Human Resources committee  GE is a global company. When it's making decisions about investments, the number one factor it looks at is the availability of skilled workers. That is more important than the cost of labour, for example. It's having the available skill set that allows you to be able to bring som

Human Resources committee  We supply high-tech equipment to all these different businesses. But if those businesses are tied up in a regulatory process that doesn't have a timetable, they're not going to start making the investment that needs to be made in the skills that they will eventually require, beca

Human Resources committee  Can I just add the third area where we could see some change? This is a sensitive area related to aboriginal government. The schools are often administered at a very local level as opposed to a regional level. I think that is holding back addressing some of the challenges, partic

Human Resources committee  The first barrier related to energy. A lot of the new development in small northern communities is in areas that are off the grid. The challenge there is getting reliable sources of electricity to those communities to allow them to wean themselves off diesel, in particular, which

Human Resources committee  The recurring difficulty that we heard from business and also from our clients is really over the speed of regulatory approval for new projects. Any effort that can be made to both speed up the regulatory process and avoid unnecessary duplication between various federal agencies

Human Resources committee  Thank you, Kim. I'll try to sum up what Kim has presented as a result of the study GE did. Essentially, the first point we would make as a recommendation is that there should be a much broader recognition across Canada of the importance of remote communities in Canada's econo