Human Resources Committee on Dec. 1st, 2011

[John Pineau]

I love the saying, “Piggies get fat, and hogs get slaughtered”. Three years would be perfect. Five years would be bad.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Okay, thank you.

I'll pass the time over to Manon.

[Manon Perreault, NDP, Montcalm, QC]

Good afternoon to the four of you.

My question is about women's employability. If I have understood correctly, a number of skill development programs are available in the workplace. However, women make up a small percentage of forestry and construction workers.

Are there any initiatives aimed at increasing the presence of women in those areas?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Who would like to take that?

Ms. Sparks, go ahead. You have about 35 seconds to respond.

[Rosemary Sparks]

I can cite one example from Alberta in particular, which I think is very effective. It's called Women Building Futures. This is a program designed to assist women by not only preparing them technically but also by preparing them to actually work in the environment of construction. Once a woman is prepared and ready to go on the work site, she works closely with the employers, who will employ her and support her through that initial stage and work to ensure her retention. It's a successful program.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Only eight seconds remain, so I think we'll just stop there and turn it over to Mr. Mayes.

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

As a former mayor of Dawson City, Yukon, I am familiar with the challenges remote communities have. So I'm going to focus my first questions on some of the challenges to communities.

A lot of the northern communities are developed around resource development, whether that be forestry, oil and gas, or mineral extraction. There are some challenges with infrastructure in that regard. First of all, it's energy. There has to be an energy source that's reliable and inexpensive to a certain extent.

I know that our government in the Yukon, for instance, has spent a lot of money helping to provide money for transmission lines for the Mayo hydro project to take some of those smaller, remote communities off of diesel generation. It's good for the environment and it's also a more reliable source.

I'm on the energy caucus, and it was interesting to hear about a number of the potential mines that are trying to develop in Canada, which face challenges because they're remote and away from the grid, and about how they are going to get power to develop their finds.

Mayor Buckway, could you maybe discuss that a little bit? I know Yukon has five potential mines, and there are some challenges with regard to energy.

[Bev Buckway]

Thank you.

Yukon Energy recently made a presentation to us, and they indicated that if the four mines that were are to come on stream do come on stream, demand for energy will be doubled. And if the industrial enterprises that are off the grid want to come on, the demand will be tripled.

It sounds as though the mines will get precedence over some of that energy. Then the costs will fall back to some of the residents and the business owners if they don't get the primary power. We are greatly concerned about what some of the alternatives would be.

We're looking at some liquid natural gas up in the Eagle Plains area. We're not currently using that, but we're being forced to look at some alternative ways of looking at things. We've looked at some geothermal. We know that's expensive and risky. We do not have people from the south banging the doors down to say, “We're coming here in a partnership to do this”. We don't see that big thrust coming this way. So it could definitely become quite critical for us.

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

One of the very innovative things the Province of British Columbia did when the oil and gas industry boomed in the Fort St. John area was to actually take a portion of the royalties and provide it to Fort St. John to help with the infrastructure in the community.

Is any of that happening in the Yukon or in any of the northern communities that you know of?

[Bev Buckway]

Can you speak to that...?

[Erin Hogan]

No, I don't think so.

[Bev Buckway]

Not so much...?

Well, I think it varies from place to place. I know there are discussions continually about increased royalties and whatnot, but it depends on the area and on what the current regulations are as to exactly how it works. I think it varies so much that there is nothing standard, but if there were a revenue generator that would help improve the infrastructure.... It all helps, because with the remoteness, the difficulty, and the cost of freight to get things in, as you've said, it's all difficult.

[Colin Mayes, Conservative, Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

I'd like to direct my next question to Madam Sparks.

One of the things the colleges in the Okanagan Valley have done is to put together skills training. For instance, they put the welding courses in a big van and move it to Salmon Arm, and then they have the plumbing one down in Kelowna and the electrical one in Penticton; they just leave them there for a year and then shift them around. It has been very successful.

Is anything like that model available? You mentioned first nations communities and the possibility of something like that going to a first nations community, being there for a period of time, and thus having another skill set being brought to that community. Are you aware of any of that?

[Rosemary Sparks]

I can't specifically talk about the idea of the truck moving into remote areas with the training on it, but there is work being done in northwestern Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Quebec around this notion of bringing training to people, as opposed to people going to the training. Some of that I believe is distance education, as opposed to a physical vehicle pulling up with the equipment and the means to do the hands-on training.

All we've heard about those kinds of projects is that when they can get them functioning from a financial point of view, when it's successful as an economic vehicle for them to do that, they are successful in reaching the people and getting them trained.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you, Mr. Mayes.

We'll move to Ms. Crowder.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Chair, I wonder if we could ask the witnesses to provide the clerk with copies of their written presentations so that we could have them translated.

I know you didn't get to finish them all, and they were very thorough. There are some important things that we didn't get to, given that we only have a five-minute round to actually ask you questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Yes, absolutely.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Great. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

We'll ask you to do that, if you could. We would appreciate it.

Go ahead.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

I want to thank all of you for coming.

I'm going to start with the FCM representative.

Ms. Hogan, you talked about what happens in some of our communities when our major industry shuts down and we're left reeling. My community certainly has experienced that as well, although it's not considered remote. We've had a sawmill shut down in a place called Youbou. That devastated the little village. It goes on and on.

It's interesting, though, what you've recommended. What Thompson is doing is of course very forward-thinking in terms of putting together this group and working together to look at the diversification and the impacts on the community.

Believe it or not, the federal government used to have a very good industrial adjustment program--and this is not partisan, because it was before your time--that brought together community partners, business, and labour, not only to deal with communities where resource industries were being shut down and to do the work around that, but also to deal with business start-ups. It's unfortunate.... I think your community needs to be applauded for taking on that work without any other support.

But I also think you highlight a very difficult problem. The chamber also raised this issue in terms of resource communities going through transition. You mentioned it in your briefing, but if you have any other comments about what works well with that, it would be helpful for us.

[Erin Hogan]

I think the main message we're trying to get across on the susceptibility of these communities to the boom-and-bust cycle--especially the resource-based ones--is that we need to be able to cushion this somehow. Really what we're proposing is that there needs to be strategic investment by the federal government in infrastructure in these communities to strengthen and diversify the north.

The best way to do that is for the federal government to consult with local municipalities and have us come to the table to negotiate those strategies. We know on the ground what core investments are the most efficient and will have the biggest impact on our communities. Really, we need to have that voice and input into this decision-making.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Thanks, Ms. Hogan. I have to declare that I am a former municipal councillor, so I have a great deal of sympathy.

Mayor Buckway, I wanted to touch on this just briefly. My colleague, Ms. Hughes, just reminded me about the gas tax. I know that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities has worked quite hard on getting fair representation for remote and rural communities, because the per capita basis simply doesn't work in our smaller communities. Is there something that needs to be done differently about that with the gas tax?

[Bev Buckway]

Thank you very much for that question.

The gas tax funding, as it's currently set up, worked very well for our municipalities across Canada, and we very much liked the set-up. When we're looking at a long-term infrastructure plan, it remains to be seen whether there's any hope of structuring that money, with whatever way the funding program would work in the long term, in the same way the gas tax fund worked. It gave municipalities direct input into how the money was spent, based on their priorities in the municipality. So it was very successful. We liked it very much, and we would really favour programs that work along that line.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

I have two other quick questions, but in summary, I think what I'm hearing is that it's really important for our rural and smaller communities that you be at the table with regard to any funding formula, and that there needs to be a recognition that it can't be on a per capita basis.

[Erin Hogan]

Yes, I would agree with that.