MR. CHAIRMAN: We have a quorum so I am going to call the meeting to order. I would like to just begin by thanking Dr. Jacquelyn Thayer Scott for being with us today. I understand she had a 4:00 a.m. wake up call for a flight out of Toronto this morning, so she has made the special effort to get here to be with us. Thank you very much. As you know, this committee has been looking at the impact of the Devco closure and part of what we are trying to do is to come up with some recommendations about how we can deal with those impacts and, of course, the University College of Cape Breton is seen as being part of the solution to some of the economic difficulties. I understand you have a presentation. I would like to hear from you.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Mr. Chairman and honourable members of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to meet here with you today. I know you have been meeting for some time on this matter and you have heard some excellent and carefully documented presentations. Most of those will relate directly to the Cape Breton Development Corporation, its history and the present issues. It is not my intention to speak to you about Cape Breton's economic past, although I will reference history as it applies to the present. Rather, I want to talk to you about Cape Breton's future and what we can all do to help it reach its potential.
Because I am an academic by profession, I always feel bound to start by laying out my assumptions. So I hope that won't be too tedious in this case because I think it will lay an important foundation for the few simple points that I want to leave you with. So these assumptions, there are four of them. First of all, we must all overcome the legacy of history, the history of Cape Breton and its relationship to the mainland and the history of the Atlantic Provinces among themselves.
Second, we must stop defining Cape Breton in terms of its problems and define it instead in terms of its potential. The glass is half full, not half empty. Third, what is needed to secure economic and social success today and in the future is not the same as what was required in past economic areas. Many of our current systems of economic planning and funding are old wineskins and do not hold new wine. Fourth, a stronger Cape Breton does not mean a weaker Halifax.
Let me spend just a few moments expanding the discussion of those assumptions. Like many of you, I have found my attention glued to the nightly television news these past several weeks watching new horrors unfold in the Balkans and the Middle East. Again, like many of you, I suspect I am not only appalled and disturbed by those events but I shake my head and say, they have been fighting one another for hundreds, even thousands, of years, why can't they learn to leave peaceably and in mutual respect? Many Canadians, including some of my friends in other parts of Canada to whom I have talked about these events, smugly conclude that thank God it can't happen here. The ancient Greeks had a word for that - hubris. Of course it can happen anywhere when people let their history and their cultural differences immutably control their relationships with one another.
This may seem a very dramatic and overstated example to now try to apply to Nova Scotia but I will attempt to do so anyway. For most of the past 200 years, the relationship between Cape Breton and mainland Nova Scotia has been characterized by a culture of colonization and perceived in real cultural and religious differences. Our friends and fellow citizens in Quebec did not invent separatist sentiments in Canada.
The conjoining of Cape Breton and the mainland into one province was not amicably received on both sides but the mainland needed resources, the King's brother needed royalties to cover his gambling debts and Cape Breton had coal, fish and timber. It was clear from the founding days of the Royal Reserve, a condition that continued officially until the late 1800's and unofficially for long thereafter, stamped the relationship between the two into a colonial pattern. From the 1820's until well after the Second World War, most of Nova Scotia's provincial tax revenues were derived from Cape Breton mineral royalties.
Further, the ethnic and religious differences between the two settlements fostered the age-old distrust between the English and the Celts, between Protestants and Catholics. Why do I mention these things? Surely they must be ancient history, no longer relevant to today. I wish that were true. In the seven years I have lived in this province, I have continued to be astounded by the depth of the animosity toward Cape Breton among the mainlanders I meet and by their myths about Cape Bretoners. Many of those with the strongest opinions, I might add, have never crossed the causeway or they are former Cape Bretoners who, living now on the mainland, feel they must adopt the local values and morays to be accepted themselves.
But any attitudes which prevail in the electorate, particularly within the electoral elites of professional communities, are inevitably reflected in government. Civil servants are often suspicious and inclined to believe Cape Bretoners are too stupid or corrupt to make their own decisions and politicians and governments of every political stripe are too timid in attacking the myths and moving forward.
I have lived 9 years in Vancouver, 10 years in Winnipeg, 6 in Toronto and now 7 in Cape Breton. I can honestly say that many of the brightest, most creative and hardest working people I know live and work in Cape Breton. By way of small example, every year for the past several, UCCB's premiums for sickness and disability insurance have been reduced because our absenteeism rates are so much lower than those of other Atlantic universities.
My point in these last few minutes is a simple one to grasp. We are still caught in our historical mire and someone, somebody, must break the cycle if our collective future is not to be sabotaged by the attitudes which continue to undermine our relationship with other Nova Scotians. Yes, I recognize that the attitudes exist on both sides. When I first moved to Cape Breton, I vowed I wouldn't fall into the trap of blaming so much of the status quo on Halifax. That is a vow I haven't been able to keep because the evidence of the historical conflict continues to infect almost every current transaction. It is a bit like that old saw about paranoiacs being that way because someone is really out to get them.
This within-province problem extends to the Atlantic Region. I have been struck time and again by the isolationism of Nova Scotia within Atlantic Canada. At one time, it might have been called New Brunswick envy. By way of illustration, I vividly recall a phone call some years ago from a former Minister of Education who had been invited to join with his New Brunswick Cabinet colleague to celebrate the signing of a global transfer of credit agreement between the nine campuses of the New Brunswick Community College and UCCB. On the face of it, this was a good thing. University grants, appropriate transfer credit for college work, something encouraged by Ministers of Education across Canada, including the gentleman who called me in a fury. How dare I conclude an agreement with New Brunswick, he stormed, to which I responded, excuse me, we have just signed a deal which means New Brunswickers will come to Cape Breton and spend $10,000 a year or more in our community for each of two years. Please tell me how that is a bad thing. His reply indicated that he felt this made New Brunswick look good. Funny, I thought it made a Nova Scotia university college look good.
Atlantic Canadians have more in common with one another than real differences which separate us. We need a fundamental change and political and policy attitudes to view Atlantic Canada as a region and to serve its best interest rather to continue to die little deaths because of our unwillingness to work in common regional cause. Surely we have the capacity and the intelligence to overcome 200 years of history when it no longer serves our best interest.
My second assumption, you will recall, is that we must all stop defining Cape Breton in terms of its problems but look at how to support its potential. Here I would agree that Cape Bretoners, at least a small but vocal minority of them, are often our own worst enemies, wallowing in our decline and industrial-age pollution and so on without thought as to whether that self-portrayal is likely to make anyone want to invest in or live on the island. What is even more perplexing, however, is the willingness of provincial politicians, again of every Party stripe, to buy into this view of Cape Breton as a problem. We have a ton of potential - bright, creative people making their mark in the information technology and cultural industries and in tourism and hospitality industry innovation. For example, we have outstanding education and training organizations at the post-secondary level - not only UCCB but the Nova Scotia Community College Marconi Campus, privately-owned McKenzie College to name but a few.
Our regional health care complex is one of the most innovative and experimental in the province. We have a high rate of adoption of the use of information technologies and the beginnings of well developed networks of community learning centres at CAP sites and libraries. We are experienced at working in partnership with school boards, libraries, small private companies, post-secondary institutions, health care providers, government agencies and others, to leverage the impact of scarce resources.
Why is it so hard for politicians and the media to focus on these strengths of the many rather than the perceived weaknesses of the few? We need leadership from all Parties, political and others, to focus on the half full glass and strategies for topping it up, rather than on a half empty glass in danger of running dry.
My third assumption was that economic success today and in the future requires different inputs and supports than in previous economic eras. While the basic inputs during the industrial era were principally capital assets of the direct producer or manufacturer combined with labour, the basic inputs in this new economy are principally skilled labour with capital assets concentrated in training and networking infrastructure.
Some of you may know that this past year I have been chairing a federal expert panel on skills development which has had significant input from the provinces as well as from industry and educational stakeholders. One of the more important pieces of research we discovered from anywhere in the world was from within Statistics Canada. Quietly, over the past 10 years and more, John Baldwin and a group of researchers have been collecting data on every new business startup in Canada, tens of thousands of them. They followed them through tax returns, their growth and survival over a five year period and longer and have surveyed most to ascertain the differences between those who grew and survived and those who stagnated or failed.
The conclusions are quite dramatic. Those that succeeded and grew did two things very differently from those that did not. They constantly innovated and adopted new technologies and methods and concurrently, they continued to upgrade and train their staff.
Innovation alone and training alone were not the key. Both together created the energy and synergy for success. There are lessons here, as well in the experience of other successful regional communities, for Cape Breton.
Our economic potential is not hidden in the murky depths of a soothsayer's crystal ball. The best avenues for development in Cape Breton have been researched before, exhaustively I might say, by the community, by government and by academics. The most viable sectors to develop in the short and medium-term are information technology, especially multimedia networking applications; tourism and hospitality; petroleum and gas spin-offs, including supply activities for the Laurentian field and microprocessing of petrochemicals; environmental services and technology validation; cultural industries including crafts; and aquaculture and greenhouse agriculture.
