Mr. Speaker, my questions are for the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment. It gets back to my Member’s statement from earlier today, where I talked about migrant workers. According to the last information I have, it’s 3,300 and counting — and these 3,300 migrant workers take with them $350 million per year out of our Territorial economy.
I’d like to start off with asking the Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment if the government has a plan to address or mitigate the situation that we’re in today with the 3,300 migrant workers.
The issue of migrant workers has been a troublesome one for our government for some time. First of all, we have to recognize that we live in a democracy, so people are free to move and live wherever they want, as provided for under the Constitution of Canada.
We have been attempting to address the issues through the negotiation of socio-economic agreements with the mining industry companies, specifically diamond mines, through the negotiation of a socio-economic agreement with the Mackenzie Valley pipeline proponents.
Now, it’s more difficult in the oil and gas sector, because that’s a responsibility of the federal government. The federal government, through the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, provides for benefit agreements with the oil and gas companies.
The way we looked at it, the best way to keep migrant workers living in the North is to make the Northwest Territories an attractive place for them to live. The best way to do that is to provide and make sure there is affordable housing and a lot of the benefits that we enjoy by living here. But the reality is it’s becoming harder to attract skilled workers. There’s a lot of competition for these workers, and the mining companies are finding that they have to offer these additional benefits.
Our plan is to go on the record and continue to express our concern about these activities to the mining companies. We hope to set up a process with the mining companies to work together to come up with solutions to this problem. We will certainly be communicating our concern to the federal government so they can take further action with regard to the workers involved in the oil and gas industry.
Specifically, I'd like to ask what campaign? When I gave my Member’s statement, I mentioned a scenario. That was just for construction workers. It wasn't skilled labour we were talking about. Out of the 40 employees, maybe five or six were skilled labour. The rest were labourers being trained, most of them from Newfoundland.
I'm wondering what type of campaign our government has to show industry and these migrant workers that there are communities here in the Northwest Territories that have affordable housing and that are livable.
For those areas of responsibility such as construction contracts that are awarded by our government, we will certainly follow up to make sure that the requirements of the various contracts are adhered to.
With regard to workers from Newfoundland who are brought in to do construction projects rather than hiring local citizens, we would have to bring this to the attention of the federal government, which has responsibility for labour standards.
The large pockets of unemployment in the Northwest Territories are located in our smaller communities. I'm wondering if the department and the government could work with communities to identify individuals in the small communities, guys who have skills and the ability to work. If we had a list or some type of avenue that would allow communities to get a list of individuals inside the community who wanted to work, it would make more sense to subsidize the airfare from here to Inuvik or to Fort Smith, rather than back to Newfoundland.
Is it possible for the department to look into setting up something like that in the communities on the ground level that is going to identify individuals for work in our resource sector? Thank you.
My understanding I that at one time, we did have such a registry of employees in the Northwest Territories. I would commit to finding out what happened to that registry. We may still have one. It only makes sense to do so.
In the oil and gas industry, there was a process whereby you expanded your area of coverage, so if you couldn't find people locally, you would go to the next level, which would be within the region, and then you would go to the Northwest Territories — sort of in concentric circles of employment. I would think that would be something that we would espouse.
I know that some of the smaller communities do have informal arrangements whereby they all know what skills are available. Then when they bid on jobs and contracts, they know who to get to, and they work together to make sure that communities get the benefits of contracts. Certainly, this is something that we'll be looking at.
Final supplementary, Mr. Ramsay.
One other question. When the payroll tax was first introduced, it was a way to try to get some revenue from migrant workers. It was increased a couple of years ago to 2 per cent.
If a company — a Northern company — subcontracts with a company in the south, and the payroll is paid out of the south, are we not getting the 2 per cent payroll tax? Because the payroll is coming out of southern Canada to these workers who are working in our backyard and not paying the payroll tax. I'm wondering if there is some slippage there.
That certainly was the intention of the payroll tax. It comes down to a question of monitoring and enforcement. Wherever we are aware of it, the Department of Finance follows up to make sure that the payroll tax is imposed. It’s more difficult to impose when the payments to individual workers are made outside of the Northwest Territories. That would be an area where we would have to look to see how we can improve the monitoring and follow-up and collection of payroll taxes.
