Supporting resource workers
A BC Liberal Government will continue to help forest workers and their families through these challenging economic times.
We will provide an additional $30 million in new funding to expand and supplement the $129-million federally funded Community Development Trust we launched last year. That Trust is delivering new transitional and pension bridging support for older workers, new tuition assistance to help forest workers upgrade or diversify their skills, and new job opportunities to keep people working.
Across British Columbia, we have given all families facing financial hardship, including those in hard hit resource industries, the option of deferring their property taxes in each of the next two years, for as long as they own their home. That will save many families thousands of dollars in avoided property tax, now when they need that money the most. We worked with other provinces to convince the federal government to extend Employment Insurance benefits.
A BC Liberal government will do more. Rather than having many laid-off workers in forestry and in other sectors exhaust their E.I. benefits, a BC Liberal Government will propose a new national Extended Employment Insurance Program. Working with other provinces and the federal government, it would aim at stopping the spiral into dependency that comes when workers exhaust their E.I. benefits and are forced to resort to Income Assistance programs.
In the new Extended Employment Insurance program provincial governments would direct the dollars that would normally be used for income assistance into employment insurance if the federal government would agree to top up those payments up to regular E.I. benefits for up to an additional year. This would help keep workers from entering into a downward spiral that comes with disposing of assets and other major moves that create real challenges.
We expect Canada and BC to come out of this downturn earlier than many other places and this plan would build a secure bridge to those workers’ futures.