Each of these industries requires at least two pieces of knowledge-based infrastructure. First, an affordable, high-speed bandwidth for telecommunications and networking; and second, a highly trained and constantly reskilling workforce. In addition, they each require an applied research capacity to solve problems, identify and test new technology innovations and commercialize new knowledge. By way of simple illustration, let us take aquaculture. Why has it been so successful in New Brunswick and such a failure in Cape Breton to date, especially when in most cases the physical conditions in Cape Breton are more amenable to success?
Upon analysis, the answer is plain. New Brunswick has the laboratory research complex at St. Andrew's and it works closely with industry to identify and solve problems. Cape Breton has no resident fish veterinarian, no nutrient analyst, no laboratory facilities for these or for the marine biologists who could serve this sector. When problems go wrong in this industry, they go wrong instantaneously. These are the same types of facilities, incidentally, that are needed to support an expanding greenhouse agriculture industry.
I could go through the specific infrastructure requirements for environmental services and technology validation and petroleum and gas spin-offs if only our time today allowed but it does not. UCCB has done that analysis and the remedies are embodied in our proposal to the Canada Foundation for Innovation for a $25 million science and technology facility designed specifically to provide these development supports, as well as to house next stage development supports for the local information technology sector, with which we have long been involved developmentally.
Here is a telling little story that harks back to my assumptions. We put forward that proposal in the first round of CFI competition. Indeed, I believe we were the only small university in Canada to submit in the large projects category. When we were not successful we went to see the senior CFI staff and asked if we might go over the weaknesses in our proposal so we could learn for another round. They told us our proposal was very strong, indeed, the peer review panel had given us the highest marks possible in all but one category,
that being the track record and quantity of the research personnel. Very understandable we replied, but we can hardly attract or hire experienced researchers when we have no lab facilities or offices for them. They agreed this was a chicken and egg problem and one that the CFI needed to deal more creatively with in the future.
So, how far away were we from reaching the bar of those projects that qualified as eligible for funding and those that did not, we asked. Their reply was that we had already reached that bar and our project was deemed eligible for funding but their funds in this first round did not extend to cover all eligible projects. Fair enough. Were there any other factors, we asked. For example, were the views of the provinces sought on projects within their jurisdictions? Yes, was the reply, although the CFI was not bound by those views. Did Nova Scotia offer a view? Yes, we were told, Nova Scotia indicated it would support a project from Dalhousie but if UCCB were awarded the project, they would have to get their matching funding from ACOA.
I don't recall any provincial public policy debate over what criteria should be used by Nova Scotia to determine which CFI projects it would support and which it would not. I certainly never received any minutes or communications indicating that the Council for Higher Education ever debated or decided on such criteria. Did this comment by a Nova Scotia official mean our project, which would have such direct economic development impact was not funded? We can never be absolutely sure what role this comment played in the funding decision, it may have been a small one, but we can be certain that it didn't help.
I mention this anecdote not because I want to whine, believe me I have already done that in other quarters, but because it is illustrative of how desperately we need new assumptions in this province. Because such a comment from Nova Scotia could only have arisen from the old paradigm assumptions I challenged in the four required assumptions for the future that I set out to you earlier. With different attitudes toward Cape Breton and its institutions, with a different view of sub-regional potential and with a different understanding of the infrastructure required for economic growth and a knowledge-based economy, my guess is that Nova Scotia's comment to the CFI might have been different. Fortunately, for both Cape Breton and the rest of Nova Scotia, there will be an opportunity to remedy this specific case because we will be submitting again in an upcoming second round.
I noted earlier a common requirement of all the industries which is logical to develop in Cape Breton. Affordable, high speed bandwidth. This has been a very significant problem for the Island. Some of you will know that I am also on the board of CANARIE, the federal Crown Corporation responsible for building the national backbone, the latest of which is the optical network known as CA*net 3. We are still waiting to be hooked up to its earlier incarnations. Just last week I was told that the carrier and the province were apparently ready to address some of the outstanding problems and get on with this in the near future. I hope so, but I remain skeptical. I have been told frequently over the past five years that the solution
is imminent. We still wait and in the meantime we pay more than $15,000 a month more than metro universities and we only get access to a T1 line for that fee.
This is a time-critical issue for both UCCB and the local IT sector. With bandwidth, if you build it, they will not necessarily come, to paraphrase an old movie script, but if you do not build it, they surely won't come. We are aware of specific cases where private sector partners have declined interest in local investment because of the bandwidth and associated costs issues.
What else would help Cape Breton achieve success in these knowledge era industries? Here is a short listing. I haven't provided any real discussion because of the time constraints but you may want to follow them up from further comment.
First, venture capital for small and micro-enterprises, with preferential capital gains treatment for the investor. Second, increased high-end business advisory services, especially related to commercialization, marketing and export management. Third, programs to incubate and capitalize young entrepreneurs, not only our own but those who might be attracted from elsewhere in Canada. Fourth, a provincially-funded immigration initiative to differentially and preferentially attract and retain skilled immigrants to settle in Cape Breton.
As you might imagine, we at UCCB have more detailed thoughts on how each of these needs might be effectively addressed and we are willing, nay, eager to be involved with government in helping them happen. But to return to first principles and assumptions, we are not willing to waste our limited time and energy on sham initiatives or on governments who think they not only know best but all of what should be good for Cape Breton. We are looking for true partnership, positive can-do attitudes and leadership, honourable members. If we can provide those on both sides of the causeway, our future in Cape Breton is not in jeopardy.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. The usual way that we proceed is by giving each of the caucuses a set amount of time and using up the time that we have left. I wonder if just before we begin if I could just ask one question for clarification. You had mentioned the Canada Foundation projects, do they come each year? Would you apply each year?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: It is a relatively new initiative. It was established not in the current budget but with the previous federal budget where they established an endowment. In the current budget, they added to that endowment. So it is a limited number of rounds before it is exhausted. But there is expected to be a second round later this year, probably but no later than the fall.
MR. CHAIRMAN: When was it established?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: It was established, in terms of legislation, probably almost two years ago. By the time procedures were gotten in place and so on, the first rounds were in the past year.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Corbett.
MR. FRANK CORBETT: Dr. Scott, it is good to see you again.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Thank you.
MR. CORBETT: As someone who lives just down the road from the college, I am just going to ask you some background questions. I guess, first of all, what is the full-time enrolment at UCCB?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: It is approximately 3,600 full-time equivalent students, which translates out to about 4,000 noses. In addition, in terms of workshops, upgrading seminars, that type of thing, there are another 20,000 single registrations each year.
MR. CORBETT: I guess we in industrial Cape Breton call them locals, but how many local people would you say, percentage-wise, are there?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That has changed over the past several years as the university college has grown. Currently, about 73 per cent of our students come from Cape Breton and the balance comes from outside the province and internationally.
MR. CORBETT: Now, one of the reasons we are here today is because of the federal government's announcement about Devco and so on. With 73 per cent of your students coming from the local area, if the projections in the statement of the federal government were to come true, what kind of impact do you believe that would have on your enrolment?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: It is difficult to tell, because it depends on what decisions are made not only by younger families that might choose to leave the Island in terms of having been directly affiliated with Devco, but it is difficult to predict the downstream impact on other businesses and industries and how that might affect movement off the Island. In any event, the population as you know, particularly of the young people, is in decline in Cape Breton, as it is everywhere in Atlantic Canada except the Halifax-Bedford district.
MR. CORBETT: If affected employees at Devco were to take retraining, they would get approximately $8,000. Using your facility as an example, how much training do you think a person could get for $8,000?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: If that involved only the payment of tuition and fees, approximately two years.
MR. CORBETT: That is excluding toothbrushes and toothpaste.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes, excluding what other expenses might be involved.
MR. CORBETT: UCCB is what I like to say - and I am sure you probably do too - is a unique institution. The trades component, plus the business, the arts and the sciences that are given there, is there a difference in funding, in a university setting like that, for your arts and sciences programs as opposed to your trades programs? Is there a difference in funding there?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes, there is.
MR. CORBETT: Could you explain that a little bit?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: We are in a unique situation, by a lot of different dimensions, one of which is that our funding is principally received from the Nova Scotia Council on Higher Education. You may recall that they went through an exercise over the past couple of years with rejigging the funding formula. The assumptions underlying how the funding formula is established are not fundamentally different from what they were before, but they sort of altered some of the previous relationships between disciplinary funding. So things like engineering and engineering technologies receives a higher level of subsidy because of the degree of capital investment that is necessary for that, as opposed to perhaps an arts program where your principal expenses are related to library resources, audio-visual resources and so on. We do not receive any official base funding for our trades.
MR. CORBETT: That is, I guess, what I am getting to, is as you said, the capital costs, in a sense it is almost like it goes hand in hand when you talked about the availability of bandwidth and so on, that training in trades, there is no sense working on equipment that is outdated in the workforce.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That is right. We have been very creative in working with private industry nationally, through national industry sector councils, and so on, to try to deal with the shortages of capital money that are there, but there is no question that there is an impact.
