DATE:
February 19, 2014
LOCATION:
Yukon College, 500 College Drive, Whitehorse, Yukon
SUBJECT:
Minister of Employment and Social Development and Minister for Multiculturalism Jason Kenney delivers a speech at Yukon College and discusses recent changes to Employment Insurance in the North.
Thank you for that warm welcome in this place that isn’t always so warm. But you’re right, I am a Saskatchewan boy, like your premier, and he and I always run into each other at Riders games, actually, cheering for the Saskatchewan Roughriders. He grew up, I think, in Yorkton, and me not too far away in southern Saskatchewan. So we’re used to cold climate.
But it’s great to be here. Thank you very much for the wonderful welcome here at Yukon College, Dr. Barnes, to you and your board, your faculty, staff and of course the future of the Yukon, your students. Great to have just briefly met with some of those involved in some of your training programs that you administer here at Yukon College, preparing people for a bright future of opportunity in a land of opportunity.
And you know, it’s been said often that northwest Canada is the newest part of the New World, and if that’s true, it’s most true of Yukon. This is a place with a limitless future, and it’s so exciting to see just the little signs of that in my brief time here already. Getting off the airplane yesterday, I heard, for me, the familiar sounds of Tagalog with new members of the Filipino community joining you to make Yukon their new home. And I can see the growing diversity here as newcomers arrive. I went to breakfast this morning to the wonderful sounds of Latin salsa music at a restaurant being run by a recent arrival from Costa Rica. So I said this is the sound of diversity of growth, of energy that we are seeing and feeling all around us in these amazing days in this territory.
So I’m just so delighted to be here. And the future looks bright for those fortunate enough to call this place home. Especially with all the major mining developments that you know about, the economic outlook for all of the territories—the NWT, Nunavut and Yukon—is exciting, with significant income growth and job creation expected over the next several years.
In fact, economic growth in the territories is expected this year and for the foreseeable future to outstrip growth in the rest of Canada, in southern Canada. This territory’s economy, in particular, is forecast to grow this year by nearly six percent, which is phenomenal if indeed that is realized.
Mining and Yukon of course are synonymous. The Yukon Chamber of Mines has grown from 12 members in 1943, when it was founded, to more than 400 members now. According the Chamber, as recently as five years ago, mining exploration in the territory was worth about 30 to 40 million dollars, but last year the territory had $320 million invested in exploration, nearly a tenfold increase. An increasing number of people who immigrate to the Yukon as well do so because of the opportunities in mining and all of the secondary and tertiary benefits that presents.
And I have to say as a former Minister of Immigration how happy I was to work with this territory to increase the number of newcomers arriving through the Provincial Nominee Program, and we hope that momentum will continue. I’m going to be meeting with the Multicultural Association later today to see that firsthand.
But the population up here, as you all know, is still sparse, and in the whole fewer than 36,000 people. So you’ve got a small population and a lot of baby boomers about to retire and huge economic opportunity. All of that equals a gap in skills, a skills shortage in parts of Canada like Yukon.
And it’s not just happening here. I’ve been on the road for the last week or so. I started in Newfoundland. Believe it or not, Newfoundland used to be synonymous with unemployment and emigration and now with last year the highest growth in Canada, facing significant skills shortages, especially in areas like St. John’s, the capital, and Labrador with mining. And so we see these challenges all across the country. I think it’s a good challenge to have.
So I’m very impressed by what Yukon College is planning to address these shortages with the new Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining. The Centre, as you know, aims to introduce more students to the mining industry in order to meet the increasing demand for skilled workers in the field, and our government is really pleased to have contributed to the Centre’s creation with the Prime Minister’s announcement this past summer.
Within its first five years, I understand the Centre is expected to produce about 520 tradespeople—mining and apprenticeship graduates—with another 700 students completing other courses, and I just met some of those involved in the esthetician course and eco-tourism and a number of other really good programs that are going to link people to good futures.
