skills training, but I don't have much background or expertise to provide the committee concerning immigration.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The agricultural sector is an interesting one. My colleagues and I have had a couple of meetings in recent weeks with the Agricultural Human Resource Council and others. If you look at those national projections I mentioned, they will show balance over the long term. If you look at some of the 76 economic regions and locations across the country, for general farm labourers and some very specific ones, it's a mixed story.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This is not news to us. One of the messages I would like to leave for this committee is the notion that we have a range of sources of data, statistics and information insights. Those range from surveys to administrative data to sectors that ESDC funds to produce and to provide us with these results, to the regional economists I mentioned, who are in the field, and who collect and understand daily news about plants opening and shifts shutting down or starting up.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  —and we would not dispute that. Sometimes perhaps the labour market economists come out to talk about the notion of the shortage and whether it is a sustained structural shortage, or that we also need to look at the supply of labour and its ability to adapt and to adjust through geographic mobility, occupational mobility, training and so on.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak today about the labour market in Canada. In my opening remarks, I will speak to the various sources of information available to assess shortages and labour market pressures and some of the analysis and products produced by ESDC, and then offer some brief insights into what we currently understand about labour shortages.

Human Resources committee  I think it's important to say that we have a variety of sources of labour market information. We receive some through surveys from Statistics Canada. We look at our own administrative data, including things like employment insurance data and Job Bank data, and then the BuildForce industry validates it.