Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with our hard-working member from Calgary Centre.
I will start my remarks today with a great quote from our Prime Minister when he was up in the Yukon territory this summer. He said, “that great national dream—the development of northern resources—no longer sleeps. It is not down the road. It is happening now”.
Economic action plan 2013 and this year's budget is a direct reflection of those comments and sentiments and is our government's focus on the north as a priority.
I would like to highlight the fact that this year's budget, economic action plan 2013, has a direct line item to support Yukon College's Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining. Our government and our Prime Minister recognize that mining and responsible resource development in the north will provide that vital opportunity for people of the north. It will create Yukon jobs for Yukon people. This technical and trades facility investment will allow Yukoners to stay at home while they study. It will allow them that critical opportunity to access the kinds of jobs that will be available for them in the job market. It will give them the opportunity to come out of school and go right into the workforce. What we heard time and time again, as we did consultations across the territory, was that the jobs were there and Yukon people wanted access to those jobs. However, they needed the training where training was not available.
My hat is off to the great folks at the Yukon College and the Yukon government, who have worked in close partnership with us to ensure this becomes a reality and to our government for recognizing those priorities of the territory by making this a specific budgetary priority.
The other thing we heard clearly from our students who were looking forward to opportunities in the workforce was that they wanted to be able to take advantage of not just jobs in the unskilled portion of the labour market, but they wanted opportunities at the semi-skilled, skilled and highly-skilled levels of the economy, which is booming in Yukon right now.
This is a direct opportunity to provide that for Yukon people. It is not just Yukon people for Yukon jobs. It will be highly-skilled and semi-skilled jobs for Yukon people, keeping people right in our territory to study for their career path and opportunity. This is wonderful news in the budget. I am looking forward to the future and seeing the development of Yukon College's Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining. The people in our communities will be able to take full advantage of this and they certainly look forward to it.
I would be remiss if I did not talk about another thing our government responded quite well to, and that was what Yukon people wanted out of the exploration, mining and resource development boom of our territory. They wanted to ensure they would see some rewards out of the exploration and resource development that was going on. This past summer, our Prime Minister signed a historic resource revenue sharing agreement with the Yukon territory that would allow the people of Yukon to see greater benefits from resource extraction in the territory. Again, that is another signal that our government understands the needs of the north. It understands the benefits to the people and the reasonable requests that the great folks of the Yukon territory have when it comes to labour market opportunities.
We are certainly seeing that through the lower than national average unemployment rate and the vitality and growth of our communities. Right now, it is a wonderful part of our country to be in. Certainly all signs are indicating, as the Prime Minister put it, that the north's time has come.
The other thing I want to highlight is we have maintained our commitment from the 2011 campaign. I remember clearly telling the great people of Yukon that we were going to focus on returning Canada to balanced budgets. We were going to do so in two key ways. First, we would not raise taxes for Canadian families. Second, we would not cut the transfer payments to the territories and balance our budgets on the backs of the provinces and territories through transfer payments.
Once again, we have not only maintained that commitment, we have actually increased the transfer payments to the provinces and territories. Our territory has certainly benefited from that. This year's payment is $861 million, up from $809 million last year. Our social transfer payments have increased. Our health care transfer payments have increased.
Why is that important? It is important because it allows the territory and our municipalities the ability to control their own path forward and to control their own destiny. They can make longer term plans for what they want to achieve as a territory, in partnership with their municipalities and the great communities that exist in Yukon. It also allows them to meet their education and health care targets and their social and environmental responsibilities.
I know the people of Yukon and the Yukon government certainly appreciate our commitment to ensure that the transfer payments to the territories are not cut, as we have seen under previous Liberal governments.
I can highlight those quickly. If we look at past transfer payments, I did highlight that the grand total this year was $861 million, of which $817 million was through the territorial formula financing program. When we reflect on that, it is an increase of $316 million from what we received under previous Liberal governments.
The health care transfer gives $32 million to the territory. That is an increase of almost $10 million, or 43% more than what we received under Liberal governments. Our Canadian social transfer is an increase of $10 million, or 32%.
In all areas, our government has maintained its commitment not to balance the deficit and not to bring us back to balanced budgets by slashing transfers to the territory. That is certainly a significant step forward.
We are maintaining our commitments. We are not raising taxes on Canadian families and we are achieving a return to balanced budgets by 2015. We are working hard at that and we are well on our way. That is great news to celebrate.
When we did consultations across the territory this summer, I was happily joined by several ministers. I did a number of consultations on my own as well. We certainly heard from community to community how popular the building Canada fund was and how important it was to ensure the territory was surviving through the global economic crisis that we saw in the 2008 recession. We heard consistently from our folks in Yukon that they wanted the return of the building Canada fund.
We now have the building Canada fund back at record levels. It is the largest and longest infrastructure fund that the country has ever seen. I know our municipalities are going to be very happy about that. It is something for which they lobbied hard. It is something they encouraged us to keep. They encouraged us to keep the name. They liked it so much and it reflected what they were trying to achieve.
The municipalities are all celebrating the indexing and the permanency of the gas tax fund right now because these things will allow our municipalities to make core plans and project their destiny well into the future, beyond the nose of a mandate for tomorrow and beyond a one-year budget cycle. This is allowing our municipalities, our towns and our communities to project well into the future.
There are a whole host of other things contained in the budget from which Yukon and our nation will benefit. I obviously do not have time to get into all of those things, but I did want to highlight that. I wanted to highlight some of the key things of which we were asked.
The new roadmap reflects a commitment that will increase the vitality of Canada's official language minority communities. It helps strengthen linguistic duality. Canada's two official languages are an integral part of our history, our culture and our national identity. I am proud of our Franco-Yukon community.
I am proud of the contribution that our Francophone community makes to the vibrant culture of the Yukon Territory. It is important to me that we continue that road map, which is something that was defined as extremely important to the Francophonie of the Yukon. I am glad that is contained within this budget as well.
I look forward to celebrating all the good news in budget 2013, the economic action plan, throughout this year, as we move forward and secure Canada's and the Yukon's long-term future for jobs, growth and long-term prosperity.
