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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
BioTalent Canada is pleased to be included in your discussion here today.
We're addressing an issue that is very pertinent to the biotech sector, or the bio-economy as we like to call it, which includes industries that stretch from health, medicine, and pharmaceutical manufacturing, to agriculture, medical device, nanotechnology, and even food processing.
While the bio-economy is growing rapidly in areas like agrifood and sustainable development technology, the huge pharmaceutical industry remains a massive contributor to the Canadian economy but is facing huge economic challenges.
Nonetheless, recent estimates conclude that the bio-economy contributes no less than $86.5 billion, or 7%, to the total of Canada's gross domestic product.
BioTalent Canada is a national not-for-profit sector council currently funded primarily by HRSDC and led by a volunteer board of industry leaders. We provide skills development and human resource information and tools for job seekers and employers in the bio-economy.
Like many industry verticals, labour market research has shown that Canada's bio-economy companies continue to need skilled, job-ready people. Due to the vastness of the sector, the skills that are in demand range from the highly specialized to those used in lower-skilled jobs.
Through commissioning our own research, we have conducted the only national studies in Canada that are exclusive to human resource issues in biotechnology. In our most recent labour market surveys, we learned that more than 80% of biotech companies in Canada are small to medium enterprises, which means that most of their time is spent innovating, and there is often no dedicated human resources department. Research also indicated that 34.4% of the companies were currently facing skills shortages, and 32.5% had active vacant positions to fill.
In turn, BioTalent Canada identified potential talent pools, including persons with disabilities, aboriginals, internationally educated professionals, new graduates, and retired and retiring workers. While dealing with labour gaps directly affecting persons with disabilities is not BioTalent Canada's specific mandate, of those companies surveyed, research indicated that only 21.9% have hired persons with disabilities. In other words, persons with disabilities is a labour pool whose full potential is not currently being realized in Canada's bio-economy.
BioTalent Canada has developed tools and techniques to bridge the skills gaps identified by those labour market surveys. Our 2009 study, “Generating opportunity”, showed a need in the biomanufacturing sector that was specific to skills gaps in positions that required less training.
The problem was two-fold. First, it was found that industry could not find people with the skills they require, and secondly, skills from potential candidates were not recognized as being relevant to the biotech field. Our solution to this was the successful launch of our biomanufacturing skills transfer program, which kicked off in February 2012.
We found that the area we referred to as biomanufacturing—that is, manufacturing related to biomedical devices, agricultural biotech, bioenergy, food processing, nutraceuticals, and pharmaceuticals—lacked skilled workers. In the companies surveyed, 30% of the biomanufacturing positions were vacant. Also, in the recent downturn, we knew there was an available labour pool of unemployed and displaced traditional manufacturing workers in southwestern Ontario region, particularly Kitchener and Waterloo.
Our biomanufacturing program identifies, recognizes, and matches traditional manufacturing skills with the desired biomanufacturing skills. BioTalent Canada then helps these workers connect with industry. Our goal is to transfer 100 unemployed manufacturing workers into jobs in biomanufacturing by the end of 2012.
What has worked best for us is to try to look at skills gaps with a pragmatic approach. For the biomanufacturing skills gap, for example, we took an entirely new approach and looked at areas of the economy where economic conditions resulted in a glut of certain skills—in this case, manufacturing. Then we mapped the deficiencies necessary for those workers to transition into the bio-economy—in this case, biomanufacturing. This skills recognition is a unique approach to addressing competency gaps and a departure from the credential recognition commonly applied in other industries.
From a governmental perspective, with federal funding being cut from all sector councils in 2013, the federal government has effectively put the responsibility for sector skills assessment and corrections squarely in the hands of private industry. While we're working toward the transition, it is quite possible that there will be no national organization like BioTalent Canada to act as the skill-set watchdog for the national bio-economy. There's a real risk that there will be no national vision on sector skills in the future, and no watchdog to ensure Canada's approach remains consistent and competitive with the skills approaches implemented in other countries in the international sector.
This abrogation of sector skills responsibility could pose a real risk to Canada's continued competitiveness for internationally educated immigrants, and for investment in human capital to drive the robust Canadian bio-economy.
Thank you.