Thanks to initiatives like this, northerners, Yukoners will be well placed to take advantage of the economic boom in northern Canada.
As you know, we just had a federal budget last week, and some good news out of that, which just reinforces what’s happening up here. We’re on track for a balanced budget, which is very important in terms of long-term stability. We’re doing that while keeping taxes down at actually the lowest level for the federal government since the 1960s.
But we made some really important investments. Of course here in the Yukon, we’ve huge investments in just about everything, including transfer payments to help the territorial government with all the responsibilities it has. In fact, transfers from the Government of Canada to the Government of Yukon have gone up in the past eight years by a whopping 365 percent on a per capita basis, from about $16,000 per person to over $24,000 per person. And that’s just the funding going to the territorial government. But of course there are many more investments that I’ll mention in a second.
Now one of the things that we’re focussing on—and this is what I really wanted to talk to you about—is work to encourage young Canadians, especially, to go into the kinds of jobs which are increasingly short supply, like skilled trades and apprenticeships. We announced in last week’s budget, for example, a new Canada Apprenticeship Loan. Until now, if you were a student apprentice and had to take your eight-week block training away from work. Often you would lose your income, maybe you would go on EI for $2,000 a month, give or take, but you often have living expenses to take care of, and those are higher up north than anywhere else. But the problem is that there weren’t other options for you to finance that formal block training period. We’ve had of course for a very long time the Canada Student Loan Program. That’s for more full-time students, typically in universities and colleges.
So what we’ve done is to announce that we will be opening up $100 million of interest-free loans in the Canada Student Loan Program to student apprentices. That’s important, so that gives them an additional option about how they pay for their formal classroom training, their block training. But it’s also important because it sends a message that we should not and will not any longer treat apprentices and vocational and trades training like second-tier education. This is first-tier education. It sends that message that this is first-tier education, and young people can do just as well in realizing their potential and taking care of their families through the trades.
So I’m very excited about that, and it’ll be of, I think, particular help to many of you who are here at Yukon College in apprenticeship programs like carpentry, electrical, heavy equipment mechanics or welding programs, for example.
So this is just one of the things we’ve done to break down this ridiculous idea that skill and vocational training is somehow second-class formation.
And let’s be clear, you know, some young people are cut out to pursue academic university formation, and others are going to do much better, actually, in their future and fully realize their potential and contribute back to the community in the kinds of good-paying vocations that are increasingly part of our economy, especially all through northern Canada.
Another interesting idea that we launched in the budget last week is a pilot project to support innovation and flexibility in apprenticeship training. We know, for example, that a lot of student apprentices or apprentices are working out in work camps or in remote areas. They’re a long way from the classrooms or the training centres where the block training is done. And for them to leave their work site for two months in order to go to a training college, perhaps in southern Canada, for example, can be a very expensive proposition. And it means they have to give up work, and they’ve got moving expenses and everything else.
So we want to support efforts by training institutions to deliver the block training to apprentices in remote areas, perhaps through online training modules and things of that nature. So Dr. Barnes, you might want to take a look at that, I think $11 million that we’ve set aside to support innovative pilot projects in this area that I think might be very relevant up here.
One other thing that I wanted to emphasize—a lot of apprentices go on, as I mentioned, Employment Insurance for the couple of months that they are doing their block training. We’re now making it possible for employers to pay apprentices who are receiving EI during their block training on top of that, so they’re not penalized, so they can be paid up to 95 percent of their salary without losing their EI benefits.
All of these things together constitute more options and help. And on top of that, we introduced the Apprenticeship Incentive Grant, which is, I think, a $4,000 grant, and the Apprenticeship Completion Grant and the Tools Tax Credit. So there’s more help for young people—and I hope that places like Yukon College can kind of advise young folks on the whole package of incentives and supports that exist because when you do the math, it is extremely impressive what’s available now, that was not just a few years ago.
