I always remember when I was a relatively new MLA and the Premier stood up at that time and said there's more jobs than people to fill them in the territory. I never really thought about it that way, but that really is the truth. That's why we bring in thousands of people a year to do work. What we really need to do is ensure that our northern residents are trained to get those jobs. We might still need people from the South. We likely will, but that's okay as long as we're keeping money in the North and northern people are working.

In 2015, ECE completed with the Conference Board of Canada a labour market forecast, and at that time, it was forecasted that between 2015 and 2030, there would be 28,500 job openings in the Northwest Territories. We're doing the work now to update that to 2035. Interestingly enough, we're also looking at doing the work that we already did but also focusing on new and emerging economies, things like infrastructure projects, housing construction projects, tourism and knowledge economy, and mining and remediation. They fit in nicely with things like the earth resources specialization, the new polytechnic. There's a big labour shortage. We know we need tradespeople. I could stand up here for hours talking about all the needs we have. We need teachers. We bring in hundreds of teachers every year from the South. You're not going to get an argument from me that there's a labour shortage.