MR. CORBETT: If that funding is not addressed in a different way, do you feel that that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, would have a negative impact on your institution to carry those programs forward?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Absolutely. You will be aware, as will many other people in Cape Breton, what difficulty we have had in dealing with successive governments over an appropriate funding base for UCCB. We are currently in receipt of some short-term, three year, non-base funding to address some of the trades issues, but we are at a loss to understand why we have to justify that. It is in our mandate and our legislation that we offer that kind of training, but we are the only institution that is questioned when it comes to the funding required to deliver it.
MR. CORBETT: I am certainly not here to give you free advertising, but it does not bother me.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Oh, it helps.
MR. CORBETT: I want to stay on the funding side of especially the trades program, because I am thinking if a lot of employees are going to be severed from an employer like Devco, if they are going to take advantages, a lot of them will be in the trades area and in technologies, and that is one of the reasons I asked you particularly about the $8,000 and I am not going to ask you whether you believe it is a proper amount, I personally do not think it is, but I wanted you to answer that. If an influx of those people come to you, can you handle that with the funding and would you think they would be getting a fair shake with the equipment, and so on, that is there today?
[1:30 p.m.]
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: The only hesitation that I have in replying, is that the way we would view those individuals is the way that we view many older persons who come back to us after years in the workplace. We have a well-established national reputation in what is called Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition, so we would be involved with sitting down with each of those individuals to try to determine what their current skill levels are, to do some career assessment testing of where there might be some opportunities for them, and where there was an appropriate avenue into the trades and technology programs, to give them some advance credit for that, where that is appropriate. But it may be that some of them want to try something completely different or that they see some market opportunities, if they tried something that was completely different from what they have done in the past. The reason I say that is that we have had some very good experiences previously with Sysco.
As you know, the average age at both Sysco and Devco is about the same, but the distribution is vastly different. You have larger numbers of these younger people at Devco, where at Sysco almost nobody is under the age of 49. The reason for that is there were two previous iterations through the Canadian Steel Trades Employment Congress Program of structural readjustment in the steel industry, where we had at least 100 steelworkers come through UCCB. Many of them did some of the technology type of training, but many of them
did other things, as well; they saw this as an opportunity to completely change their career pattern.
I find it hard to predict exactly what the impact will be in terms of the capital issues. If all of them chose technology, we would have a problem, no question, but if there is more of a distribution into the various programs and disciplines, then there is a possibility that it can be handled more ably.
Our perspective is that we need to understand the individual learner's needs and what they already bring to the table, so that we can get them into a program that is going to suit their aspirations, but also get them in and out as quickly as possible with the right kinds of skills and knowledge.
MR. CORBETT: That would be it for this time around, Mr. Chairman.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We have about five minutes left on our side, so I am going to ask a question at this point, if that is all right, to use up some of that time. Something that struck me - and you said you had no way of quantifying the impact - when Dr. Brown was here a few weeks ago, he talked about a 10 per cent reduction in the GDP overall of the Cape Breton economy. That is one way, I guess, to quantify.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That is one way. It is hard to translate that into how many 18 to 24 year olds that means are going to leave.
MR. CHAIRMAN: I suppose that is a difficulty. One of the points that was made with respect to the whole question of - and you made the point earlier that there is - a phenomenon going on in the Atlantic Provinces of younger people leaving and in your brief, you also talked about attracting skilled immigrants to come to Cape Breton. I know that Prince Edward Island, for example, has a very strong program called Come Home - I think that is what it is called - bringing people home, not only in this country but in others, who have left and have become highly skilled. I am just wondering if you saw a role for a program like that, to bring back, I guess, the generations of people who have gone down the road from this province?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I think there is some potential for that. I think the issue is to have a context where people see that there is opportunity. Let me relate that, again, to the experience I had this year on this skills panel that we have been working on.
You read a lot in the newspapers, particularly from industries complaining about skills shortages and complaining about brain drain and all of those sorts of things. We spent a lot of time sorting through that data. While we are still waiting for a few more reports to come in, what it looks like is there is more of an opportunity shortage than there is a skills shortage. If you are 22 years old and you have a skills set where you could work almost anyplace, what we have found in talking to a lot of those people who have gone to other places is that it is
not necessarily a big pay cheque that attracts them - that's always helpful - they want to be where the action is, where there is opportunity. Most of us wanted to do that when we were 22 too. Most of us still wanted to do it until we were into our 40's, it is pretty normal stuff.
So I think the success of any kind of Come Home initiative like the success of any kind of program for young entrepreneurs involves all of us working together to create an atmosphere of opportunity in Cape Breton. If we create the right sense of opportunity, the right conditions where there is not only just a differential advantage in coming home because you can get a house cheaper or because it is a safer place to raise your kids but because it is also going to be a better place to do business - I think we can do that, by the way - then I think that will be successful. I think it is unlikely to be successful if people buy what I call the media image of Cape Breton.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. We will move now to the Progressive Conservative caucus. I don't know if Mr. Archibald or Mr. Muir wanted to lead.
MR. GEORGE ARCHIBALD: I really appreciate the things you have been saying about Cape Breton. The outlook in the future for Cape Breton I think is probably as great as it is anywhere in Canada. Anybody with any experience or any opportunity that has ever visited Cape Breton would want to live there and never leave. Certainly with Cape Bretoners there is no shortage of grey matter or brain power because we have seen how well they do across Canada.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That's right.
MR. ARCHIBALD: But one of the things that you have said is so true and I think that it is something that governments over the last years have perhaps missed because governments have spent a lot of money in Cape Breton, a large portion of the Nova Scotia debt is attributed to some ventures that the taxpayers of Nova Scotia have participated in in Cape Breton that have or have not provided dividends. Certainly the federal government was spending money like water in Cape Breton for years but they were all, I think, dreaming it up in Ottawa or somewhere else and it never did get down to the decision-makers on the Island to say, look, this is where we ought to go.
Now, one of the things that we are concerned about, the coal mines, you didn't spend a great deal of time talking about the coal mines in the future. Certainly, that's fine. But one of the things that the provincial government is still tied in with is Sydney Steel and the $40 million guarantee that they just provided. You also mentioned the difficulty with bandwidth in the IT development on the Island. Can you imagine what a $40 million guarantee would do to the installation of the IT sector in Cape Breton and what it would do to put computers on the same footing in Sydney and Cape Breton as they are in Halifax or indeed as they are in the southern states. I have talked to people who are doing all kinds of things with computers in Cape Breton, they are leading edge, and they could employ hundreds of people
but they can't afford to hook onto the system, it is too expensive. Should the governments be looking more into providing infrastructure rather than support service for industries that are already there?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: A difficult question and I am not an expert on the steel industry. I can't evaluate what is a good investment and what is a poor investment there. I do know a fair amount about the information technology industry and I can certainly say that infrastructure investment there would be very critical. Let me draw an analogy, if I might, about a previous, very successful government investment policy. Most of you folks around the room aren't old enough to remember the late 1970's but DREE had a policy that said that the way to help save Atlantic Canada is you make Halifax the hub. You invest all kinds of infrastructure in Halifax, beef up the ports, beef up everything else, locate government regional offices there and so on, and eventually that will have a positive impact on the economy of Halifax because wasn't, in those days, the attractive place that it is today.
I think it is fair to say that 20 years later, that was an extremely successful government policy and I think it was a wonderful policy. I think it was a very good policy. It was good for Halifax, it was good for Atlantic Canada but now that that has worked, we need to look at some other areas and similar right kinds of investment and appropriate infrastructure could have the same impact in other places.
None of us can bring back dollars that old governments spent years ago. All we can do is deal with the present and the future and if we want to capitalize on the potential that Cape Breton has, then it is critical that we make some investments in infrastructure development that are going to support knowledge-based industries that have a real future.
MR. ARCHIBALD: With regard to the University College of Cape Breton, does UCCB have a different relationship with ACOA than other universities in Nova Scotia?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Not with ACOA, no. It has a different relationship with Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation.
MR. ARCHIBALD: Okay. Is there funding made more available in excess of what would normally be going to an educational institution because of their relationship?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: For the most part, no. The only case where that would be the situation is where we made a capital investment in the new buildings and Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation made a significant contribution to that. The nature of the Memorandum of Understanding between UCCB and ECBC is that it triggers money on small mini-projects for the most part and it is usually where a specific business organization or community organization has a problem. It is very seldom just a two party kind of piece only between University College of Cape Breton and ECBC but a business or a particular business sector may come to us. They might have a problem where they might go to ECBC and ECBC
feels we can help them with their problem. They trigger some of the marginal costs associated with that. They are not paying the costs of the faculty members involved but they are paying the marginal costs if there are some extra expenses associated with doing the particular piece of research or problem solving. So, no it doesn't address our base funding issues.
