Finance committee  We would have to test it with our membership, but knowing what we know, they do like co-op programs. They find them very useful. The same is true for internships, and they would love to be able to attract more of them. They often feel though that it's hard for a small business to attract them because they tend to be taken up by the big guys and the governments and so forth.

Finance committee  I would agree that Stats Canada is one of the bigger red tape burdens that small businesses have to face given that they have a requirement to fill out often a 20 to 30 page survey. I think there are a lot of other ways that data can be collected. It can be shared more often between government departments, because sometimes they're being asked the same questions multiple times.

Finance committee  In our last what we call “Help Wanted” report, which we do on a quarterly basis, we did compare the average increase in wages, because it's part of a monthly thing that we do as part of the “Business Barometer”, where we ask about the average wage and price increases they are foreseeing for their companies for the next three months, and we compare those with the companies that said they had job vacancies.

Finance committee  I absolutely would agree.

Finance committee  I would say that we're always very cautious of the cap approach because we've seen some of the outcomes of that in other countries as well, where we see other prices going up, whether it be bank service fees or bank charges, so we have to be very cautious about that if we go that route.

Finance committee  Not at all. We don't believe that's going to be the case. If anything, you're going to hear of more folks looking at increasing compensation, investing more in training, the types of things that we specifically asked our membership about in a survey. You have fresh data in front of you that shows that their plans with that extra money is to invest it back into their business and back into their employees.

Finance committee  As I mentioned in my remarks, we have done extensive surveying of this over the last couple of years to understand the impacts, and small business owners have told us in no uncertain terms that it would cause them to freeze or decrease salaries, and reduce investments in their business.

Finance committee  We have a lot of fears about what this will mean for Ontario. It will make it a lot less competitive for businesses in Ontario to compete and to attract folks and investment, and so we are fighting hard to try to lessen that blow for our membership in Ontario. We have something called the "axe the Ontario pension tax” campaign going on right now in Ontario to try to make sure that we fight back against it.

Finance committee  Yes. It would be great to understand a lot better where the skill gaps are and what we need to do to invest in them, and it would definitely be helpful to have more information available to us.

Finance committee  It's very important. It's one of the things we've been pushing for probably for decades, because the last thing you want to do during a downturn in the economy is to start raising EI rates. The stability that we see coming over the seven-year horizon, starting in 2017, and maybe sooner if we can get there, is going to be extremely important in bringing that stability to small business owners when times get more difficult.

Finance committee  No, I'm not aware of any review except for groups like us trying to put forward—

Finance committee  It's a voluntary code of conduct. Yes, and it at least started to bring some fairness into the system, for example, by allowing merchants to get out of contracts when they change rates, which was not really allowed previous to this, but obviously we need more. We see the rates continue to go up, and we'd like to see more movement by the industry to recognize that this is time to pull back a little bit on increasing rates, going forward.

Finance committee  Well, I think it's something small businesses have been facing now for about seven to eight years. With the introduction of premium cards into the market back in 2008, we suddenly saw pretty significant increases in the merchant fees being collected by small business merchants, as well as larger merchants.

Finance committee  No. That's not an option. They have to honour all cards regardless of the type of card they accept, even if they can recognize which card is actually a higher rate or a lower rate. That's a problem in and of itself; it's often difficult. What you may think is a rewards card is actually sometimes a lower merchant rate card.

Finance committee  Well, it's because there's such a market dominance by these two industry players, and in fact we need to have some oversight of those industry players. We felt the code of conduct was a great first step, and it helped to sort of bring them into the—