Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to take this opportunity to make general comments and ask the Minister some questions. Mr. Chairman, my question relates to how we go about creating or training more people so that they can be employable in this market that we have. Mr. Chairman, I think everyone knows we live in an unprecedented period of a boom all around the world, especially in North America. There is such a demand for trained people in all sectors. There is a float over to southern Canada, and we are experiencing that in Yellowknife especially, maybe not so much in communities.
I know in Yellowknife, it is not just the professional positions, while we have a shortage of doctors, and lawyers as well, nurses, teachers and engineers, we have a shortage of anyone with computer training. We have a shortage of people with basic office skills. I know small law firms have a hard time keeping anyone with any skills. I would even suggest labour work. Not to mention, Mr. Chairman, the shortage of people trained to work in the diamond industry. We have not even tapped into oil and gas yet.
I would suggest our Territory is not ready. Our training capacity is far behind what may be necessary to fill these jobs.
I have also heard that BHP is in a position of having to institute a literacy program, because their employees are not functionally literate to do the work. The company probably does not want us to speak about that sort of thing.
Given that we know the population of the Northwest Territories is 44,000 people, and there must be some expert advice on how many people can be employable, because so many of them will be retired and so many of them will be babies, and everyone in between. I wonder if the government has the statistics on the labour force requirements out of that 44,000? Where are those people located? Where are the jobs located? I think we are very fortunate in having all of this opportunity. It is a good time for us to look at what we have. We insist in socio-economic arrangements with these massive project companies. Even in government, we are not able to fill some positions with as many affirmative action candidates as we like. There just are not people out there who could take the job. Some may disagree with that, but I think we live in such a boom-time, people are highly valued, especially trained people. Can the Minister provide any information like that?