MR. ARCHIBALD: One of the things you have mentioned here that I found somewhat distressing is that Nova Scotia offered the view that they would support Dalhousie but not UCCB. Who in Nova Scotia said that?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I don't know.
MR. ARCHIBALD: Was it the minister? Was it the deputy minister or the Premier?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I don't know. It was whoever the CFI consulted.
MR. ARCHIBALD: Well, isn't that critical to find out who said that and take them down to UCCB for a few minutes?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Easier said than done. They have to protect some of their communications as well.
MR. ARCHIBALD: But you know, perhaps nobody . . .
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: We could make all kinds of educated guesses but . . .
MR. ARCHIBALD: Well, I know, but maybe nobody said that.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Oh, I don't believe that. I have known David Strangway for a lot of years.
MR. ARCHIBALD: To me, I find it a bit horrifying and very troublesome and I would like to know . . .
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: As did I.
MR. ARCHIBALD: . . . if this is policy of the Government of Nova Scotia. Half of the Cabinet and the Premier make Cape Breton their home. I just find that statement almost unbelievable that that would be one that would be made by ACOA or by . . .
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I don't find it that surprising. We have run into that attitude on many occasions.
MR. ARCHIBALD: Well, I find it both surprising and troubling. I just find it very hard.
MR. JAMES MUIR: Thank you, Dr. Scott, for coming and I should perhaps tell the committee I have had some association with UCCB for quite a number of years so I am quite familiar with some of the things and George I can believe that that was said simply because UCCB did things a little bit differently than some of the mainland universities or main line universities and when you are saying, well, you don't have a proven track record in research, they are not looking at the way it has been defined at Cape Breton, which has been a good way, in my opinion.
Dr. Scott, as pointed out by both Mr. Corbett and Mr. Archibald, you didn't mention Sysco or Devco in your comments. Now, am I reading from that that perhaps you and your colleagues at UCCB see that you have talked about history and you are saying that that stuff is history. If Cape Breton is to move forward, then we have to get beyond that and go ahead.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I think, generally speaking, we have to get beyond our history in all respects.
MR. MUIR: Secondly, one of the things that has been problematic for me, and I expect for maybe Mr. [Charles] MacDonald over there, who represents Inverness, one of the difficulties in looking at Cape Breton is that usually the term Cape Breton has a very narrow geographic focus. They don't count Inverness as "Cape Breton" or Cheticamp or Isle Madame or even Louisbourg or something like that. How do we put the whole Island into the picture, or Port Hawkesbury?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That is always tricky and I really share that piece because I don't live in the industrial area. I work in the industrial area but that is not where my home is.
MR. MUIR: You live over with Rita MacNeil, I think, don't you?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes. The potential of the Island is the whole Island and we have been working hard and with extremely limited resources to expand further any of the kind of knowledge-based assets that we can bring to the table for the whole of the Island. We have had long discussions that have resulted in some agreements with the Strait school board on how we can help facilitate one another with the Southeast Nova Community Enterprise Networking Centre. At various times in the early stages of the RDAs, we made a formal offer to the other RDAs in addition to the Cape Breton County one, to be involved with them in the same kind of way. We definitely want to be involved with the whole Island because taken either way, the industrial area versus the other area, both have deficits. You put them together, you have a tremendously powerful potential combination and I am much more interested in concentrating on the potential on the half full piece than on the historical divides.
MR. MUIR: You mentioned resources. One was the greenhouse type of agriculture and the other was the problems, I guess we would call it, that they have had with aquaculture. In the Bras d'Ors and whatnot, there have been a couple of these things. What is the relationship of your institution with the AC in terms of the AC has put on that new building that has the big fish tank and everything in it and they are into aquaculture in a big way. That is a provincial institution, you know. It has a provincial mandate. Is that something that that relationship could be further and better utilized?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes, I think that is a fair way of stating it. For many years, we attempted to get sort of a satellite operation of AC at UCCB and we are willing to try to find space and resources to do that. Their problem, they felt, was that they didn't have the resources to extend themselves that far and that their cluster of research facilities didn't lend themselves to that.
Over the past three years or so, we have experimented with something that is a little bit different which is called a Resource Based Extension Centre, which is located at the old Point Edward farm, where we work specifically with the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Fisheries Ministry and with AC to provide what I guess when I was growing up in the U.S. would have been called county ag and extension courses and technical assistance and so on. We have also established a CAP site there to try to facilitate the connections with AC.
The hardest one is aquaculture. It is easier to do the silviculture-agricultural kind of piece at a distance. It is hard because the facilities that you need to properly study aquaculture, you really have to be pretty well on-site. We have identified ways to do that in that proposal, I think, that goes to CFI.
MR. MUIR: I think the aquaculture thing, just the dietary habits of the population and the price of meat going up, and all that stuff, I just think the water is clean, basically, in Cape Breton.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes, although a number of the shellfish areas are in danger on the Bras d'Or because of the lack of enforcement of sewage problems.
The other thing that is important about the aquaculture industry and all of these industries is when you look at the future population of Cape Breton further out, assuming no in-migration - and I don't make that assumption operationally, I am just doing it for demographic purposes - the biggest proportion of young people are aboriginal, who are coming on stream. They are very interested in developing science and technology expertise. Their communities are very interested in ways to develop sustainable kinds of economic activity. So the potential is not only the commercial economic potential that would be available generally to the Island from better development of aquaculture but there is also the potential for the sustaining of food fishery and some economic development for the Mi'kmaq people.
So it is an important area, we think and they think, to be able to have the right situation to provide the kind of resources because as you know, and as I alluded to in my opening remarks, when a problem goes wrong in an aquaculture operation, you can't take a water sample and ship it to Halifax and wait five days for the reply; they are dead in three hours. So, you have to be able to have those kinds of resources nearby. It doesn't lend itself to assistance at a distance.
MR. CHAIRMAN: You have four minutes left.
MR. MUIR: I will give it up.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, we will move to the Liberal caucus then.
MR. CHARLES MACDONALD: In the past and in the future, how do you perceive the role of UCCB in the economic development of the Island?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: One of the things, and Frank began by alluding to this uniqueness piece, what is different about us is being this university college that we do trades, technology, arts and science, and we try to integrate those traditions. It is now an idea that has established enough success at our place that they have created five of them in British Columbia and they are working on a couple in Alberta and in several international jurisdictions. Part of the characteristic of that model, apart from being the kind of educational model that blends those traditions and focuses on work placements, is that almost all of our programs, including our Bachelor of Arts, have work placements and voluntary service placements associated with them; also, community service kinds of components and it is very much interlinked with the whole kind of community, economic and social development.
So I can't imagine a future for UCCB if it is not involved with the economic development of the Island. We constantly get asked to both national and international gatherings. I talk about that because as poor a job as we think we have done, compared to what we would like to do, we are seen to be better at that than anybody else in Canada and places like the World Bank and CIDA have brought people in internationally because they see it as a model for developing countries in particular. So I can't imagine a future that doesn't include our focus on economic development. When you look at other regional communities that became successful around North America, there is not one of them that didn't have a higher education institution that was involved in the activity to make that happen.
MR. CHARLES MACDONALD: I guess going from there then, the community colleges' role, how would you perceive that?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Oh, I think it is a strong role and we are, of course, a community college too but we have global transfer agreements with the Nova Scotia Community College. We are starting to work on some joint degree proposals. We want to do more in the applied research area. I think there is some potential particularly with the Strait Campus. We are already doing that with the Marconi Campus, particularly in the information technology area where Marconi, McKenzie College, ourselves and the Silicon Island group are doing a fair amount together. So I think the combination of the institutions is a good one.
MR. CHARLES MACDONALD: I will pass on but one last question, I guess. The idea of the young people wanting to be where the action is, and I think all you have to do is look at a Saturday night and you understand where young people go. The same as when they are looking for jobs; I agree, wholeheartedly, with what you say on that side. I think we tend to travel to where the action is, whether it be work relation or social or whatever.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: You see the real tragedy is that somebody else's young people don't see Cape Breton as the place to go to for the action.
MR. CHARLES MACDONALD: That is right. Now is it possible that, I guess, when we are looking at the oil and gas or the IT sector or whatever, is it possible that Cape Breton in the future can be that action centre where people can . . .
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I think so. I think we have to kick-start it which is why my comment about the immigration strategy and the other things that I mentioned there. We have to have the conditions right to create the opportunities. I think it is possible, yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Fraser.
MR. HYLAND FRASER: Thank you and thank you for coming. You indicated earlier that 73 per cent of the students that you have are Cape Bretoners. Does that make it easier for the university to focus on economic development in Cape Breton because basically three-quarters of your students are from the Island? I guess I am wondering, if 25 per cent of your students were from Cape Breton and the rest were from other places outside Cape Breton, from other places in Canada and the United States, would your focus be different?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: No, I don't think so and I will tell you why. That is actually a lower percentage of people from the immediate area than is true at most Canadian universities. You see Nova Scotia is a bit anomalous because our reputation, as universities, has been established as providing high quality undergraduate liberal arts and science education. So you get a lot of what are seen as out-of-province students in Nova Scotia, particularly at mainland universities, where really out-of-province students are New Brunswickers, who crossed five miles over the border, but also from Ontario and other places with some historic ties. The average among all Canadian universities is that 80 per cent of
their undergraduate students come from within an hour's drive of the campus and 20 per cent come from outside.
