Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee today.
I would like to start by saying that the Quebec Employers' Council welcomes efforts by the federal government to balance the budget by tightly controlling public spending, while preserving transfers to the provinces.
The council invites the federal government to make balanced and strategic use of future budget surpluses by, first of all, reducing the corporate and personal tax burden and, second of all, investing a significant portion in government programs that exert structural leverage on productivity, innovation, marketing, reduction of the environmental footprint and, of course, infrastructure. I will come back to that.
With respect to transfers, we underscore the particular case of health transfers. The council feels that tying health transfers to growth of GDP does not reflect the needs of an aging population. Furthermore, an in-depth review of the Canada Health Act should be undertaken.
On the revenue side, we would like to point out the online sales problem, which is not only depriving the federal and provincial governments of tax receipts, but also doing harm to the competitiveness of Canadian companies.
Moreover, skills training is essential in order to better match labour market requirements and improve workforce productivity. In this connection, the council sees the introduction of an employment insurance contributions credit for training expenses, especially for formal training when new investments are set up, as another way for the employment insurance program to help maintain and create quality jobs.
We would like to stress that it is not necessary, in our view, to enhance the Quebec and Canada pension plans because the need is not widespread.
Another point I would like to make regarding labour is that the recent changes to the temporary foreign workers program, despite their laudable objectives, make the hiring process much more complicated and expensive.