Human Resources committee  All right, sir, I will. I think evidence shows that very expensive programs also have very large benefits, so if the training is very intense, very targeted, and you pay a lot of money for the best training providers, the results are equally high. The evidence I know of is from the U.S.

Human Resources committee  I have lots of stories about the skill shortage.

Human Resources committee  I think employers complain a lot about skill shortages. I think the government listens maybe a bit too much. The evidence is that any skill shortages are localized to certain occupations, certain industries, including, of course, the petroleum sector in Alberta. But the labour market should sort this out.

Human Resources committee  Maybe not, because we already see years four and five with very high impacts. We did some analysis on U.S. data and it picks up up to year 10. We look 10 years down the road and you see the benefits persisting. But even year five is fabulous, I think, because we see that there are long-term impacts, and they pick up.

Human Resources committee  Maybe I misspoke. It's a very good program. What I don't want to see is it becoming the only program, especially if you think of an equity thing. Maybe these really are the unemployable people whom, in the absence of the job search assistance programs, would be stuck. So you do give them this first leg-up, which is good.

Human Resources committee  Thank you. I hope you can hear me well; if not, ask me, and I will speak up. I'm a labour economist at the University of Guelph and I think I'm here because my specialization is in program evaluation. Most of my work looks at how to evaluate all these active labour market policies: what the right methodology is, the literature, what the conclusions are, how we can interpret all of these findings.