International Trade committee  Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to be here today. As mentioned, my name is Corinne Pohlmann. I'm the senior vice-president of national affairs for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, and I'm pleased to be here to share CFIB's perspective on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  We believe that there should be two rates, and a lower rate for smaller companies, simply because the cost of doing business as a smaller company is generally higher per capita than it is to do business as a larger company. It allows smaller business to retain more of their income and actually invest it in those areas that are of higher cost to them.

Finance committee  Yes. When you're first starting out in a business, CRA wants you to build a bit of a history with them, and so they require you to actually remit anything that business has to take from their employees and remit to the CRA, so payroll taxes, income taxes, all the rest of it. They have to do it on a much more frequent basis in their first year in order to build a history with CRA.

Finance committee  Its primary purpose from a small business perspective is as a retirement savings vehicle. When we ask our membership about what they're doing to save for retirement, by far and away, the proceeds from the sale of their business and the lifetime capital gains exemption is how they're going to finance their retirement.

Finance committee  I can't say they've ever asked for it, no.

Finance committee  That's correct, yes.

Finance committee  It's extremely important. As I showed you, today's business barometer continues to show that at least it's not getting worse. Things are starting to improve slightly, but they aren't necessarily improving as quickly as we'd like, and with confidence comes growth, I believe. By putting in measures, as I said, the small business tax rate is a big one.

Finance committee  Across Canada, we have 109,000 members.

Finance committee  We've estimated about 1.25 million are working for our members.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Certainly, we follow closely what's.... The shortage of skilled labour is very important. It has continued to grow despite the fact the economy has cooled somewhat. It's one of the factors we look at in our “Business Barometer”. In this month it's probably the second highest issue that's causing business constraints at the moment, in that they have a lack of skilled labour and trouble finding the people they need.

Finance committee  Well, no. I think it's been going on since the oil prices dropped. We've seen that the confidence in Alberta has been dipping for the last three or four months. It has not necessarily improved; it continues to be fairly low. We've started to see a little bit of improvement in Saskatchewan where there was also as big a dip, but this confidence level is very varied across the country.

Finance committee  Yes. This is extremely important, as we've talked about. The second highest priority of small business in Canada is to find ways to reduce the paper burden. In particular, CRA and Minister Findlay have done an excellent job in trying to at least start moving the needle a little bit, because CRA really has the biggest impact on small companies in Canada.