DATE:
February 20, 2014, 2:00 p.m.
LOCATION:
Aurora College, Trade and Technology Centre, 4507 50th Avenue, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories
SUBJECT:
Minister of Employment and Social Development and Minister for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney delivers a speech on recent changes to Employment Insurance in the North.
Hon. Jason Kenney: Thank you very much. Well, thank you so much for the warm welcome. I’m told today is fairly warm for Yellowknife, but having grown up in Saskatchewan, it’s like a nice brisk winter day for me, so it’s great to be up here. Thank you to everyone from Aurora College for your warm welcome and for the good work that you do to give people, especially young folks from the Territories, the skills they need to succeed and realize their potential. And it’s just a real pleasure to be with you on behalf of the Government of Canada, which is an important funding partner and supporter of much of the work that you do, especially through the Mining Training Centre.
And I’m up here in part because we’re doing a lot of exciting things, but focussed very much on the huge economic opportunities that exist for northerners. You know that we in much of northern Canada are looking at hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in mining and commodities, resources and related infrastructure, which together over the next decade or so represent hundreds of thousands of potential jobs. And many employers and businesses tell us the biggest challenge they have is filling the jobs that are available.
I know that you’ve got a strong operating mining sector here in the NWT, and that it is projected to grow with more mining investments in the next few years. And every one of those mines that will be constructed will require hundreds, if not thousands, of skilled workers and then hundreds to operate them long into the future. And we want to make sure that the northern economy is an economy in which northerners fully participate, making good livings, taking care of their families, giving back to their communities.
We don’t want to develop a northern economy that’s all about flying people in and flying them out to do the work that is here. Of course, some of that’s always going to exist, just because of the relatively small population, but as much as possible, we want the people who have been unemployed or underemployed to be the first in line to accept those jobs that will be opening up in the future. And in fact, we are projecting that in 2015 the territorial economy here will grow by nearly 3 percent and then by 8 percent in 2016 when some of the new mining developments come on stream.
And this is in addition to a lot of other important investments that we are making in the North to support the economy here, like the all-weather road that will be linking Tuktoyaktuk to Inuvik and the vast potential of the canol shale in the central Mackenzie Valley—just a couple of examples of projects that’ll help to boost your economy for years to come.
This is still a sparsely populated region, though, with only about 43 000 people, and so some skills are in short supply. Your Minister for Energy and Mining, for example, David Ramsay, said last summer that the territory will need about 3 000 new workers for the projects coming on stream over the next 8 to 10 years. And as I said before, Canada faces unprecedented skill shortages in many regions and industries. And we’re doing what we can in partnership with the NWT government to address those.
One of those efforts is the strong federal support of the Mine Training Society. I was just speaking with my counterpart Jackson Lafferty about the very good work, and also with Premier McLeod about the very good work done by the Mine Training Society. As you know, last August, Prime Minister Harper announced up here $5.8 million in federal funding for the Mine Training Society, and I believe that’s in addition to about $30 million that we’ve invested in the past several years.
Today, I’m delighted to be here at Aurora College to celebrate an important milestone for the Mine Training Society. It was established as a partnership between industry, the Government of the NWT and the Government of Canada. The Society’s mission is to help Aboriginal people in particular and northerners find long-term employment in the mining industry. Working with Aurora College, they’ve been training people in mining skills, and I understand they have hit an important landmark. A thousand people have graduated from your programs and found employment. And today, we have number 1 000 with us, Conan Zoe. So congratulations, Conan (applause). I don’t know how you drew the lucky number, but there you go.
I understand, Conan, you’re a member of the Tlicho First Nation and live here in Yellowknife. And last March, you were selected to be one of the 11 people enrolled in the Underground Miner Program sponsored by the Mine Training Society, delivery by Aurora. In August, Conan was offered a training position with Diavik Diamond Mines and got his certification as a Level 1 underground miner. In January, he was hired full-time at Diavik. So congratulations, Conan. Well done. We’re proud of you (applause).
I said I probably should have brought a thousand-dollar cheque to celebrate the one-thousandth guy, but I didn’t. I’m sorry.
We’re also helping to get some more good news. I was just making an announcement at the Legislature with the Premier and Minister Lafferty a couple of hours ago that we’re making investments in helping northerners with disabilities get job training so they can fully participate in the workforce. And I’m also making another announcement here that will be helping some older workers in need of retraining to get into the workforce.
So I’m very pleased to announce, along with the Government of the Northwest Territories, funding of over $280,000 to the Tlicho government. This project, under the Targeted Initiative for Older Workers, will help 16 unemployed older workers develop the skills they need for jobs in the Behchoko tourism industry. Did I pronounce that correctly? Behchoko, I’m sorry.
