Human Resources committee  In our industry alone. In Banff and Lake Louise a comprehensive study was done that shows that even with all the advertising, even with reaching out to everybody.... By the way, we prefer to hire Canadians. It's a lot cheaper than having to fly people in. At the end of the day, we identified another thousand people this year in Banff and Lake Louise.

Human Resources committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to be back here again with you a couple of weeks after my last time here, but I won't say any more about that. The Hotel Association of Canada represents all of the lodging industry across Canada. There are about 8,500 hotels.

Industry committee  It's basically the same thing in the hotel business as well.

Industry committee  If you're trading down and trading down, then how do you get it back, and so forth.

Industry committee  In a hotel, we're typically at 65% for business travel, roughly, depending on how you define it. The other portion is obviously leisure. Where we've had the biggest fall-off, though, as Ms. McKenzie stated, is in group travel. In other words, business travel, particularly conventions, is off.

Industry committee  We track more our occupancy rate and RevPAR. We're obviously very interested in knowing where people are coming from or what they're doing. Yes, we do.

Industry committee  I'm not allowed to talk about rate, either, just for the record. Thank you.

Industry committee  I can speak for the hotel side, Mr. Garneau. We look at it in terms of bookings, and we see how they fell off almost overnight. Yet we see now that the group bookings, the business bookings for the third and fourth quarters next year, are starting to come back a little bit. Are we optimistic?

Industry committee  I think we've been very fortunate over the course of the last few years. There was a period of time when there wasn't a minister designated with responsibility for travel, tourism, etc., and I have to give full credit to Mr. Ritz, who was minister prior to Minister Ablonczy, in terms of being very accessible and consulting regularly, seeking our views.

Industry committee  There's been a lot of discussion with people. Why don't we just go out and buy...? What does a passport cost in the States, Brian?

Industry committee  If you're going to go out and bring in a big convention or something, typically the people there already have passports. We're looking at the people who will go across the river, across the bridge to your hometown. How do we influence them? How do we get the guy who would go to the casinos where Mr.

Industry committee  One of the things I've always been a big believer in.... You have all these great big city visitor bureaus, if you will, that are spending phenomenal amounts of money all over the place to attract people. I often wonder why you don't take $1 million and go and buy a convention, instead of taking $1 million and dividing it up with 20 different things.

Industry committee  I don't have any further comment. I leave all the promotion in that area to Ms. Mackenzie and her CTC team.

Industry committee  It's interesting. Under the temporary foreign worker program, you have to demonstrate to the bureaucrats that you've gone out and tried to hire a Canadian. You have to show an advertisement to prove that you've actually advertised in the media. The problem we have is that we do not have sufficient numbers of people, particularly in the resort areas.

Industry committee  It's not a panacea.