So as you know, we continued also in the budget our focus on the North, and I don’t think the Government of Canada has been as focussed on the social and economic development of the North for many decades. As I mentioned, with the huge increases in support for this territorial government, with enormous investments in infrastructure, we’re dedicating well over a billion dollars for public infrastructure in the North over the next decade through the new Building Canada Plan. And by the way, that gives extra funds to smaller communities like those here in the North, so that they can pay for the higher costs of infrastructure.
Of course, to give you an example of some of our major investments, the upgrading of Yukon’s Mayo B hydroelectricity plant, $120 million investment in housing, especially social housing here in Yukon—we’re working with territorial governments and municipalities to develop more transport infrastructure in the North. We’ll make investments—and by the way, of course there’s the completion of the highway up to Tuk in the Northwest Territories, which will, I think, strengthen the North. We’ll make investments announced in the budget to improve broadband infrastructure in Northern and remote communities. We’re launching a new fund to improve health care services in the North. We’ll enhance funding for the Nutrition North program. We’ll continue to gather the data required to submit the strongest possible claim to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to assert and defend Canada’s sovereignty in the North . . . and so many other things.
And I know my colleague Ryan Leef is so busy, he’s making announcements almost every day on investments that we’re making in the territory.
Now I just want to turn to for a moment, if I could, to an announcement I’m making today about Employment Insurance. It’s an important program that’s there for people who have worked for a reasonable amount of time and have lost their jobs due to no fault of their own and cannot find other employment at their skill level in their local communities. And it also helps to fund a lot of important job training programs, for example.
But we’ve had for a long time an outdated EI approach to the North. It doesn’t reflect the growth and dynamism that’s happening. You need to understand that the Employment Insurance system is based on what the rate of unemployment is in a given region of the country over a rolling three-month average. And if unemployment is very high in a certain region, you qualify for benefits a little bit more quickly and get benefits for a little bit longer. If unemployment is very low, the reasonable assumption is that there’s more work available and that you have to work a little bit longer to qualify for benefits.
Since the early 1970s, for just basically historical reasons, we’ve been pretending that the unemployment rate in the northern territories is 25 percent. It’s a fiction. We just set it at that because I guess back in the 70s they figured they didn’t have good enough data to sort out exactly what the unemployment rate is. But we’ve massively improved our data collection through Statistics Canada. And look, we also have a firm grasp of reality. We know the unemployment rate here in Whitehorse is five to six percent, not 25 percent. And in the rest of the territory, on average, it’s about 12 to 13 percent, depending on the season, not 25 percent.
So this is true across the territories, by the way. It’s true in Yellowknife—about five percent unemployment—and in Iqaluit. So we do know that there are significant differences in unemployment rates across the territories. The jobs and opportunities available to northerners are obviously different in Whitehorse than in remote communities. Therefore, we’ll stop looking at each territory as one EI region. Instead, the capital of each territory—in your case, Whitehorse—will become its own Employment Insurance region and the rest of the territory another. So there’ll be two here, two in the NWT and two in Nunavut.
This reflects the fact that it’s easier for northerners to find good jobs in Whitehorse, Yellowknife or Iqaluit than it is in the remote areas of the North. The Employment Insurance program, of course, will continue to be there for people who’ve worked for the requisite amount of time and have lost their jobs and can’t find one.
I think this is an important announcement because it shows our confidence in the North. We don’t need to pretend that this region is in a period of economic doldrums when that is not the case. And it will encourage people who may, due to no fault of their own, lose their jobs to actively seek the jobs that are available, linking unemployed people with available work.
So the northern economy is becoming an economic powerhouse. Things are changing for the better here in the territories, and we need to be ready to seize the opportunities that are coming our way. And I want to thank Yukon College for the passion with which it is addressing those wonderful challenges that you’re now facing here in this magnificent territory.
Thanks very much.
(Applause)
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