Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-207, which seeks to amend the Income Tax Act in order to encourage new graduates to return to their region of origin, and therefore better support the regions and curb the exodus of young graduates.
I am a little bit confused by my Liberal colleague's speech because he does not seem to agree with his colleagues on the Standing Committee on Finance where, unless I am mistaken, the Conservatives and the Liberals attempted to gut this bill.
I support the original bill which provided a non-refundable tax credit of 40% of the graduate's salary to a maximum of $8,000 for the first 52 weeks of employment in the region.
This bill is based on the Quebec tax model that has helped 1,300 people a year in that province at an estimated cost of $21 million. The amount that was cited by my Conservative colleague seems to be an exaggerated amount if extended across Canada.
There were, indeed, problems with the bill but none of those problems were insurmountable.
It is said that there is none so deaf as he who will not hear. I am afraid that the Conservatives simply did not want to have anything to do with it. I will speak about this in more detail later.
First, I would like to talk about a few problems with this bill, including the definition of the regions. As pointed out, the definition is based on an act that has not been amended for a number of years, specifically since 1982. That is a problem. When we refer to new graduates, do they have to have graduated very recently or could it simply mean graduates?
As I mentioned, these are not insurmountable problems. They could have been fixed in committee.
It does not surprise me that the Conservatives did not understand the possibilities of this bill. It could be a step, in my view, in the right direction in terms of levelling the playing field and possibly bridging the divide between rural and urban areas which have a significant advantage right now in attracting qualified workers.
For example, we know that urban areas depend on good food. Concerns about food security are increasing in Canada. This would be a way of encouraging value added industry related to food production in rural regions by motivating young people to go back to rural areas.
This bill could have had a positive effect on low and middle income families in those regions. Canadian communities need the economic and social conditions to thrive. All regions in Canada need those conditions.
One of my colleagues on the finance committee made a statement.
I have a copy of the document, from which I will quote. He indicated that Canada presently has a productivity problem, according to the statistics. He said, “Now, typically speaking, Canada is a country that suffers from a productivity challenge.” I do agree with that.
And then he continued, “We have economists come forward and talk to us about that all the time. This bill would seem to set up a counter-intuitive incentive to improving Canada's overall productivity.”
I do not agree with that. It may not be an intuitive solution but if our goal, in Canada, were simply to send workers to the regions that are already thriving, this would not help all Canadian regions to flourish, and that is the point of this bill.
In my opinion, the role of government is not simply to send workers as widgets to fill a need for industry. It is also to ensure that all regions in Canada develop and are allowed to maintain their integrity. This is where a law such as this would help assist workers to encourage them to go back to their region.
In British Columbia there is a very strong economic growth right now but that there are also smaller regions, for example, forestry regions where workers are unemployed and suffering from the beetle kill, where this law would assist those small regions.
I would ask my colleagues to think about this, and those in Alberta perhaps know it better than anyone else, the impacts of the tar sands and the development of the oil industry, which has produced riches no doubt, but it has also created terrible social and economic problems.
I do not think the objective that we should have as government leaders is to only feed those industries, continue to feed that one part of Canada that is going full steam. Certainly that should be part of it but there are other regions in Canada that should be better supported.
The bill offers one small piece of the puzzle. It is not the total answer but it would help encourage graduates to go back to regions or to go to rural areas and provide some of the technical knowledge they have acquired at university, the expertise, the ingenuity, the creativity that would bring an enrichment and renewal to these regions that may be economically depressed.
Therefore, I am pleased to support the amendment to re-establish the integrity of the bill and to reject the amendments of the finance committee. I understand that there is a new amendment that will be coming forward to further make this bill more acceptable. I hope my colleagues from the Liberals and the Conservatives will be supportive.
We did not support the gutting of the bill at committee. As I said, we saw it as a first step to draw young graduates to economically depressed regions. It could act as an incentive to motivate regions toward greater economic development within the context of an overarching regional government strategy.
As I said at second reading, when I spoke to the bill, it does require a regional development plan but I could see very easily where a bill of this kind could be paired with a good regional development plan that would really allow the region to grow in a way that it would not without the bill.
In conclusion, we support reinstating the bill's content. We would have proposed that it could have been strengthened with specific definitions but that in itself is not adequate to vote it down.