I haven't had a lot of direct conversations with the unions recently.

I will say, first of all, that we are a fairly highly unionized industry, as you pointed out. Those are relationships that are managed between the unions and the companies, and for all intents and purposes seem to flow well. It's something that we obviously don't discourage and certainly have welcomed in our sector.

When in the spring we were asking the federal government to implement changes to the temporary foreign worker program, we in fact had letters of support from unions, because of course when we bring foreign workers into a unionized plant, those foreign workers are automatically part of the union. They are afforded all of the same benefits and protections that any other worker would have—in fact, whether a plant is unionized or not. As we work on the strategic framework, I think we are going to have to be having more conversations.

A chair of mine once said that if we were doing everything right, we wouldn't still have problems. That doesn't mean we haven't all been working hard, but we clearly have to start thinking about how we do things differently. I think that involves having conversations with a lot of folks we may not always talk to, including indigenous Canadians and groups that are perhaps under-represented, and trying to figure out how to in fact encourage more people to come into this workforce. The challenge there, of course, is that we end up stealing from other employers, so you make the situation more difficult for them.

I think that ultimately what we want to do is understand how we look at Canadians who perhaps are not active or fully active in the workforce and how we encourage and help them to overcome barriers to enter the workforce. How do we look at where maybe the people who aren't working are? They may not be in the right places where we need them to be.

Really critical to this whole thing is that a lot of times you have workers but they don't have the right skills. We have a massive skills gap. The skilled trades are where I think we spend a lot of time talking about that shortage, but across the board, we often see a skills gap that we need to focus on as well.

All of this, I will say, is part of the project that we're working on.

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