It's my pleasure to be here to represent ECO Canada, Canada's sector council for the environment industry. We are an industry-initiated, industry-led, not-for-profit Canadian corporation with a mandate to ensure an adequate supply of people with the appropriate skills and knowledge to meet the environmental human resource needs of the public and private sectors. We believe in forming partnerships, identifying labour market issues, and then coming up with labour market solutions.
We've been in existence since 1992 and are one of the oldest sector councils in existence. We develop recruitment and retention programs for individuals and employers as well as for government—federal, provincial, municipal, and aboriginal—and educational institutions, in order to ensure that the environment sector will reach its full employment and economic potential. We have published over 50 labour market intelligence reports, and those reports are used all over Canada and are considered to be the source of environmental human resource information in Canada and in some cases worldwide. We currently have over 178,000 members in our organization, and we are very well known and respected.
You should be aware that environmental employment is a significant employer in Canada. Over two million Canadians have environmental employment to some degree. That's 12% of the workforce. Some 682,000 work in environmental employment more than 50% of the time, and that's 4% of the Canadian workforce. Over 318,000 organizations employ one or more environmental professionals. That is 17% of all organizations in Canada. We are the thread that pulls a variety of organizations together. We're in urban and rural areas, including Canada's north. With respect to employment rates prior to the economic downturn, environmental employment was growing at a 60% faster rate than employment in the general Canadian economy. Even after 2008, we are growing at average rates of 7% annually, compared with 1.5% for the Canadian economy. We're involved heavily in the STEM process—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and about 37% of our individuals are from that area. About 40% of our employers hired during the economic downturn, but a full one-third of them said they have difficulty finding people with the appropriate skills and knowledge.
The environment sector is going through an evolution. It's moving towards what we're referring to as the green economy, and we have to be ready for that expansion. Some 37% of all individuals in the environment sector have a university or college diploma, implying that 63% do not. We have applicability with highly skilled professionals as well as lower-skilled people. The Canadian Wind Energy Association, CanWEA, estimates that 70% of all jobs in their industry will require entry-level workers, such as skilled trades and labourers. This will also be critical in building construction, renewable energy, environmental remediation, recycling, and green manufacturing. We certainly do cover the entire gamut.
We believe in national occupational standards documenting what people do in functional areas of employment. We believe in building a common language and logic, which we currently do not have, with respect to the green economy and environmental jobs. We're working on that in partnership with a variety of other organizations.
One-third of all environmental workers today are over the age of 45. About 4% of environmental workers are already beyond retirement age. Some 14% of environmental workers will reach retirement age in the next 10 years, creating 100,000 vacancies. We have predicted that this year there will be 40,000 new environmental jobs in Canada. How are we going to fill those jobs? We're going to fill them with youth, transitioning workers, immigration, and aboriginal people. Of those individuals, 30,000 to 35,000 will come from the current post-secondary educational institutions. However, a good number are going to have to come from a variety of other activities. ECO Canada has built solutions. Those solutions are based on attracting young people to environmental careers and making them aware of the environmental activities that are going to lead the future. They are our leaders of the future. We have a green high school program that has, in one year, been in contact with over 42,000 students and teachers.
We also have a Canadian Environmental Accreditation Commission. We are actually accrediting universities and colleges across Canada, and we're the only organization in Canada to actually accredit university undergraduate and postgraduate programs. We have a Canadian Centre for Environmental Education that offers full-blown baccalaureate and master's degrees, 100% online, with no residency requirements. We are Canada's largest aboriginal trainer as well, and currently we have 466 aboriginal people working on contaminated sites cleanup in northern Canada in combination with the federal contaminated sites action plan.
We believe that the environment and the economy go hand in hand, and according to the University of Massachusetts, clean energy investments compared to fossil fuel create 2.6 times more jobs for people with college and university degrees, 3 times more jobs for people with some college, and 3.6 times more jobs for people with high school. We are going to work in partnership with a variety of organizations as we move forward. We believe that ECO Canada is an agent of change, and we will be ensuring that we're able to meet our employment and economic potential.
Thank you.
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When we're talking about measurement, for example, we're talking about renewable energy and energy efficiency—measuring pollutants that are being emitted, greenhouse gas measurements, carbon measurements, carbon loadings, carbon inventories.