When I went there seven years ago, 96 per cent of our students were from Cape Breton County and I don't think you would necessarily have found everyone agreeing that we were highly involved in economic development in the local community at that stage. Where the difference comes, I think, is in the philosophy and the mandate of the institution, as has been expressed. Those people who are coming from outside to us now are coming because they get a unique educational experience that immerses them in Cape Breton because they are doing work placements there, they are doing voluntary service placements there and so on. So they are coming for what they get from it being located in that place.
MR. FRASER: I graduated from St. F.X. I guess that is an integral part of our community and the outreach that they have done is basically through the co-op movement, enhancing that and the Coady Institute around the world. What brought UCCB into, I presume it is the board of trustees or the board of governors would have targeted economic development or survival in Cape Breton Island as its outreach mandate to serve the community better rather than just educating students to find work either in Cape Breton or somewhere else. When did that happen?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That is an interesting question because actually it happened at the beginning. It is right there in the legislation. That was the original model envisioned for the place from the beginning. Where, perhaps, it got off track during the 1980's, and it was a natural reason that it got off track, is there was little understanding of the model in government, less understanding and sympathy in the higher education community. So you had an institution that was poorly resourced, had no assets of its own, didn't own its own campus even, and they were consistently criticized by the other universities because they weren't like them. So the tendency, it is just like individuals, look at kids in a school yard, well, heck, look at adults, nobody wants to be seen as being that different if you can get acceptance by being like everybody else. So there was a kind of straying away from the original vision. But the original vision cost a lot of money and it has to be well endowed and UCCB didn't have that.
[2:00 p.m.]
What happened after the drift was simply bringing it back to the original vision. The original legislation had two of our board members appointed by the Cape Breton Development Corporation and that was back in the days when the appointment was not from the coal side, it was from the industrial development division. It was always seen as a model that would be involved in economic development. So it got off track for a little while for quite understandable reasons but now it has been very successful at doing what it was intended to do.
MR. FRASER: Do you find that the leadership that you and your university are trying to provide or are providing - I don't mean to belittle it at all - to the community and other groups in the area are attempting to do the same thing, is everybody going in the same direction or is everybody going in different directions thinking that something else may work better than something else, especially in a time of crisis like now?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Let me say, first, that I don't see us as some kind of shining knight leader, with all of the answers. We are one important partner in terms of finding the solutions. We don't know it all but we are quite willing to work with other people and we do have some sense and we can bring some knowledge to bear on what some reasonable courses of action might be.
It is difficult, I think, in any community to achieve what appears to be unanimity of opinion. I suspect even in this community, you wouldn't have to scratch too deeply to find different points of view about what will take Halifax to the next level of development. It is the same in Cape Breton, it is just that our differences get portrayed more widely in the media. It is also a fairly common kind of phenomena in communities that are short of resources. In fact, there is a whole academic literature written about it. The culture of poverty, when you don't have enough resources, the pie is small, you fight all that harder over every piece of it. So some of that is an artifact of the lack of resources and some of it is just natural kinds of disagreements among communities. But we have the capacities to sort that out. We don't have the capital capacity to address some of the problems in the way the thing needs to be addressed. We have only one private sector employer of significant size on the Island.
MR. FRASER: How long is it going to take to, I guess, remake the economy from what some people have tried to hold onto to the new economy that you have outlined in your remarks? There is obviously a transition period here. The younger people have left or are leaving or are successful in other places and how you either get those back or get the people coming up to stay and be entrepreneurs. How long is this going to take in your view?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That can be a bit variable. I have talked to and read about a lot of other jurisdictions that went through similar kinds of cycles. In most places it appears to be about a 20 year process. I would say that we are six or seven years into that process. So there are some discernible pieces of new economy, still fragile but there. What will lengthen that process is if there is not the appropriate investment to keep it on track -because in all of those places that have done that kind of turnaround, there has been significant ongoing public investment in key pieces of infrastructure - if that is not there, then the 20 years may never happen or it will be 30 or 40 years.
MR. FRASER: The programs that you offer, part of them are in the arts and sciences, the degree-granting status that you have, and the remainder are in the community college. To address the new economy, as you see it, will you change what you are teaching?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: We don't have to. If you have an opportunity, I would really commend to you the chance to look at the programs we do offer. We have already spent a lot of time combining those traditions into new kinds of programs. We offer quite a number of Bachelor of Technology degrees, which are full undergraduate degrees but in the technological disciplines. We offer a number of degrees that are composed of arts and science courses and technology courses. We have added about eight new degree programs in the last six or seven years and from time to time somebody at MPHEC would say, how can you do this, we know you don't have any money? They couldn't find anything wrong with the proposals so they felt they had to approve them, because it never occurred to them that a higher education institution would reallocate its resources within. Since we didn't have any resources, we had to reallocate what we had, so we have been pretty creative about doing that. That has resulted in a solid growth in our students.
MR. FRASER: How much more time, Mr. Chairman?
MR. CHAIRMAN: You started at 1:53 p.m., you have 20 minutes, so you have about 5 minutes left.
MR. FRASER: The tuition that you charge for a degree-seeking student versus what you have to charge to a community college or trade individual, is there a lot of difference?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: There isn't any, none whatsoever.
MR. FRASER: Does it cost you more to get someone out the door one way or the other if given the same length of time?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes, it can in certain programs. I have never been persuaded though of the argument that says that the tuition should necessarily fit what the anticipated labour market outcome is. Look, for example, at some of our highest input programs. We are nationally known for the quality of our engineering technology programs, particularly in the manufacturing area, a high-cost program. Currently, that business is booming, those kids get paid $27 an hour on work term, but four years ago you couldn't find a co-op placement anyplace, everybody was laid off. So you can't set a price on the presumption, and particularly in a situation where you have a province that no longer offers any bursaries, what you are talking about is putting a price on the debt they will incur and there is no guarantee once they get out into the labour market. Lawyers used to think it was a guarantee of a lifetime income to get a law degree, not anymore. So things change all the time.
One of the other things that has been interesting about this skills panel piece is that we did a study of all the government track records, federal and provincial in Canada, of predicting labour market changes over the past 20 or 30 years; they are consistent, they are 100 per cent
wrong. Nobody has the answers on what it is going to be like three years, five years, seven years from now.
MR. FRASER: When a laid-off miner - and I think Mr. Corbett had talked a little bit about that - comes to you with their $8,000, what kind of advice are you going to give them? Is it going to be based on what they want, is it going to be based on what your people feel would suit them or the market; what advice do you give these people?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Well, I think first you have to give them informed advice, which gives them the best possible information about what the labour market is currently. It gives them the best possible information about themselves in terms of their aptitudes, what experience they have and what that experience is worth in the open market. Beyond that, they have to make their own decisions. We never had a great deal of success, nor I think has any other educational institution, at forcing people into a program they don't want to be in. It doesn't work.
MR. FRASER: Do you feel that many of those who come to you like that when they are finished at UCCB, if that is where they indeed go, would have to leave the Island because they cannot wait for the 20 years, that inevitably they have to leave?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I do not think there is anything inevitable about it. Some of them, because their attitudes and perspectives will have changed in the process of getting educated and trained, may decide on their own that they want to try something someplace else. In other cases they might, for labour market reasons, have to go off-Island. But if the steelworker experience is any to judge by of those nearly 100 that went through UCCB, a lot of them are still on the Island working at other businesses, also running their own businesses.
MR. FRASER: I am going to change my focus just a little bit as we close this round. Someone here had asked about considering all of Cape Breton as part of the mix. If Port Hawkesbury, Point Tupper - the Strait area - continues to grow, we often in the western part of the province, in Antigonish, look at that as a big benefit to us. How do you see that as a benefit to industrial Cape Breton, or is it too far removed to benefit?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: No, not too far removed at all. There is a lot of crossover. There are people who live in Iona who come and work in Sydney and who go to work in Port Hawkesbury; there are people in Sydney who work in Port Hawkesbury. What is good for Port Hawkesbury is good for the whole Island; what is good for Ingonish is good for the whole Island.
MR. FRASER: But as the Strait area continues to grow, how do you see industrial Cape Breton benefiting a lot from that? People are certainly not going to travel from Sydney or North Sydney or New Waterford to work in the Strait area.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: They do now.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We will now move on to the next round, Mr. Fraser.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I guess the other thing with regard to our services that has been part of the nature of our discussions with the Strait school board and with the Nova Scotia Community College, is how can we offer the full spectrum of applied research and higher education services in that area?
