Thank you very much to that member for that important question. We’re taking the challenge of unlocking the lost potential under the previous Liberal-NDP coalition of actually getting people into the trades, supporting—

Interjections.

Getting people into the skilled trades, the 300,000 jobs that go unfilled every year—that’s why we created Skilled Trades Ontario, a new crown agency which has a mandate to streamline registration and certification in Ontario’s 144 skilled trades, breaking down the stigma and getting more people in. That’s just one of the many changes we’ve taken on as a government.

The stats speak for themselves: We’ve seen a 25% increase in apprenticeship registration this year over last and a 30% increase in women in the skilled trades—and wait till we get into the specifics in the supplementary, Speaker.

It’s working to build a stronger Ontario. We need the men and women in the trades to get the job done, and we’re doing just that.

We’re also investing $224 million to help through the Skills Development Fund Capital Stream. That’s helping build training centres for apprentices and tradespeople through that fund. This is just one part of our $1.5-billion commitment to the skilled trades to addressing the backlog, the neglect from the previous Liberal government, so that people can find a job in the skilled trades. Because we know that when you have a job in the trades, you’ve got a career for life.

Speaker, I don’t get the rhetoric about skilled trades. We all know that it’s important to have skilled trades workers.

Here’s the situation, Speaker—the question is to the Premier. Electrician students at Conestoga College are desperate to write their C-of-Q. That means they’ll become electricians. But they can’t, Speaker. They can’t because Conestoga College doesn’t have any testing days. They reached out to the Ministry of Labour, the minister’s portfolio, to add at least one more testing day—at least one—to the regional office. One more day means that these 30 Kitchener students can start working as qualified journeypersons as quickly as possible. Your ministry told them that you don’t have enough staff. For a government that claims to be working for workers, it doesn’t seem like they are because everyone knows Ontario desperately needs tradespeople.

Why is the Conservative government not prepared for these tradespeople to take their final certification tests?