ECO Canada, through our certification program, is the only organization—I won't be able to say this very often—in the world right now that is ISO-accredited to certify greenhouse gas verifiers and quantifiers. That process has been in existence for about a year now. The vast majority of our applicants are from outside Canada, because there is no regulatory regime within Canada that's pushing people in that area.
We're also seeing huge gaps with respect to technical people not having managerial skills, not having communication skills, because they're coming from science, engineering, and technology backgrounds.
We have a whole list of national occupational standards, which are all electronic, that individuals can measure their competencies against, and then be directed toward training to fill those competencies.
Hi, and I apologize for my voice. It was quite an exciting weekend for us, as you know.
I want to go back to the fact that you said your budget is being cut. We're hearing that there are shortages out there, yet when we look at a document that was prepared for us, based on HRSDC's Canadian occupational projection system, I find it sometimes contradicts itself. In some places it says that most of the places are balanced right now, and if there is a shortage by 2020, there will be a surplus in some of these jobs. A lot of it is in the sciences field.
I'm concerned because if we're looking at the need to fill positions, the need for employment—and we have people out there who are looking for employment—and your budget is being cut, I'm trying to figure out what impact that will have with respect to being able to entice people to take courses or upgrading or anything like that to be able to move forward.
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If I may, I honestly believe that within the environmental sector we do not have common language and logic. So when you're comparing some of the other numbers, we're not necessarily using the same NOC or NAICS codes to collect that data.
Our data has been accepted by Stats Canada as being more reliable because it deals specifically with functional jobs, and NAICS and NOC have not kept up with that.
I believe, as well, that you're right. Professional development change is the rule, not the exception, in our area, and keeping pace is going to be absolutely critical.
Our labour market intelligence indicated that people wanted to have online programming. They wanted distance delivery so they could do it online, because they work in remote areas, and so on. We created a partnership with 25 universities and colleges across Canada and we now offer, as I mentioned, a diploma, a baccalaureate degree, and a master's degree, 100% online, with no residency requirement. We currently have 1,000 students taking 2,500 courses, and 15% of those students are foreign students, which means that in their home country they get a parchment from a recognized Canadian university before they get here. The remaining 85% are professional development.
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Our partners in this whole process are some of the larger universities in Canada, as well as several universities from the United States.
It's only begun; we've only been in existence for three years. Our first master's student started last year, so we haven't graduated any of those as of yet, but it's interesting to note that in the second intake, we had double the number of qualified applicants as we had in the first year.
Certainly, within the industry, the talk on the street was that this is a great program, and let's get involved.
With respect to how we are going to work with the other universities, the universities that are involved as our partners here, they just simply offer their courses up, we accredit those courses, and then they become part of our activity. We use some of that money to identify where the curriculum gaps are and to develop new curriculum to fill those gaps.
It's a self-propagating process because we are indeed a not-for-profit Canadian corporation.
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Thank you very much for presenting today. We really appreciate it.
There's one thing, from the standpoint of correcting the record, on a comment you made, Mr. Trump. In my previous life I was an academic at two universities—the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario—and I recognize that people outside those environments may think it takes six to eight years to implement programs, but frequently we can implement them as soon as we see a need, usually within nine months. So I think the academic environment can be responsive when provided the right information by the individuals they work with.
This is specifically for you, Mr. Henderson, at BioTalent. You mentioned a bit about the skill shortages. Could you be very specific on what the skill shortages are, in very specific terms—in the engineering field, it would be a mechanical engineer, not just an engineer—and also region by region? There are, at least from my experience of being on the Genome Canada board and my experience with the National Research Council, substantive differences, and it would be helpful for us to have that sense on a regional basis of what the differences are.
If you have the information, that's great. If you don't, if you could provide it to us at another time, I'd appreciate it.
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Certainly from all of the research, both allegorical and anecdotal, the agrifood sector is booming. There's no question it's one of the things that's driving the Saskatchewan economy, specifically in those areas.
What I've heard, certainly from the SME standpoint, is very interesting. When you talk about biotech, you talk about a minimum science degree, science engineering, mathematical, but what a lot of these people are specifically lacking are the soft skills. When I say “soft skills” I don't want to put that as a negative, but these are entrepreneurial jobs and as much as somebody might be able to look through a microscope, the anecdotal inference is that people need to be able to meet with investors and be able to sell, market, produce, manage labs, and all these other things that are going to be very important to these jobs.