MR. CHAIRMAN: This is a 15 minute round and we will need a few minutes at the end to discuss the tentative schedule. If it is all right, I would like to begin. I do not intend to yield the Chair to do that, unless somebody objects. I am not seeing any.
One of the things that was said earlier here - and I guess this is maybe more of a comment than a question - and something that has always stuck in my craw a little bit, is that any money that is spent in Cape Breton always mysteriously gets attributed to the debt, and any money that is spent in mainland Nova Scotia apparently comes out of revenue. I am not sure why it is that we are constantly trying to load and blame the Island of Cape Breton for the provincial debt, because clearly there is no correlation between the two.
You had said a little earlier about not making a decision based on history or on lost money, that it was gone. Would you agree with me that that would be the same in any industry?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes, I would, as a matter of fact.
MR. CHAIRMAN: So what you always do with an industry is look at it on the theory that you have put forward in this brief, which is to look to potential.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That is right. Economies change all the time and you have to keep reinvesting in them. That is Halifax's history; that is going to be our history.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Following through on that theory, what you would do is get the best advice possible about that industry and then make a decision on whether or not you were going to continue with it or expand it or make an investment in it. Is that fair?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: The hub and spoke decision of DREE is now, at least from a Cape Breton perspective, somewhat controversial in the sense that although we have seen the development of what we call the hub - what other people refer to as the metropol - what that
has done, in fact, has drawn a lot of resources out of Cape Breton. Is that a fair part of that analysis?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: There is no question that places that are doing well, or in growth-mode, are detractors to places that are not. It is important to remember the massive government investment in Halifax was in large part in response to the downturn in the economy here because of the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway; a tragedy not unlike the collapse of the coal industry or the steel industry. It was a good decision that government made to invest in that way.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Very early on in your presentation you talked about the need for venture capital and the need to make that accessible. There has been some debate over the difference between what we think of as traditional venture capital, which is where the venture capital suppliers or investors come forward and take a part of the business and sit on the board of directors and are looking for a return, recognizing that it is high risk, and seed money, which goes into an industry much before venture capital ever gets there.
Venture capital happens at a point where the thought has been crystallized and there is a marketable product and things are starting to move down the production line; seed money often goes in when there is just a thought and where people are looking for research and development. I am just wondering if the reason you talked about venture capital was because there is so much of that need there and whether you were distinguishing it from what I would consider to be early research and development and seed money?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: You make a useful distinction. There is certainly a role for the seed money piece. What I was specifically thinking of there was the example of a lot of the information technology industries on the Island, which are mostly home-grown, and their venture capital needs; they are past that first stage. Traditional venture capital isn't really interested until you are about $1.5 million, preferably up toward $5 million. What they need is $0.5 million, $300,000 or $800,000, so it is not worth a venture capitalist's time and investment in terms of all of that sitting on board stuff, and so on, for that kind of money.
There is a gap, there are some limited seed development programs which could be improved and if you get to the point where you need $5 million and you have the business case for it, there is somebody who is likely to be interested.
In between, there is a real gap, and that is where a lot of our new industries are, firmly placed in that gap. They have an established beginning track record, so it is not the same as, I have a good idea, I need to try it out. They are not at a scalable point where they are going to attract the big venture capitalist, unless there is some kind of differential advantage for that private venture capitalist and unless they can, for example, get a better capital gains deal on that small loan than on the bigger loan.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. [Maureen] MacDonald.
MS. MAUREEN MACDONALD: I would like to apologize for being late. I have just a very simple and straightforward question, and it is around the IT sector. My impression of the sector is that it tends to be very small in terms of the employment that is generated out of this sector. It is also my impression that the IT sector is the sector that most regions or areas that are underdeveloped are sort of banking on now for some economic advantage. So I guess given that this is a very competitive situation, that it doesn't have a lot of employment opportunity in some ways, I have some questions about why that would be seen as being the way to go, or a primary focus for development in Cape Breton. That is my first question.
Secondly, in terms of the development of that sector, if this was something that would really be helpful for Cape Breton, what are the competitive advantages that Cape Breton has over every other underdeveloped area that is developing similar kinds of strategies for development of this sector? I understand your points about good and talented people - that is a given and that is a feature - but that is not the whole picture. What are the other advantages?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Those are both very good questions. I am not sure I would agree, entirely, with your assessment on the employment possibilities. Looking at the experience of Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, those are small sectors. Ottawa, which is Canada's largest cluster, is still 20th on the North American scale of numbers of people involved, but there is a heck of a lot of employment in that sector in Ottawa. It really sustained them through the downturn and the federal government lay-offs. In fact, they superseded their previous economic performance as a region because of the growth in that particular area.
It is true that this industry, in Canada at least, is dominated by small companies, though not necessarily micro-sized companies. At this point, most of those in Cape Breton have 10 or 12 employees or fewer. A lot of software start-up companies have that. The trick is to get them to the 50 to 100 kind of capacity, or to the 200 capacity. Then, if things really work well, you might get a small software factory that employs 1,000 to 2,000 people which, in global terms, is still a small software factory. It doesn't take too many 100 employee businesses to make a heck of a big difference in Cape Breton. Even if we do not become the world capital of IT, there is sustainable pay-off and benefit to it.
What are the particular advantages that we offer? At the present time, because of the way in which the private and public sector post-secondary institutions have cooperated, you have a full range of training capacity in a relatively small area. There is more there than there would be, say, in North Bay, Ontario or other places of similar remoteness from a major metropol.
Secondly, the major advantage is wage scales. A software developer in Cape Breton, you can buy for $25,000 to $35,000 a year. In Ottawa, it will cost you $55,000 a year. That is a big differential, particularly if there are any other benefits associated with locating there, if you can get past the bandwidth cost differential on some of those sorts of things.
I certainly do not see us becoming Route 128 or that sort of thing. But when you think that it would only take 5 or 10 companies of 100 people to literally change that community, that is doable.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Corbett.
MR. CORBETT: Just one quick one. I was intrigued one time at a meeting at the university, that some of the people that teach there had put forward the proposal of making UCCB a tuition-free zone.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Academic freedom is a wonderful thing, isn't it?
MR. CORBETT: Give us your spin on it.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Philosophically?
MR. CORBETT: Yes.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Philosophically, I am there. A lot of other countries that do better on the world market than us still have free tuition for post-secondary education. I will tell you why it makes no sense to me.
I look at the demographic tables of Canada, not just Cape Breton. I have been looking at them a lot more over the last year. Most of the people who are going to be in the workplace 10 or 15 years from now are already there. Our population tree goes like that.
We have so few young people in this country compared to our competitor countries because our baby boom was so distended, relative to others. I think that is a serious issue, not only for emigration reasons but for diversity reasons, in terms of looking at how that cohort of young people is different.
For example, aboriginal people are currently somewhere between 1 per cent and 1.5 per cent of the total population of Canada, depending on whose definition you accept in terms of those kind of statistics. In the under 15 population, they are 10 per cent of the population of Canada. Well, I am sorry, our old systems and our old perspectives and outlooks don't work when you face diversity realities that have different kinds of challenges than we have faced before.
I was in Winnipeg last week and one of the people we were talking to was the head of the Manitoba Aerospace Human Resource Council, which has been a very successful industry sector council in Manitoba that really developed after - remember when Bombardier got the big federal government contract and Winnipeg was so upset about it - they kind of got their act together and their little industries and said, this isn't going to happen to us again, we are going to be better, smarter at how we do business and be so competitive and so on. So we were asking this gentleman, what are the big challenges you see in this sector over the next few years? He said, within five years, 50 per cent of the new entrants to the labour force in Manitoba are aboriginal. Our interest is in interesting aboriginal young people in working in the aerospace industry and interesting people with physical disabilities in working in the aerospace industry. That is very forward looking and thoughtful thinking.
As a country we have to do that. Now, why in a country that has no young people to speak of, we insist on differentially charging them at rates that cripple them with student debt, I do not understand. It doesn't make any sense to me. Purely apart from any philosophical feelings I might have about free tuition, it doesn't make any economic sense to me. I want those people to have their debts paid off and to be socking stuff away, paying taxes on high incomes to support me in my old age. I just don't understand it.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Archibald.
MR. ARCHIBALD: One of the things in your paper that I would take issue with, and I don't want a row with you, but you said that civil servants are suspicious and inclined to believe that Cape Bretoners are stupid or corrupt. I don't believe that. I would like to meet the professional civil servants in Nova Scotia who have said that. I have never heard a civil servant say that.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I have never heard a civil servant say that either. I have seen people treated as if that is how they believe.
MR. ARCHIBALD: Oh, they treat us that way in the Valley sometimes too, but I have never heard anybody come into a committee meeting and say that the attitude in the Valley is that civil servants think that we are stupid and corrupt.
I think there is a huge future for Cape Breton, but I think infrastructure is suffering not just in Cape Breton but it is particularly in Cape Breton, the roads, the harbour and the airport. Can you tell me how industrial Cape Breton is going to develop when it costs $500 to fly from here to Sydney?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Have you flown to Cape Breton recently? It costs you more than $600.
