NS Premier McNeil talks about the Atlantic Growth Strategy

Transcript: NS Premier McNeil talks about the Atlantic Growth Strategy

(Text: Federal ministers and Atlantic premiers announce new initiatives under the Atlantic Growth Strategy. January 27, 2017 | Wolfville, NS.)

The Honourable Stephen McNeil, Premier of Nova Scotia:

About a year ago we came together for the first time. It became obvious to us this was an opportunity for us to collaborate in a way that we hadn't seen for quite some time in the Atlantic region. We started off with a real focus on growing our population. We've had tremendous support from the national government in ensuring that any public policy changes are flexible enough to meet the needs of the economy, to meet the needs of industry as well at the same time, making sure we're capitalizing on those 20,000 young people that come to Nova Scotia every year for post-secondary education.

About 7,000 to 8,000 of them are from other countries where today with the new Minister we're aggressively going to work with our universities to grow that number even more and provide them an avenue to stay inside our province, to grow jobs and create opportunities here.

The announcement today we're making a commitment in a partnership with the national government to double the investment with a focus on right sizing companies, getting companies to scale up to drive economic opportunities.

We all know there are companies in our communities who are exporting but there are many more who would require support and help to become the next exporters of our region, to continue to make sure that we build on this.

This isn't a committee that comes together to create another report. It's a committee that comes together to drive action and I'm looking forward to being in Newfoundland and Labrador this coming summer when we get a final report on some of the growth and changes that we've talked about today and then to focus on what will be our next steps to grow this region with our national government.

(Text: The Atlantic Growth Strategy. La Stratégie de croissance pour l'Atlantique.)

(Text: Be part of the discussion #AtlanticGrowth.)

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