Today’s announcement is timely as the budget that we brought out last week is renewing this program called the Targeted Initiative for Older Workers for a three-year period. This is a program for folks who’ve been working in one job for much of their lives who end up, for whatever reason—maybe the employer just doesn’t continue, and often they’ll be in their 40s or 50s—unemployed, and they just need to start a new career. And this is to support them in doing so.
We’ve got some other exciting things too. I wanted to make you all aware because Aurora has so many students in skilled trades apprenticeship programs. So you’ll be happy to know that in our budget last week, we launched the new apprenticeship loan, which is going to provide interest-free loans to help apprentice students finance their block training.
You know how it is—many apprentices have to take time off work, often without income, maybe sometimes just with Employment Insurance, during their block training of 8 or 10 weeks for each year of the three- or four-year program that they’re in. And this is maybe one of the reasons why Canada has a low completion rate in many of our apprenticeship programs. Roughly only about half of Canadian student apprentices actually go all the way through to their journeyman ticket certification. And we think one of the reasons is because it’s a big opportunity cost for a young person who’s out there making decent money as an apprentice on the job site for them—and you know how life is. People’s expenses go up to what their income is. So they’re operating, taking care of their families or they’re spending the money they’re making and then suddenly they’re told to come back to Aurora or go down south perhaps to finish their fourth year in a trades apprenticeship program. They have to often give up their income, maybe go down to $2,000 a month on EI—can’t take care of their families with that.
So we’re trying to provide support for those people so they can actually pay their way through. And that’s why we will now, for the first time, give access for student apprentices to the Canada Student Loans Program with interest-free loans, to help cover their living expenses as they study to complete their apprenticeship.
This is important from a practical point of view, but it’s also important from what I’d call a symbolic point of view because it’s sending the message that apprentices in the trades are every bit as valuable as kids who are going to university academic programs. And we should be encouraging people to go into the trades and apprenticeships, and we should not be treating that as a second-tier kind of formation. It’s a first-tier, first‑class education that people are getting for very good careers, which in many cases pay better than those following university degrees. So we want to honour and support young people who choose the trades, like the many students here at Aurora. And that’s what the apprentice loan program will do.
Let me tell you a couple of other things. Yeah, that’s right (applause). And a couple other positive aspects of this: We’ve introduced the Apprenticeship Incentive Grant—I think it’s a $4,000 grant for people who enter apprenticeship programs; the Apprenticeship Completion Grant is for if they get all the way through to journeyman status; and the tools tax credit to help offset the cost of the big capital investment for new mechanics and the like.
And we’re now asking employers, if they let someone go during their block training period, we want the employers to keep investing in them. We want those people to come back. We want the employers to invest more in training. So now we’re saying that if an apprentice who is registered with us goes on their block training and on EI, the employer can still pay them their salary, up to 95 percent of their regular salary, and they won’t lose a cent in Employment Insurance.
So all of these things together are saying that we support apprentices, we support the trades, and that’s important. Speaking of Employment Insurance, I should mention one other change that we’ve just announced. For about 40 years here in the North, we’ve pretended that the unemployment rate was at 25 percent in all three territories for purposes of calculating Employment Insurance benefits. But you know, that’s not a reflection of reality. Here in Yellowknife, according to Statistics Canada, the unemployment rate is actually 4 percent, not 25 percent. Of course, it’s higher out in the rural territories or the smaller communities. And so we’ve come up with a policy that will create, for the purposes of the Employment Insurance program, two regions. One will be the capital, in this case Yellowknife. The other region will be the rest of the territory. We’re doing the same thing for Whitehorse in the Yukon and for Iqaluit and Nunavut.
And the idea here is let’s have an EI program that actually reflects the reality. So this means that we’ll have a 4 percent unemployment rate for EI purposes in Yellowknife rather than a fictitious 25 percent point rate. And in the rest of the territory, you know, unemployment I think is averaging around 12 percent, so largely people would be unaffected in the rural parts of the territory.
But it does mean that we encourage people in the cities to really actively search for work, because there’s no shortage of jobs available in the cities. And I think this is positive. It just shows our confidence in the growth of this region’s economy. And the work that Aurora does is a key part of that.
So again, in closing, I want to thank you all for the confidence you have in your home territory. I know one of the challenges that the North has is attracting and retaining people. I get a lot of pressure from employers to get access to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to fill positions. And I always say to them: Look, that’s only there as a last resort. You have to do everything you can to recruit, train and invest in your local population and in the Canadian population generally before looking abroad. And employers have to, even more than they are, to reach out to northerners first for the jobs that are available, and I hope particularly to our Aboriginal communities who have historically faced levels of unacceptably high unemployment.
So again, thanks to everyone from Aurora for your warm welcome. Congratulations to Conan. And I hope you’re going to be a good example for others to follow in your footsteps. And thanks very much. God bless (applause).
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