MR. ARCHIBALD: I can fly to Europe for less than that, if I give them two weeks notice. How are we going to overcome this problem of interprovincial transportation and international transportation? Who in the heck is going to go to Sydney from Boston and say, gee, I think I will start a business, I want to expand, I am going to go to Sydney. So he calls the airport and because it costs more to fly to Sydney, he might as well open a plant in London. How do you propose that we overcome the transportation problems with regard to the airport?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That is a very important problem that you have raised. I wish I had the answer. In a deregulated environment, I don't know if there is an answer, unless you have the high volume of activity that forces competition into the scene and currently we don't have that because there is not that level of business activity to justify the competition.
On the other hand, I look around and Saint John is not doing too badly, Fredericton is not doing too badly, Moncton is not doing too badly; St. John's is not doing too badly and they have the same problem. So that is a problem that, no question, all cities in Canada that are burdened with that differential regional airfare need to find some way to address. But judging from the experience of other cities in Atlantic Canada, I don't think it is the make-or- break piece for Sydney.
[2:30 p.m.]
MR. ARCHIBALD: Well, I think it is one of the difficulties we have and it is tied in with your infrastructure. We don't have it for communications in Sydney, we don't have the airport, the road to drive from here to there is not very good and it is not improving; in fact, it is worse now than it was 10 years ago.
One of the things that is important regarding the future, as you have suggested, is maybe with aquaculture for a lot of people. I am concerned about the Bras d'Or Lakes. What has been done lately to help clean up the Bras d'Or Lakes? There is a problem with sewage.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: There is a significant problem and there are a lot of efforts that are under way through the Bras d'Or Stewardship Society and some other initiatives that we are involved with to try to work more proactively with government in addressing this. We had an unusual circumstance some years ago where we had an Island-wide consultation about how the problems on the Bras d'Or might be handled and we ended up with an agreement, on how that might be handled, that was signed by 17 regional and stakeholder groups and five Indian bands. But I think it was a little too different and radical for Nova Scotia, so it hasn't gone anyplace. The problem, of course, is that you dip a bucket in the water of the Bras d'Or and whatever you take out, there are five agencies - federal, provincial and municipal - that have some jurisdiction over it, and the problem is with too many people having jurisdiction, it is the same as nobody having jurisdiction.
MR. ARCHIBALD: Is there a role for UCCB to take the leadership? Somebody has to take the leadership in solving the problem.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: We have tried to do that but ultimately it involves utilizing the tools that are available in the current Environment Act to do that. It is possible under Section 105 of the current Environment Act to establish a local agency that can deal effectively with the problems of the Bras d'Or. I think there is some reluctance, perhaps understandable, in various departments of government to utilize that section of the Act but I don't see too many other options for making it happen.
MR. ARCHIBALD: I don't know who is going to take the leadership to solve the problem, but somebody has to be leading. The lakes are pretty darn good now, but it is a lot easier to fix the problem before it arises than . . .
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I couldn't agree with you more. We have over the years put a significant ongoing number of resources into supporting efforts around the Bras d'Or and we will continue to. But it is going to take political will to do anything about the Bras d'Or and that means that the citizens of Cape Breton are going to have to make their voices loud enough to persuade whatever government of the day that wishes to do something about the problem. To date, I guess, those voices have not been loud enough.
MR. ARCHIBALD: Well, it is an awareness too. People have to be aware of the potential problem that exists, because most people, probably 90 per cent of Cape Bretoners haven't swum in the Bras d'Or for a long time and probably 90 per cent of them didn't go across on the boat, but it is the awareness that people have to realize, that there is a potential problem and then they get concerned about it. But right now, ask 90 per cent and they will say, what's the problem? Everything is fine.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: There has been an increase in the last two or three years of some efforts of public education. But I guess because of resource limitations, those haven't been as strong as they might have been. There have been some public meetings, Mr. [Charles] MacDonald will be aware of, around the lakes to try to inform people. There have been information pieces in the various newspapers around the Island. There was a flyer that was distributed to all household drops on the Island about two or three years ago, all around the lakes. I am not disagreeing with you at all, I am very strongly in agreement with the points that you are making and would certainly welcome any advice with regard to how to further that up on the agenda of whatever government may have the power to help address the issue.
MR. ARCHIBALD: We can move along to something else. A little while ago we had another organization represented here and one of the problems they said they could foresee with the development in the future of Cape Breton, was the attitude of unions and unions' inability to adapt to a new economy. Are you seeing any of that difficulty as well?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I don't know that I would ascribe it particularly to unions. I have a lot of respect for the labour movement; they have been responsible for a lot of positive changes in Canada over its history, as well as some things that people may not see as being as positive. I think that in some people there is a narrowness of vision about what the future can hold and about what the resources are to begin addressing that future. I think we have to encourage more people to come forward who share a belief in the potential of the future.
MR. ARCHIBALD: The future of Cape Breton, and industrial Cape Breton particularly, rests to a great extent with UCCB. I have been there three or four times in the last few years and I am constantly amazed at some of the innovations and some of the ways that things are done. I have met a lot of the students and they are up to date.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: They are terrific students.
MR. ARCHIBALD: They want to make things happen and they want to make it go. How far can UCCB go, really, in leading the revitalization of an economy in Cape Breton?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Realistically, not much further than we have gone. There are things that prevent us from going the next step. Currently, all that we have done with regard to technical assistance and applied research, which is a lot, we do without any relief from teaching load. We have no capacity to relieve somebody from teaching one class so they have more time to do this stuff. So people have been doing it over and above in a way that does not happen at other institutions because they are differently resourced.
We are now at the point, as well, where we simply do not have the labs and the facilities to go the next step. We desperately need those that are in that proposal to the CFI, because with all the best will in the world, we cannot currently provide support to some of those industries. They simply require certain kinds of labs and certain kinds of people in them to do that.
MR. ARCHIBALD: One of the things that is interesting about St. F.X. - I don't know if it has anything to do with St. F.X. - but certainly there are more young people in Antigonish County going to university than any other region of the province, and I suspect it is probably because of this outreach and the extension methods that St. F.X. offers. Do you know the student population in Cape Breton, the percentage of youngsters who are going on to further their education beyond high school?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: It is about 80 per cent.
MR. ARCHIBALD: About 80 per cent are going. That is better than Antigonish.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: One thing that young people in Cape Breton do understand is, whether they leave or they stay, they have no place to go without education.
MR. ARCHIBALD: Do you know the drop-out rate in schools?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I do not know the current drop-out rates in terms of the high schools, no. Somebody at our place would, I just do not happen to have the figure at hand. I know we pick up an awful lot of people who come back in as mature entrants.
MR. ARCHIBALD: After they saw the light.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. [Charles] MacDonald.
MR. CHARLES MACDONALD: I would like to go back for a second where we were talking about the stakeholders group that we had on the Island and they came forward with a fairly extensive list of infrastructure and programs that we should get involved in. I guess what you are saying is that in these things we should have investment before economic development will be attracted to it. What do you see as the essential or critical points that should come in, in the immediate future?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: The stakeholders report, I think, is a very good one and certainly anything that I have said in my representation would be further commentary and complementary to that. I think when you get down to rank ordering, which are the most important first, there is no question that the bandwidth stuff is. There is no question that the infrastructure to support some of those specific industries are really key. The third big factor, I would say, is the attitude change on both sides of the causeway. We have to believe this can happen and believe in ourselves and our capacity to create our own future.
MR. CHARLES MACDONALD: Keep the cup half full.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes.
MR. CHARLES MACDONALD: That's all.
MR. FRASER: I would like to go back to funding of UCCB. The Nova Scotia Council on Higher Education, I guess, increased funding last year, or the fiscal year that we just finished, and on into the future. What effect does that have on you and what is it worth in dollars to UCCB?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: It was worth about $1 million a year.
MR. FRASER: Do you receive any other special funding for your community college program?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: The only thing we have is this short-term funding for the trades.
MR. FRASER: Do you mean short term as in year to year?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Short term as in three years.
MR. FRASER: Do you have requests in for more funding?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Without question. (Laughter)
MR. FRASER: If you got it, what would you do with it?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: First of all, I would pay some of the basics. If you look at the long-term survivability, I would get some of that capital reinvestment, particularly in teaching equipment and so on; that is very important. There are some key areas where I would do a bit of additional faculty hiring, where they happen to be kind of expensive resources because they are a little bit scarce in the market place. I would do what I could in the absence of some CFI money to try to find something where we could convert and make a lab. So we wouldn't have any problem spending it; we have the plan and we have the prioritized list.
MR. FRASER: The university is relatively new; I expect that your endowments from your alumni who have gone on to become wealthy and generous are not as lucrative as some of the other universities.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: That is true.
