Last night saw the City of Terrace’s Council hold their Bi-Weekly Meeting and one of the more highlighted subjects at said meeting was a call to action document that was presented by Terrace’s Lands and Economic Development Manager, Michael Pucci.
The recommendation was for Council to commit their support to the Voices of Northern BC - Call to Action document that is looking to protect the employment status of community members who are working under visas and by proxy, protect local businesses from being closed down due to a lack of employees that might stem from Canada’s recent immigration cuts.
This recommendation led to varying statements from Councillors like Sarah Zimmerman, Brian Downie, Mayor Sean Bujtas and James Cordeiro
“Y’know, I would also argue that the initial Federal Policy was equally, kinda came out of the blue in terms of the impact it would have on these caps and certainly as usual the Northwestern part of our Province was not considered in this” - Sarah Zimmerman
“There’s two aspects I’d like to highlight, one is the financial side, both the college and the school district benefit and indirectly we benefit as residents from increased revenues into the school system, but secondly, foreign students coming in enable courses to be developed and put on” - Brian Downie
“Yeah I think this is important to support this, I do think though that there really needs to be a northern flavour to this and I don’t know how we can get to that and maybe that’s something we pursue in the future cause I agree with Councillor Zimmerman, the voices of the Northern BC and other Provinces is not really heard at that Federal level but in saying that, we are known at that level, we are the gateway to the Golden Triangle, LNG Canada, the largest private sector investment in Canadian History is 40 minutes away from us, Port of Prince Rupert, the 3rd largest port in all of Canada is just down the road from us, we’ve got Cedar LNG, we’ve got Ksi Lisims, we’re known and they have to understand that the situation could be catastrophic in our area if immigration isn’t allowed to help with working” - Sean Bujtas
“Now I do have to say as a disclaimer right up front, one of the things I’m gonna mention, it’s my opinion, it’s not the opinion of my employer, it’s information that’s publicly available, there’s no insider information from my employer so I just wanna make that abundantly clear that I’m not representing them, as I said, my concern is that this doesn’t look at all the knock on effects, it’s looking very specifically at one part of the labour market and there’s a lot of consequences, or at least potential consequences” - James Cordeiro
Ultimately, even with Councillor Cordeiro’s concerns about Housing and Healthcare potentially not being available to people coming to the Northwest to work, be they from outside of Canada or somewhere else inside of Canada, in addition to the possibility of wage stagnation resulting from the move, the motion ended up getting passed by a majority vote.