Specifically in those two sectors I see great growth, and that is certainly what we are seeing from our sister organizations. Otherwise we have aquaculture, both of those organizations, had a huge resurgence in the last two or three years, or I should say huge growth since the last time we did our last labour market survey.
My name is Alain Beaudoin and I am Director General of the Information and Communications Technologies Branch. Joining me is Shane Williamson, Director General of the Program Coordination Branch of the Science and Innovation Sector.
My remarks today will consist of two parts. First, I will be providing a quick overview of the federal support provided through the granting councils. Second, I will speak to our recent efforts on the issue of talent for the information and communications technologies sector.
[English]
To support the supply of talent in all sectors of the economy, the federal government has a number of programs in place to promote the development of a highly knowledgeable workforce and support researchers, as well as graduate and postgraduate students, who are critical to success in a knowledge economy.
The three granting councils support a suite of post-secondary research talent programs. New programs have been created in recent years to support students or researchers who have demonstrated a high standard of scholarly achievement and excellence in research.
The Vanier Canada graduate scholarship helps Canada's universities attract sought-after doctoral students from across Canada and around the world. The Banting post-doctoral fellowships support top-tier post-doctoral talent from Canada and abroad. In the coming months the Minister of State for Science and Technology, the , will announce the 2012 Vanier scholars and Banting fellows.
Other significant investments have been made, including the establishment of the Canada excellence research chairs program targeted at attracting the very best internationally recognized researchers and their teams to conduct groundbreaking research at Canadian institutions. Established in 2008, this program now supports 18 chairholders at 13 universities, who are making positive contributions to Canada's global competitiveness and well-being.
Budget 2011 announced funding for a new CERC competition to award 10 new chairs to Canadian universities. The competition was launched in November 2011, with appointments expected in late 2013.
[Translation]
The CERC program builds on the success of the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program, which allows Canadian institutions to strengthen their position as global leaders in research and development, bringing together greater economic and social benefits for Canadians.
In addition, the government supports programs that connect students and researchers with industry, such as the Industrial Research and Development Fellowships program, and the Industrial Research and Development Internship program. These provide students with valuable research experience in an industrial setting. Not only does this bridge academia and the private sector, it also helps to strengthen Canada's innovation performance.
[English]
As part of Canada's economic action plan, significant support was provided through the knowledge infrastructure program for the repair, maintenance, and construction of university and college facilities. A total of 520 projects were funded through this temporary $2 billion program, helping post-secondary institutions refurbish their existing infrastructure and build new facilities. By enhancing the research and training capacity of Canadian universities and colleges, this program will help provide a new generation with the advanced skills they need to thrive in the knowledge economy.
[Translation]
Now let me turn to the specific issue of talent for the ICT sector.
In 2010, the ICT sector accounted for approximately 5% of Canada's GDP, performed 33% of all private sector research and development, and employs approximately 563,000 Canadians, with salaries 52% higher than the national average. In order to compete and innovate, ICT companies must attract and retain the best possible talent.
During the 2010 Digital Economy Strategy consultations and the 's recent roundtables with the ICT sector, the industry emphasized the importance of talent for their sector. To help us shed light on supply and demand of Canadian ICT talent and support our work with provinces and territories, we hired the firm Nordicity. Between January and March of this year, Nordicity conducted interviews and an online survey of ICT firms and associations in key clusters.
While there are limits to the data collected in Nordicity's research, respondents identified current and future talent shortages, especially for media developers, programmers, and for software and computer engineers. Additionally, it found that there is a lack of executives with five years or more experience. Survey respondents also felt that college and university graduates need more “real world” skills, such as communications, project management, and overall business acumen.
[English]
Many company executives stress that talent is top of mind, and that speed in hiring is a requirement to keep pace with rapid technological changes and global competition. However, they indicated that the current immigration processes take too long to address their needs.
Earlier this month, Nordicity shared these results during an ICT round table organized by Industry Canada. It is important to note that the responsibility for ICT talent is shared and that while it resides primarily with academia and the private sector, governments also have a role to play. As such, the round table comprised industry, associations, and academia as well as federal and provincial government officials. The round table participants agreed with the broad findings of the report and on the importance of collaboration between all partners.
