Brampton, Ontario - 5 February 2015
Well, first of all, I want to say I’ve got an announcement today.
I want to say a couple of things about that.
I first want to say a couple things about Ukraine, but before we begin all of that, let’s just have one big hand of appreciation for our folks here at UTi for hosting us today.
I said I wanted to address the Ukraine situation first because we notice a lot of events are occurring there and various leaders have engaged on that in the last few days.
I’d like to reiterate that the world needs to take Russia’s aggression in Ukraine seriously, as we’ve seen once again increases in the violence in Russian aggression in that country.
Canada’s responded strongly as have many of our allies but I think all of this indicates we need, if anything, to do more.
We urge everybody to do more, to have a forceful response.
But obviously we will always work with our allies and our partners as we shape our response to those events.
Now I want to talk a little bit about what brings us here today.
As I’ve said many times before, and as we all know, we remain in a very challenging global economy.
We’ve seen, once again, renewed volatility everywhere.
Obviously we’re all familiar in Canada with the fall of the oil price, but that’s just one part of market volatility all around the world that we are concerned about.
Let me just assure all Canadians that we remain committed to the long-term path we have set under our Economic Action Plan.
That’s to make sure we keep lowering our taxes and keep them down, balancing our budgets, and making targeted investments in our economy that will grow our economy in the long term.
And we’re going to continue down the path that has produced such a tremendous record of achievement among the world’s developed countries.
And one of the things we have invested in as a government for some years, in fact we have increased programs in this area, has been in the whole area of support for small business and particularly support for entrepreneurship.
Earlier today we met.
We saw a demonstration from Spin Master of some of the great products they produce.
This is a company that got its start under a program that’s now called Futurpreneur that our Government has supported for some time.
And it’s a program we want to continue supporting.
So I’m here today to announce that Futurpreneur, the longstanding program that has literally created thousands of businesses and jobs for Canadian families across this country, is being extended for another two years to develop entrepreneurship in this country.
I want to thank all my colleagues who continue to work on these plans.
I’m joined for this announcement by the regional Minister, the Minister for this area, Minister of Sport, Bal Gosal, also Minister of Small Business and Tourism, whose program, whose jurisdiction this is actually under, Maxime Bernier.
And of course also local Member of Parliament from the region here, Parm Gill.
So I thank all of them for joining us here today as well.
And of course I want to thank Julia Deans who’s also with us, who is the leader of this vast network.
It used to be called the Youth Business Foundation, now called Futurpreneur.
Great partner for the government for many years, as I said, with great achievements for our economy, and she’s going to take this money and achieve greater things going forward.
So thank you for being here, Julia.
I appreciate it.
