Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Nov. 17th, 2009

[Richard Runyon]

Which one do you want me to kick at first?

[John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC]

The last one.

[Richard Runyon]

Okay.

We live in a glass house. The situation, as I said, is our economy is government. It's not without irony that first nations are looking to develop that waterfront. They've had eyes on that for a long, long time. When you talk to the first nations, they want to invest in the Yukon because they're here for the long term. That's what it comes down to. But when you talk to the private sector, that real estate is not properly priced. We have regulation issues and so on. We're not business-friendly is what it comes down to.

I could give you numerous examples of businesses that have invested here. The Yukon government has spent a lot of money on attracting the Minto mine here. These guys are operational. What do we do? We beat them up and assault them, and they're public enemy number one and things like that, which kind of deviates a little bit from this topic.

Going back to your question, we're not seeing the outside investment here, whereas you have places like Labrador that are. You've got the Northwest Territories. I mean, we are hostile to business here. We have some of the highest costs, and they're self-induced.

When we talk about this housing issue, this is self-induced, because we're not dealing with it at the municipality level with regard to zoning and so on, but we can't even get the private sector in here to help build our housing. It's kind of interesting, because we were talking about this last night. You talk about the Conservatives—I got this letter from Minister Strahl that said how the Conservatives are trying to kickstart the construction industry in Canada by giving tax incentives to first-time buyers, refunds for home improvements, and things like that. The way the Yukon responds to this is to increase the costs for our construction companies so that we're basically chasing them out of the territory. That's what it comes down to.

Going back to your comments, we had an industrial road and the city wanted to repave it. They expected the private sector on that road to repave it as well. We had bidding from all over Canada, because there's a recession down south. From what I heard, the cost difference between the local guys and somebody from Saskatchewan, who was going to bring up all their equipment and workers and everything else, was a price difference of $1 million from the local bid. So when we talk about not being business-friendly and attracting foreign investment, or even outside investment, the Yukon right now has a very bad reputation in this regard. It's a huge struggle.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We're running over time now, Mr. Runyon.

[Richard Runyon]

Does that answer your questions?

[John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Well, in a sense, but it doesn't respond to why the committee is here. You're talking about problems that are inherent to the region, as opposed to being driven by federal priorities or initiatives.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We'll have to leave it at that.

Now we'll go to Mr. Russell, and then we'll see if there's anyone else on the list. Let's go to Mr. Russell for five minutes.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Thank you very much for being here. It's good to see you again, Mr. Runyon.

By way of introduction, are you guys going to be involved in the Northern Lights Trade Show and Conference in Montreal in January?

[Rick Karp]

No.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

It's a great show. I'd invite everybody there, that's for sure. There is some collaboration between various chambers of commerce across the north.

[Rick Karp]

Yes, we've heard from them.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

We had a fabulous time in Ottawa about three years ago. It's going to be a huge trade show involving Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Nunavik, Nunavut, perhaps the NWT.... Are you there?

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

I don't know.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

We'll see what we can do to get you invited.

You made some strong comments. Let's just accept them as they are. What would your recommendations then be to us, as a committee, from a federal perspective?

I don't particularly think the answer is to cut transfer payments to the Yukon. I don't particularly think the answer is to necessarily dictate to the Yukon government, from the federal perspective, how they spend that money. That might involve some very delicate type of negotiations and maybe you have some views on that yourself, but I'm not sure if that's the direction we would be looking to go in.

From a federal perspective, I can see the changes to EI; that's in our federal jurisdiction. There are things that we could do there, such as more flexibility in programming, things of that nature.

Would direct transfers, for instance, to first nations, outside of what they currently get from the federal government or from others, be part of the solution? I hear a sense, too, that they're being cut off somewhere and not getting access to some of the funding for their particular priorities.

Can you give us one or two concrete ideas as to what we can do as a federal entity to address some of your areas? I think that's important for us.

[Rick Karp]

When we were moving towards having the Canada Winter Games, there was the creation of a pan-northern tourism strategy. We've made recommendations that the pan-northern strategy be brought back into effect to assist the tourism industry across the north. So that's one recommendation that we would put forward, to have a pan-northern tourism strategy, and also to have special funding for tourism.

In Yukon, one of the pillars that I was talking about earlier was the mining, but another one is tourism. We understand the changes in tourism. We have a Condor flight that comes directly from Germany to Whitehorse during the summer, three times a week, and they bring over a lot of Germans.

Through a program that we have at the Chamber of Commerce—and this would be another recommendation that is pan-northern—we have something that we call the Yukon business development project. We've created a program that has been assisting businesses in growing their business and becoming export capable. Yukon Brewing—if you've had any of our beer—is part of it; we've been assisting them. We've been assisting Air North; we're working with them. So it would be to have some funding to allow this program or other programs of a similar nature to be shared across the north, to be expanded. This is one of the reasons we're bringing all the chambers here on December 4, to try to share this programming.

What I'd recommend is for you to support pan-northern strategies, strategies that will develop the main pillars, whether it's mining or whether it's tourism in particular.