At the conclusion of the round table, participants identified five key priority areas that warranted action. The first priority was to increase ICT enrolment and graduation rates of ICT professionals. The second was to increase collaboration between industry and academia to ensure that curricula are more relevant and current to the needs of the industry. The third priority was to further private sector investments in upgrading employee skills and entrepreneurships, and to help develop executives who will help grow firms. The fourth was to reduce delays in the current immigration system to attract specialized and experienced workers.
Finally, participants agreed on the need for additional ICT labour information and data to better understand supply and demand dynamics.
[Translation]
Mr. Chair, we presented the results of the roundtable to FPT Economic Development ministers who met last week on the digital economy. Ministers acknowledged the critical need for digital skills and talent for the ICT sector. They also committed to working with the ICT sector to seek potential solutions to its skills challenges. As next steps, the FPT ICT Working Group will develop an action plan with various partners on the priorities identified during the roundtable and explore opportunities for collaboration.
My colleague and I would welcome the committee's questions.
[English]
Thank you.
With regard to your question, the round table agreed to identify five parties that, they thought, warranted actions by all the partners in order to help address the situation. As I mentioned, first and foremost, they wanted to work towards increasing enrolment and graduation over time. This is not a short-term priority. It will take participation and close collaboration between academia and the industry in order to address this issue.
The second was to increase collaboration between academia and the industry in order to improve the curricula to ensure that the curricula would better meet the industry's needs, which are ever-changing because of technological issues and because of various externalities.
The third was to work towards continually improving training on the job, because companies felt that it was really important to continue that training in order for their staff to keep pace with technological changes, as well as to help increase their competitiveness and to allow them to keep innovating.
The fourth one was to work towards improving immigration and accelerating entry.
The fifth was the issue of data. It's a very complex issue with regard to the ICT sector, and other sectors as well. In our case, there are various subsectors. There is a different reality from one to the other—the issues the digital media industry is facing are different from those that the telecom equipment industry is facing.
Their stakeholders recognized that this was a complex issue that warranted collaboration to move forward, so that's what we're going to work on in the next few months.
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Thank you, Chair, and my thanks to the witnesses for being here.
I really did appreciate your presentation. The words that caught me referred to developing real-world skills, such as communications, project management, and overall business acumen.
We had witnesses earlier who said there wasn't a labour shortage; there was a skills shortage. As I see some of the demand for people in the future, one of the things we should look at is the sectors, and how we can do things better with fewer people.
I was also impressed with your second point—to increase collaboration between industry and academia to ensure that curricula are more relevant and current to the needs of industry.
I'm from British Columbia, and today a mill that used to have 125 people is down to 30 people because they have programs that automatically pile lumber, cut lumber, and that type of thing. Are you communicating that connection between the various sectors and our universities, and finding ways to decrease the number of people we need through automation and innovation?
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Alain, in his comments, referenced the Canada excellence research chairs, but there is also the Canada research chairs program, which provides funding for up to 2,000 academics across Canada in two tiers.
To respond to your question about how we build it, there is a tier one, which provides funding for up to five years for emerging researchers—they don't have to have a solid track record, it's just a promising researcher. And then there are the tier-two chairs, who are established researchers with a solid track record.
So through the granting councils—it's a tri-council program managed by the three primary granting councils—we do that.
You had referenced CERN. The federal government, through the National Research Council, provides significant funding for TRIUMF. It's based at UBC, but many universities are involved in that. As part of that contribution, TRIUMF allows access to our academics to collaborate with researchers at CERN as well.
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Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Gentlemen, thanks for being here today.
I have three sons between 19 and 24 years of age, and so it may look a little self-serving—me wanting to get them off my payroll and onto somebody else's—but I'll ask these questions on behalf of the almost 15% of young Canadians who find themselves unemployed. There's an even more alarming stat, which is those who are disengaging completely from the workforce. I think everybody around this table knows it's in everybody's best interests to do what we can, and make the suggestions we can, to close that gap.
