Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-207, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act (tax credit for new graduates working in designated regions). The designated regions are those regions that have traditionally high levels of youth out-migration.
I am interested in the bill because it closely mirrors work that we have been doing in my office for my region of northern Ontario because it has suffered from massive levels of youth out-migration. It is not just affecting our economic potential but it is seriously affecting the future of our region.
A number of players in the Timmins region have been trying to bring issues to bear on this, such as the Far Northeast Training Board, Northern College and Collège Boréal. Mike Kentish, who has been involved in adult literacy, learning and training, has also come forward with a number of ideas similar to those in the bill.
I find that the bill does have some vague areas which we could actually tighten up in terms of defining what regions would merit this and whether or not a year is enough. I do not know if that is worthwhile. I think young people who commit to returning to a region after a certain period of time would merit the tax credit. However, it is important because some of our northern communities are seeing 20% of their young people leaving and when they leave they do not go back. There are a number of reasons that is happening.
Our regions include the northern mining belt. The gold region extends from Val-d'Or over to Sudbury and Timmins. In the early days the mines were founded by immigrant miners because in those days the mining companies did not want Canadians working in the mines. They hired young men from Yugoslavia, Croatia and Bulgaria on short term work contracts because the work was hard.
My family were immigrant miners who came to Canada to do this work. The miners did not want their children to work in the mines. The old Croatian miners used to tell their kids that they would break their legs if they went underground. That may not actually be what they said but they did want their young people to get an education because they valued it. Those men worked hard and died young so their children could get an education. However, when they got their education they left. Year after year they left and new workers arrived.
However, the economy changed and by the 1970s and 1980s we were not seeing the same level of immigration in the north. Young people were still being encouraged to get an education and leave but now there is a serious problem. However, we do have economic potential in a region where there are opportunities for work but our young people are still leaving.
What do we need to do? We need to start focusing on the trades and training to ensure that our young people have the opportunity to work. In northern Ontario, the young people who want an education go to Guelph, to Ottawa or to Toronto where they spend four years in school. What happens when they finish? They end up with $40,000 worth of debt. While they are there, what else happens? They fall in love and now have $60,000 or $80,000 worth of debt.
We can rest assured that these young people are not going back to northern Ontario because starting over in northern Ontario becomes too difficult financially. As a result, we are losing our best young people who are our greatest resource. They are a much greater resource than gold, diamonds, the white pine, nickel or copper. Our young people are our resources and we need to find a way to encourage them to go back to their regions.
The story in northern Ontario is similar right across Canada.
I would like to talk about the young Franco-Ontarians who must leave northern Ontario to get a post-secondary education or to get a job in Alberta or in southern Ontario.
When young Franco-Ontarians leave a community such as Smooth Rock Falls, Kapuskasing or Timmins, they leave behind their Franco-Ontarian community and culture. When we lose our young people, we lose our future.
It is critical that the provincial and federal governments provide sufficient resources for the construction of a new Collège Boréal campus in Timmins. It is equally critical that we give our young people the opportunity to learn a trade in their own language.
In the region of Timmins, a new Collège Boréal campus is essential for the development of the Franco-Ontarian community. It is essential for the development of a new economy in the north.
We need to work on education. We need to ensure that our young people have the opportunities to get trained in the trades and trained in university in their own regions and in their language so they can stay in our region so that when the opportunities do arise we will have given our young people the chance to stay and to have a new future.
The bill does speak to some of the areas of how we can start to encourage young people to come back. As I said, some more work needs to be done on the bill to fine-tune it to focus on kinds of incentives and where. Right now I think the area is somewhat vague. I do not think all regions of this country need it. We are looking at how to tweak certain areas that are suffering from extreme high levels of youth out-migration. Other areas are much more stable.
However, as federal members we need to recognize that rural Canada plays an important role and that the communities of rural Canada need to be maintained and the vitality of these communities can only be maintained if we have young people who are still living there.
What does happen when our young couples are down in Guelph, Ottawa, the University of Calgary or wherever with their $50,000, $60,000 or $70,000 worth of debt? As we said, they fall in love and stay wherever they are. What happens then is that they have a family and then the grandparents start to go south to visit them. Sooner or later, after the young people leave, the parents leave to be with their grandchildren because it is too hard to be so far away.
The youth out-migration is the first step to the loss of the population of our region and then it is followed by the older generation. Once we lose enough of a critical mass we lose the vitality that holds our northern communities together.
I am very interested in this bill. As a New Democrat, I would be more than willing to work on how we can tweak it to improve it, but it is taking us in a direction that will help us in the north build and maintain the communities that we are so proud of.
