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All federal ministers of direct relevance to the Canadian aviation and aerospace sector have been retained in their portfolios by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose new cabinet was unveiled Nov. 20 at Government House in Ottawa.
Harjit Sajjan and Marc Garneau were respectively reconfirmed in the National Defence and Transport portfolios respectively, while Navdeep Bains is back in the government’s core industrial support portfolio.
However, Bains’ department has been rebadged slightly, possibly to give it more of an industry focus. It now is Innovation, Science and Industry as opposed to Innovation, Science and Economic Development. Responsibility for economic development has been added to the Official Languages duties of Melanie Joly, an MP from Montreal, the base for many major Canadian aerospace companies.
Smaller companies come under the umbrella of Mary Ng, a former Ontario bureaucrat and Ryerson University employee first elected to the House of Commons in a 2017 by-election. She remains minister for Small Business and Export Promotion.
Two other portfolios of interest to aerospace and aviation also are affected by the shuffle. Quebec MP François-Philippe Champagne, who speaks Italian as well as English and French, has been moved from the Infrastructure and Communities portfolio to Foreign Affairs. He replaces Toronto MP Chrystia Freeland, another 2015 newcomer to Parliament who has been named deputy prime minister and minister of Intergovernmental Affairs.
Then there’s the business aviation community’s particular interest in the Canada Revenue Agency, which can affect capital and operational costs. It remains in the hands of Quebec MP Diane Lebouthillier.
One of the few new faces in cabinet, as minister of Public Services and Procurement, the government’s purchasing arm, is that of rookie MP Anita Anand, a respected University of Toronto law professor who’s anything but a rookie in her profession. She succeeded Vancouver-area MP Carla Qualtrough, who was first elected in 2015 and is now minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, another portfolio of interest to the aerospace sector.
Anand, now on leave from the faculty, where she held the J.R. Kimber Chair in Investor Protection and Corporate Governance, was associate dean from 2007-2009 and since 2010, served as the academic director of the Centre for the Legal Profession and its Program on Ethics in Law and Business. Earlier this year, the Nova Scotia native was recognized by the Royal Society of Canada for what are described as “outstanding contributions in governance” relating to private and public organizations.
Even before the Oct. 21 general election reduced Trudeau’s 2015 Liberal majority to a parliamentary minority which needs the support of the smaller parties, mainly the New Democrats, to remain in power, the industry was trying to get a grip on how it would be treated after the election and cabinet reorganization.
The Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (AIAC), which represents the manufacturing and other segments, wrote to all political parties about their positions on the industry’s future. There was no response from the Green Party but the other major parties were only too happy to indicate their priorities for an industry which contributes $25.5 billion annually to the economy and provides nearly 215,000 jobs.
Those two numbers were right at the top of the AIAC’s agenda at its 2019 Summit, held last week in Ottawa, where former Deputy Prime Minister Jean Charest’s seminal Vision 2025 report was a hot topic as the industry tries to recover from slipping export sales.
The AIAC is pressing its membership to mount a concerted lobby on the new government to revive the industry which Charest told Skies is too often taken for granted.
“The industry’s doing fairly well and we a have skills shortage, but . . . we are losing ground,” he reiterated in an exclusive interview. “It’s happening gradually and we are concerned about that and our membership is saying ‘let’s not allow this to happen, make sure that we renew that partnership with the government, which is what 2025 is about.
“Let’s do our own homework first, which we have done, and avoid losing ground for the wrong reasons. We do expect more competition; our traditional competitors are more aggressive but there’s new entrants, so it’s going to be a different world from the one we had before.”
Asked whether the government – unlike most if not all of its allies – is concerned or even afraid of being seen in an alliance with what postwar U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex”, Charest said he hoped that isn’t the case, “especially with the defence requirements we have, with the opening of the North.
“The challenge for the government will be to put its defence procurement commitments in the context . . . of the different threats that we have. If they do that, the way we’re trying to frame the discussion about the aerospace industry, there’ll be more public support than they had before on doing government procurement on defence.”
The AIAC Summit strongly endorsed a proposal that the new government include a ministry which could help to address the industry’s long-standing and mounting challenge of addressing labour shortages. Charest stressed that the AIAC was not suggesting that the federal government intrude on education, which is a provincial jurisdiction, but essentially as a facilitator.
The AIAC took Qualtrough’s appointment as proof that Charest’s Vision 2025 report clearly had an “impact” on Trudeau’s administration because Qualtrough had been “given a mandate to focus on workforce development.”
In a statement released after the cabinet’s unveiling, Jim Quick,. president and CEO of the AIAC said, “We are pleased to see Minister Qualtrough in a new portfolio dedicated to Workforce Development. Minister Qualtrough knows and understands our industry. Working together we can address the impending labour crunch – bringing together government, opposition parties, industry and workers to encourage, build and maintain the skilled work force that will be required to replace those set to retire.
“We are ready to work constructively with this government and minority parliament using our Vision 2025 report as the roadmap moving forward. The aerospace industry is calling on this new government to redouble efforts and implement the six key recommendations so Canada can continue to compete. If they don’t, jobs will be at risk and our global aerospace position will be in jeopardy.”