That being said, as Jean said in her comments and Mr. Daniel mentioned in his, mentorship and work experience are key components of this, and I think the federal government has a role to play in mentoring. I know that one of the great opportunities is through summer work experience, through the federal branch, but we see that through Industry Canada's summer work experience program, between the years of 2006 and 2011, the department did not spend over 25% of its annual budget allotted for summer workers.
Could you explain to us how that might have happened?
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Sir, I'm not really trying to run out the clock or anything.
Just a very quick question. First, thank you very much for your presentation. I am a new member of Parliament here.
I know Industry Canada has run some programs that essentially help bridge academics with the commercialization of product. One item that I think has been a challenge is, and you addressed it, Mr. Beaudoin, in your remarks, is the soft skills gap. Do those academics have the right skills to commercialize their products?
What is your quick comment on whether you think that's a whole new group of skills and a whole new group of people we should be educating to help take things from the bench to the bedside, in my health care profession or otherwise. Or, should we be giving skills to the people already in that pipeline? I don't know if we know the answer to that. Do you have programs focusing on that, to help us answer that programming question?
Thank you very much for presenting.
Mr. Cuzner posed a question, and if it is within the purview of Industry, we'd expect you to respond back. If it is not, respond back indicating that it's not the case. Okay? Thank you very much.
I'll ask the committee to stay back for a moment. I just want to discuss a couple of travel plans before the budget comes in next Wednesday.
With respect to the travel budget—Rodger, you weren't here before we broke for the break week—the Liaison Committee wanted to get a budget for both our eastern travel and our western trip. They wanted to see budgets for both legs of the trip, and the 905 trip, so I've asked the logistics officer to put something together.
On the western trip, we start in Vancouver and end up in Estevan on Thursday. We bring everybody back to Toronto, or wherever you might be going, on Thursday. She had lumped in the Barrie trip that was suggested by the parliamentary secretary on Friday, and I had indicated that we would all be travelling home on Thursday, or wherever we would be going on our points, and that Barrie should be a separate trip by itself, at some other date. So we wanted to split that off.
The other part that you can be thinking about, and I'll ask for comments, was that the western trip has some late-night flights. Since we decided not to go with a charter, it's a little more problematic to arrange flights.
To give you some idea of what it might look like, we would leave Vancouver at 6:30 and arrive in Whitehorse at 8:48, so no problems there. From Whitehorse we need to get to Fort McMurray, and we need to travel through Calgary. So if we left Whitehorse at 7 p.m., we would get to Calgary at 10:37 at night. We could overnight in Calgary or catch the 11:30 flight to be in Fort McMurray at 1:45 a.m.
Now, if you overnight in Calgary, it would mean an extra $5,000 and change, with $800 in flight costs and so on.
Does the committee wish to do a late flight into Fort McMurray or do an early flight to Fort McMurray? I think the early flight would leave at 7:35 in the morning. If you left late and got there late, you would start later.
The rest of the flights aren't too bad. You would get into Regina at 8:51, which would be fine. On the reverse side, getting you back to Toronto, it would be leaving Regina at 6:35, getting into Toronto at 23:38, if that's where you were going, on Thursday night.
So there are some late flights involved. The question specifically is with respect to Fort McMurray, I guess, because I think that one gets you in at 12:45 in the morning.
Do you want to do that or do you want to overnight in Calgary? We have to settle that question so that she can work it accordingly.
Does anybody care...?
Ms. Crowder.
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I would say that on Wednesday we're going to put the budget before this committee for approval and we should have those dates and times circulated to everybody.
Now in fairness to the clerks, they're trying to get a budget for the flights and the dates we've suggested not knowing exactly what we're going to be doing there. It's a bit problematic. They're trying to give us a start and an end time for flying.
I would ask committee members, particularly those who are involved with an area we're going to be visiting, especially in the east, to propose the people who should attend at the round table and where the site visit might be so that the logistics people can start putting that together. They're putting a budget together, particularly for the eastern trip, without having all of the details and information because we need to have that approved fairly quickly, so anything you can do to supply that information would be great.
For now we will have the dates, and obviously the flight times, for both east and west. I think we'll leave Barrie open-ended. We will select the date when it's convenient.
Are there any other thoughts or comments? If not, I'll pass this on to the clerk, who will pass it on to a logistics officer. We hope by Wednesday to have a budget with some dates, times, and things we can look at in a concrete fashion.
All right. Thank you.