Prime Minister Andrew Holness says the relationship between Canada and CARICOM countries can be strengthened, especially in the areas of development, transportation, human resource and training.

“Canada, without question, is a very important trading partner for the region and a very important development partner from services including tourism to energy, agriculture, there is a strong trading and investment relationship between Canada and the CARICOM region. But, I think we can all agree that the relationship can be mutually strengthened and there is much more to leverage than we are presently doing,” Holness said.

Holness was addressing the first Canada-CARICOM summit held in Ottawa, Canada on Thursday, October 19.

“There are some inhibiting factors which I think this summit and our further discussions can help to facilitate greater leverage of the opportunities that do exist. One of the constraints would be the need of greater development of our logistics, specifically our transportation and think that’s an area of development attention and investment interests that we can discuss further within this forum,” he added.

The Jamaican prime minister said that as economies develop and move towards services and technological innovation, greater investment will be needed in human resources, focusing on STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] areas and innovation.

Highlighting the issue of migration, Holness said: “As our labour force change and the demand for new services emerge, we also seek that managing our respective labour forces as something we have to pay attention to. Migration from the CARICOM to Canada is often seen as a beneficial thing but as our economies grown and expand we, too, need these resources that are migrating and so I think there is opportunity for deeper collaboration on how we train and how that is financed and how that is managed so that the need for workforce in Canada, versus the need for workforce in our respective regions can be strategically managed and curated so that there is no fall out.”