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Published: November 27, 2008 1:00 PM‘Help workers, not companies’
The federal government shouldn’t offer financial assistance to individual companies or industries such as vehicle or aircraft makers to help them through the economic downturn, Premier Gordon Campbell says.
“I don’t think Canada should be bailing out any individual corporation,” Campbell said after returning from a trip to Toronto and Ottawa this week. “If you’re a forest worker in British Columbia, it’s pretty hard to justify bailing out one of the big three American car-makers.”
Campbell said he conveyed that message directly to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose recent throne speech indicated further assistance was being considered for auto and aerospace industries centred in Ontario and Quebec.
“We have to do what we can for workers,” Campbell said. “That means providing training opportunities perhaps, it might provide them with bridges to retirement if they’re in that kind of a situation.”
Campbell noted that when the Harper government created a fund last year for rural and resource-based communities, B.C. directed its $129 million share entirely to forest industry communities.
Campbell’s economic recovery plan released in October included a 50 per cent rebate on school taxes paid by industrial plants. While it was designed to assist mills in lowering their fixed costs, the rebate is available to all heavy and light industrial plants in the province.