The third pillar that we have identified in Yukon is the knowledge sector. Yukon College right now is doing between $8 million and $10 million a year in research and development to support the northern knowledge sector. Allowing places like Yukon College, the University of the Arctic, the pan-northern university, to grow and prosper will bring business. This will be bring the economy to the north.

If Yukon College can become Yukon University.... They now have partnerships with the University of Alberta and the University of Northern British Columbia. We recently had the president of the University of Saskatchewan up here talking about research and development. If we can create a pan-northern strategy, a strategy for cold climate research and have centres of excellence in the north, this is another way that you could really help the north and benefit in research and development.

There are many others, but I guess we're running out of time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Mr. Russell.

Now we'll go to a question from Mr. Dreeshen, for five minutes.

[Richard Runyon]

Going back to the first nations component, if your goal is to see more development in the first nations—

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

I've actually recognized the next speaker, so perhaps in the course of answering Mr. Dreeshen's question, if there's an opportunity to sneak something else in, maybe we could do it that way.

Let's go to Mr. Dreeshen for five minutes.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Thank you, and I don't know whether I'll take my full five minutes, so if you get an opportunity, you can expand upon that point.

I know that with the KIP funding that has been put into Yukon College, the knowledge infrastructure program, there's $2 million that has been presented plus $2 million that has come from the territory. So there's a start there again to recognize research capabilities and so on.

The point I wanted to discuss with you had to do with the business advisory boards that you would have with the chamber. I come from Red Deer, Alberta, and we have a very strong business advisory group there, whether they deal with agriculture or other issues. And of course they then are able to take those issues to the national level and get hearings on them. The things that I hear you talking about, it would be nice if that got presented. I know that you're going to be talking to all of your northern partners, but perhaps letting some of the people south of 60 realize what is happening would be a benefit as well. Whether or not you're going to be able to get any suggestions from them, an awareness at least would certainly be a great start.

I guess my first question is how are you really working with the Yukon government and your municipal governments to address these issues? It seems as though there's some friction there.

[Rick Karp]

We have partnerships with at least five different departments of the Yukon government and we consult and share with them on an ongoing basis. So we do have partnerships. But to us government is government, and it's difficult for us at our level to really deal one-on-one with government. We support government. We respond to their needs. When they ask us questions about business, we respond to them about business.

We've developed partnerships with the department of highways, with the department of education, with economic development, with health and social services, as I mentioned earlier, to name four of them. With the department of highways, we run the highway signs program and several other things. So we are partnering with the Yukon government in that respect.

I have to say at this time that INAC has been very supportive over the years with our business development program, and we do have business advisory boards. The uniqueness about our program is that we will audit a particular company. Let's say it's Yukon Brewing. We will then find expertise from anywhere in the world. We've actually taken four of our businesses in the tourism sector and sent them to a worldwide tourism conference in Paris, and they got a list of 74 wholesalers in France who are interested in the Yukon. This is economic development.

We obviously don't have the capacity to deal with that many wholesalers in Europe, so we turned it over to the department of tourism. This was about a year and a half ago, and nothing's happened yet. We're waiting, and this is a frustration on the part of business. We, as business people, want to see something happen now. We want to be able to act. We want to be able to move on things, and it's very difficult to be involved with government where we want to study things more.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

How many people did you say were on EI?

[Rick Karp]

On EI? A little over 1,100.

[Earl Dreeshen, Conservative, Red Deer, AB]

Eleven hundred. Okay.

As far as bringing in foreign workers, the first thing that came to mind is where do you house the foreign workers if you're bringing them in, but that's a minor question, although it might not be a minor problem.

I guess the other thing is, do you feel that there's a certain level or a certain percentage of people that, from your perspective, are just unemployable? Is that sort of what I'm hearing? When you ask for intake for certain businesses and nobody shows up, what do you feel the problem is there?

[Rick Karp]

In social assistance, of the approximately 850, we know that about half of them are unemployable and need to have social assistance. Of the other half, we know that about 20% to 25% are employable, and that's our target--to work with that population.

Where EI is concerned, it is primarily because of the seasonality of our workforce up here, with tourism and with the ebb and flow of mining, so I'm not sure how much we can do.

Again, I come back to the point. We have made submissions through Mr. Bagnell about desirable changes to EI to have incentive programming, so that someone on EI does not stay on EI, so that they have an incentive. Although the work may be less desirable than what they have been used to, they'll still be working. If we could do that here, we wouldn't need to bring in all these foreign workers.

To answer the problem about housing foreign workers, we've been concentrating on the Philippines. We had a base of Filipino workers in the Yukon and they've been pooling resources and buying homes, and they've been doing very well. There are not quite 15 per house--I don't want to give the wrong impression--but they've been very successful.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Okay.

There being no more questioners on the list, I would like to thank you on behalf of all the members.

Oh, just a minute. We're not going to adjourn yet. We had Mr. Dreeshen. Do you want to go back?

You have a question?