Finance committee  One of the things we agree on here is that this is one step in the right direction. Lots more could be done, and there's a whole other policy debate about the purpose of the employment insurance fund. I think some of the other witnesses have spoken to that. There's a whole variet

Finance committee  I agree. It's important for everyone that the process be transparent. In spite of what Mr. Jackson said, I think it would be important for the board to have the capability to conduct its own analyses in a transparent manner. We all hope to be consulted. Transparency is very impor

Finance committee  If I may, I think it provides some discretion to enable us to react to labour market conditions, but I agree with my colleagues here that Canada should be trying to attract more people. On the other hand, I also agree with you that as we bring people into the country, we do need

Finance committee  —of public policy over the past years, that we're not doing a good enough job. If you look at the income results for immigrants and what's happened over the past 10 or 20 years, we're seeing those results deteriorate rather than improve. So yes, there are issues that need to be

Finance committee  You're right. First of all, the fact that you can only go up and down by a certain amount provides some welcome certainty and limits any kind of pro-cyclical damage. At the same time, as Andrew Jackson mentioned earlier, as we were going through a period of extended economic grow

Finance committee  I have just a quick point, if I may, on this issue of temporary workers. I think some of the criticism of the bill is that this will lead to more temporary workers. In my view, one of the reasons we've had such a surge in temporary workers is that we can't get permanent migrants

Finance committee  On this one, I don't think there's a huge difference between us. The important point is that we're at least setting up an arm's-length agency to make these decisions. Whether that independent board is going to be able to set rates in a counter-cyclical or pro-cyclical fashion dep

Finance committee  Putting that decision into an independent, arm's-length body is going to lead to better decisions. They are likely to be more counter-cyclical, because they're going to be made by the people who are affected by them.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the members of the committee for the opportunity to appear. I think the views of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives on budget 2008 as a whole are a matter of record, and I'm not going to go into them in great detail here. I believe t

Industry committee  —and incorporating that by reference would certainly be a useful part of the puzzle in dealing with research and innovation.

Industry committee  I have two quick comments. One is that over the past few years I've watched people issues become more and more top-of-mind with our member chief executives at every meeting. We had an example of that just recently, in January. When the members of the competition policy review pa

Industry committee  I think that approach has been used for many years. When I was in university it was a standard process for the armed forces. I served in the naval reserve and that was part of it. There was a trade-off. People who went to military college, generally speaking, had their education

Industry committee  I think people and services go together; services are delivered by people. They can be delivered long distance via communications and they can be delivered in person. So when we talk about how do we expand Canada's exports of services, inevitably that means the movement of peop

Industry committee  From the point of view of where lost manufacturing jobs are going, there are two things you can look at. One is, we know they are being replaced, because we continue to look at unemployment rates that are at 30-year lows. So we know that people are getting re-employed; the more i

Industry committee  Well, if I may, I think one of the problems we have is that some of the companies in our service sector are prospering despite the way our tax system works rather than because of it. As I say, we actually have much better tax treatment in manufacturing than in services when it co