THE Guadalcanal Provincial Premier, Hon. Francis Sade has clarified the GP and Canadian International Training (CITREC) issue in his opening speech on Monday this week.
This was in relation to the 1,300 queries that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and External Trade (MFAET) received after a Guadalcanal family got their Canadian permanent residency statuses two weeks ago.
According to Premier Sade, his Executive Government temporarily suspended the CITREC program since early 2020 because it was expensive and lacks a proper regulation policy to make it self-sustainable.
It is reported that CITREC program had cost the Guadalcanal Provincial Government (GPG) of almost $9 million over the course of six years to freely facilitate the educational and training ‘services’ for more than 200 trainees.
However, only less than 50 trainees were eligible for the CITREC program since 2016. The rest of the people who trained under the program were eligible based on CITREC’s criteria.
Therefore, Premier Sade states “In terms of simple economics, the CITREC program is quite expensive so we temporarily suspended it due to our strict debt servicing of $30 million when we took office in 2019”.
Premier Sade also highlights that there is proper regulation policy for CITREC program since its establishment in 2014. This, he argued, made the CITREC program unsustainable in terms of cost-benefit analysis and the question remains on how GPG can benefit from this costly agreement?
“Because GPG spends more money on this, it only make sense if it also receives some returns out of it. Thus, the policy could be in a form of loan, where our people under the CITREC program are obliged to repay GPG later on” he explained.
Premier Sade then concludes, “Nevertheless, I have to acknowledge the successive Executive for the CITREC program. It is a great program that gives our people the opportunities that they can’t find anywhere in our country and also increase our national remittances. We too want to see our people succeed through the CITREC program. Thus, we hope to reopen it soon once a proper regulation policy is in place”.
Source: GP Media