MR. FRASER: Is it growing?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: We have an excellent participation rate by our alumni in giving to us. It is one of those areas where we always rank highly in that much-maligned annual Maclean's report. A heavy number of our alumni give, but since the biggest proportion of our graduates have been since 1990, the average age is about 32, so I sometimes tease my fellow presidents that they have to have the penguin suit for the alumni receptions and our group still meets in bars. So the average gift is only about $50 to $75; at 32, that would have been mine too.
MR. FRASER: You mentioned before about tuition and whether, I guess, you believe there should be any tuition or not. Three of my youngsters are in university now . . .
MR. CHAIRMAN: You believe there shouldn't. (Laughter)
MR. FRASER: Of course, occasionally they ask their MLA why they have to pay tuition, and I keep telling them that it is the best investment they will ever make. Whether they buy cars, homes, mutual funds, or whatever, there will never be a better investment because it will return more to them than any other investment they will make and they are doing it when they are young and hopefully with lots of opportunities to pay it back; it will be a small portion of what they borrow over their career.
The facilities that you have there and the buildings that we see when we go by are mostly modern because, in fact, you are a pretty new university. When students go to UCCB and they rent outside, do we see the same high rents as we do, say, in Wolfville or in Antigonish, for students?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Yes, one of the things on our priority list is more housing.
MR. FRASER: You feel that you would be better off providing housing on campus or close to campus, yourselves, owned by the university?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I think so. We have investigated a number of possibilities, including the potential for public-private partnership. What we have found is not unlike what occurs in many other kinds of public-private partnerships which is, the private partner sees it as an excellent opportunity to make a higher rate of return than they ordinarily would in the market. If there is that kind of return in it, why would I give it to them? The university could use that return.
MR. FRASER: I am jumping all over the board here. The Nova Scotia Council on Higher Education, when they look at funding, obviously, you are probably one of those, or some people from your university are, on this committee who did the research and allocated funding to your university, and all others, in Nova Scotia, were you satisfied with the decisions they would have made?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: No.
MR. FRASER: Were any of the universities?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Oh, there is a certain level at which you would expect some generic dissatisfaction of - what you might have a fantasy life about. We would have two principal complaints. One would be that our trades programs and related programs do not receive base funding, whereas they do at the community college. We don't understand why a mandated program that gets support at one place does not get support at another place. The second issue that we have is around the cost of being at a distance.
There was a lot of discussion about that during the formula process but whenever they kept running the numbers to end up with the kind of numbers that they felt they could live with at the end, each iteration - the amount for being at a distance - got lower and lower.
We documented and we invited the council to audit what our costs were over and above the costs of a university in Halifax, in terms of what we pay extra for telecommunications, for transportation, for surtaxes on things like fuel bills, all that stuff. We invited them to send in a forensic accountant to audit the figures. It costs us $3 million a year to be located in Sydney, that it would not cost us if we were in Halifax. They were prepared to ante up about $500,000 or $600,000. That does not level the playing field.
MR. FRASER: Do you have any problem recruiting facility and competing with other universities for the same people, the same qualifications?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: No, not in those areas where there is reasonable supply. Every university has trouble competing in certain disciplines. I would say that the pool for us has improved as we have gotten clearer about what kind of institution we are and what particular skills we want.
Certainly, a number of people - particularly young faculty, we are finding - are very attracted by an institution that values teaching and applied research, and offers them a chance to be involved with the community, just as there will, of course, be others who would prefer to work at a research-intensive institution.
MR. FRASER: What time is my time up?
MR. CHAIRMAN: We wanted to have the last five minutes.
MR. FRASER: Okay. I have got just another question or two. If you were the President and Vice-Chancellor of a mainland university, for instance, say, Saint Mary's or Acadia - we will go to one of those - would you be able to see UCCB as being unique?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: In a sense you used the wrong example. Saint Mary's probably sees more of our value in partnership than almost any other university in the province because they, as well, among the more traditional universities, have tended to be oriented more closely to the labour market, in the kinds of terms that that is usually defined.
I would say that there is a fair amount of increasing mutual respect for one another. What that does not mean is an absence of competition for scarce resources, nor does it mean, necessarily - you know, when governments sometimes talk about cooperation and partnership among universities, that makes a lot of sense in principle but it may not make as much sense within your own jurisdiction. For example, Dr. Riley and I have sat down and said, we really want to do something together. Let's look at where there might be something that is
complementary. The two institutions have evolved programmatically in such different ways. There really are not that many opportunities.
One of the advantages that Nova Scotia has - and I appreciate the government may not always see it as an advantage - is that our university sector is more highly differentiated, more specialized than in many other provinces. We do an awful lot in partnership. Some of that is with Nova Scotia institutions but, increasingly, that is with institutions in other jurisdictions and internationally because that is where the leverage power of the relationship is.
Nobody has enough resources these days to partner just for the sake of looking like you are a partner. It has got to bring some value to what you do. It has to leverage your impact in the educational field in strengthening your institution. Nova Scotia is a small market. All of us have to look at other markets and other partners, just as any business would.
I would not interpret the fact that Nova Scotia universities do not have a terrific history of cooperating with one another as being perversity. Not that we cannot be perverse with one another from time to time but there are some sound reasons as well for seeking partners in other places.
MR. FRASER: When you go out to recruit for next year's recruits, how far do you go; all across the country, down the States, everywhere?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Oh, yes. New England, certainly as far as Ontario. Increasingly, like many other places, we recruit on the Internet as well and we are very actively involved in international recruiting.
MR. FRASER: So what can you say you offer that others do not, when you are competing?
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Generically, whatever program you choose, you get a very unique experience in terms of the combination of work and study, and opportunity for community involvement, regardless of what program.
As well, we do offer some programs that simply are not available in the same way, any place else. For example, some of our Bachelor of Technology programs - and those have been well recognized by jurisdictions outside Nova Scotia - our BTech environmental students, for example, are accepted directly into the Master of Environmental Engineering Program at Waterloo, which is the best program in the country.
MR. FRASER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you. Well, just in a closing remark, I wanted to thank you for, among other things, very succinctly in an almost inadvertent way, summing up one side of the philosophical objections to P3. (Laughter)
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: I didn't intend to do that. (Laughter)
MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much for coming today. Certainly, on behalf of all the committee members, it was a very well presented brief. It will certainly give us much to ponder over the next few weeks as we complete this round of hearings. Thank you.
DR. JACQUELYN THAYER SCOTT: Thank you for the opportunity.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Just, very quickly, you will notice on your schedules that at this point, the next meeting date is tentatively scheduled for May 11th. As of this moment, the only person who is confirmed for that date is Gordon MacDonald.
I was wondering whether it would be worthwhile - Mr. Drake's presentation, we have seen almost in its entirety on tape but it seems to me that if we are going to talk about, (Interruption). I know he made individual presentations to the individual caucuses but I think it would be difficult to imagine having a discussion on the impact of Devco without inviting the president of the union most directly affected in to comment as well. I was going to suggest that since we only have one confirmed person for that date, that we could, perhaps, invite him along at that time.
MR. ARCHIBALD: Who is G. MacDonald? I forget.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Guysborough RDA.
MR. CHARLES MACDONALD: Will we not tend to end up with two different scenarios? Gordon is there on an economic development side.
MR. CHAIRMAN: We could do the first hour with Mr. [Gordon] MacDonald and then do the second hour with . . .
MR. ARCHIBALD: Do you think an hour is enough for Guysborough? You know it is rural Nova Scotia. You are more of an urban person.
MR. CHAIRMAN: Please.
MR. ARCHIBALD: An hour?
MR. CHAIRMAN: I am willing to take your direction. I am just trying to get as many of the witnesses before the committee as possible. That was my suggestion. There are other people who were on the witness list if you wanted somebody else.
MR. ARCHIBALD: That would be fine with me.
MR. FRASER: Mr. Chairman, I am not opposed to having Mr. Drake in. I think we have seen his tape and we have had him at caucus. I think his opinion would be perhaps quite different from the one we have heard today because his focus is on maintaining the mining sector over the next period of time where her opinion and perhaps some others would be perhaps looking at how the future can be different. I am not sure, we want to hear every side of the future before we make recommendations and prepare our report but I think we know what Mr. Drake's feeling is on the development or the future of the mines. Aren't we looking for more than that?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Well, at some point in time you do have to hear from the representatives of the working people who are most affected by the closure. The other possibility, if you wanted to be more consistent with the economic development theme, would be somebody from New Dawn, which is engaged in economic development.
MR. CHARLES MACDONALD: Father Greg.
MRS. DARLENE HENRY (Legislative Committee Clerk): Father Greg is on his way to Spain and he is going to be gone for a month.
MR. CHAIRMAN: He is going to be gone for a month.
MR. FRASER: What about Rankin MacSween with New Dawn?
MR. CHAIRMAN: Would that make more sense, people, if we had another economic development person? So we will agree to approach and look for a representative from New Dawn, then? Okay, seeing agreement, then I will adjourn the meeting until May 11th.
[The committee adjourned at 2:57 p.m.]