Good day, members of the standing committee, and thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak with you.
My name is Felix Geithner. I'm a tourism operator and a member of the board of the Tourism Industry Association of the Yukon, also known as TIA Yukon, which represents over 400 tourism businesses in the territory. I've been asked by the board to speak to you on behalf of the tourism industry today about Bill S-6.
First, let me tell you a bit about tourism in Yukon. Tourism is a major driver of Yukon's economy. According to the 2013 Yukon business survey, tourism generated approximately $250 million in 2012 and constituted almost 5% of Yukon's GDP that year. Tourism visitation has grown by an average of 3% per year from 2004 to 2012, with 2013 being the best year on record for tourism visitation. With this fall's announcement of an additional $3.6 million over two years from the federal and territorial governments to go towards a tourism marketing campaign, we expect visitation and tourism revenue numbers to increase even more in the coming years.
It's important for you to get a snapshot of how important tourism is to Yukon's economy. Far too often, people downplay the importance of tourism because its successes are difficult to measure and its profits are scattered throughout a multitude of businesses and sectors. With mining, it's so much easier to draw a line from A to B to show exactly where the money is coming from.
Even when people stop and think about the word “mining”, the mind conjures up images of gold and silver, diamonds and riches, and exploration with cash as the reward. The word “tourism” makes people think about exploring. Not many people think about the monetary value of tourism, but they should. When you add up the revenue from airlines, hotels, car rental agencies, wilderness guiding operations, outfitters, museums, aurora-viewing businesses, plus a big percentage of restaurants, retail shops, and other more indirect sources, tourism stands out as a cash cow, one that if properly cared for will produce forever.
Tourism is a big business in Yukon. It's a slow-growing, steady economy for us that's needed in the territory when Yukon's mining industry goes through one of its bust cycles, as has been the case in the past three years. It makes no sense to make changes such as the ones proposed in Bill S-6 unless one knows for a fact that they will not be detrimental to Yukon's tourism industry and are certain to benefit Yukon's mining industry. TAI Yukon calls both these points into question.
In the letter that TAI Yukon wrote to Yukon's MP, Ryan Leef, dated November 21, 2014, we expressed our concern that one of our partners, the Council of Yukon First Nations, was not properly consulted on all points during this process, especially given that YESAA is the cornerstone of the Umbrella Final Agreement. In fact, most of the Yukon public and key stakeholders of the business community, such as TAI Yukon, were not consulted on the bill prior to its introduction. In our letter, we also stipulated that taking land use planning decisions away from the territory will ultimately give tourism operators in Yukon less of a say over land use issues where resource extraction interests conflict with the interests of tourism businesses. These issues continue to trouble the tourism industry.
The most pertinent question isn't why Bill S-6 should be prevented from being passed, but why it was ever put forward in the first place in its current form. On April 22, 2010, Yukon Senator Dan Lang addressed a crowd of potential investors as the keynote speaker at the Yukon Forum in New York. According to a news release on the senator's website, Senator Lang praised the Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Board. He described YESAB as “implementing responsible environmental and social guidelines while providing certainty to investors”.
Even when the senator introduced the bill four years later on June 10, 2014, he acknowledged that Yukon's regulatory system has been a model for the rest of the country. The reason he provided for introducing a bill that proposed sweeping changes to a fundamental part of this regulatory regime was the need to involve and maintain a competitive and predictable regulatory system that remains competitive internationally.
Taking something that is a model for the country and giving it a drastic overhaul requires more than an inside design job. Throwing black paint at a white house isn't a renovation; it's a mess.
The extent of the mess this bill has created reached all new levels on November 28, 2014, when the president of the Casino Mining Corporation in Yukon wrote about “Bill S-6 and the negative impact this is having on the territory's mineral industry”. The Casino Corporation believes that if YESAA has the full support of all levels of government, it will provide greater certainty for the mineral industry.
From TIA Yukon's perspective, Bill S-6 is a shoddy piece of legislation that sows discord rather than the certainty it sets out to create. More than this, the proponents of this bill have set an adversarial tone in Yukon with Yukon first nations and a number of key organizations and businesses through their attempt to ram it through without adequate consultation. Consultation requires two-way communication. If one party doesn't believe that there was adequate consultation, then there was not adequate consultation.
To get a sense of the tone being set by the government in the House of Commons with regard to this bill, one needs only to listen to Alberta MP John Barlow, who sits on the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. On March 11 Mr. Barlow said:
We have to take some very aggressive steps to get Yukon back to where it was before and regain that success as a resource extraction economy.
TIA Yukon believes that Bill S-6 and these aggressive steps should be abandoned by the Government of Canada in favour of meaningful discussions and collaboration with Yukon first nations and all sectors that constitute Yukon's business community, including the tourism industry.
Thank you.