Mr. Speaker, this week the Minister of Finance tabled Bill C-26, An Act to amend the Canada Pension Plan, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act and the Income Tax Act.
I had the opportunity to listen to the minister's speech, and the question and answer portion. I listened to him try to explain to us in the House, as well as to the viewers, how this bill was good for Canadians. I had the chance to ask the first question to the minister during that period, and although he is a great speaker, I did not get the answer I requested.
To start, I am going to pose this question once again, but in a different way and hope that through the following hours of debate that there is finally an answer. I shared with the minister two quotes from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business CEO, Dan Kelly:
It is tremendously disappointing to see that finance ministers are putting Canadian wages, hours and jobs in jeopardy and willfully moving to make an already shaky economy even worse. Despite all the talk, it appears that jobs and the economy are not particularly high priorities for the governments that have signed off on this deal.
Another quote from Dan Kelly stated:
Two thirds of small firms say they will have to freeze or cut salaries and over a third say they will have to reduce hours or jobs in their business in response to a CPP/QPP hike.
These two statements are very troubling, especially with the statistics from 2013 indicating that there are 1,116,423 small businesses in Canada. That makes up 98% of all employer businesses in Canada. This same information shows that 86% of Canadian exporters were small businesses in 2009, that accounted for $68 billion in exports or approximately 25% of Canada's total export value.
Locally, I have received data from my riding of Elgin—Middlesex—London, done by CFIB. When polled on the support for CPP increases, 12% of all Canadians in Elgin—Middlesex—London supported this increase. That is 12%. That means 88% of the people polled did not agree with the CPP tax increases.
With these important figures, I will continue to discuss the concerns with increases to CPP and the impact on small businesses. Rather than continuing with all the stats and figures, I want to share with the House my own personal experience as a small business owner.
Many of us come to the House with different skill sets and different assets, which is very important. One of the assets that I have was being a small business owner. I had the opportunity to run a small business with seven employees. That was run by my former husband and I. When we took this business over in 1998, we purchased it as a franchise. The gentleman was moving out of the franchise business.
At that time, we had received the books showing how well the business was doing, so we were very excited about the first day on the job. However, our first day accomplished $81 in sales. My former spouse and I had paid two staff throughout the entire day. We were open from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., and we paid two staffers throughout the day for their shifts.
At the end of the day, our cash received for the items we sold was $81. Obviously the issue here was we needed to look at how to run a proper business. How could we do this? We had many obstacles in front of us, but one of the first things we needed to do was reduce our costs. By doing so, we had to look at what were some of the costs that a business could reduce without impacting what is being sold.
I was in a small coffee shop. We were a coffee house where there was entertainment five nights a week. We served an area where there was a TD Bank and many other local businesses. We were a very common stopping ground for people on their way to work and leaving work.
One of the first things we did was business promotions. That was able to bring in some sales, but at the same time we had extraordinary expenses. I was in a location where our actual cost for rent was $3,800 per month in the downtown core of London. I was dealing not only with an extravagant expense when it came to the rent, but we also had high hydro costs. For anyone who lives in Ontario, believe it or not, it is actually even worse than it was in 1998. We were spending at least $400 and $500 per month on those costs.
We also had other costs that we had to look at, whether it was municipal taxes or different things that we had to go and propose to council, so we could put seating outside. There were many things we had to deal with that had red tape.
The number one thing I did was to reduce costs. It was a really horrible choice to reduce the number of staff. To make that business work, I needed to make sure we had inventory. I needed to make sure there were coffee beans and milk, that the lights were on, and that we paid the rent. That was what was important to me, because without those things, I could not run a business. The first expense I could change was to decrease my staff by two employees. It was a very difficult decision for us to make because it involved the lives of two students going to Western University. We had to take away 15 hours of work per person just to make ends meet.
Over time, we did do better. Nonetheless, anyone who is a small business owner will recognize that we are not just there counting the receipts at the end of the day, but are paying the bills. In my case, I recognized that I could buy a pound of pre-cooked bacon for $7.50, or I could pre-cook that bacon myself in my own kitchen for $3.50. Every single thing mattered, especially when the first day of business brought in $81.
The first thing I had to do was to reduce my staff. Seven days a week, for a year and a half years, I would go in and work. Take into consideration that at the time I had a child who was three months old, as well as a 19-month old, and a child who had just reached the age of 4 and had just started junior kindergarten. This is about a family run business. It is not about rich small business owners. This is about a family that was running a business: a mom, a dad, and three children. I would go in there and scrub the toilets and do all of those things so that we had the business.
By the end of this, we did end up doing very well, and after about 18 months, it was either a matter of our mental wellness and selling the business, or continuing to work every day. We decided to sell that business.
However, one of the biggest things we had to do to keep our costs low was to reduce wages. With wages, we have to look at what payroll means. It is not just the CPP contributions that the government is talking about. Those premiums are matched not only by employers but also by the employees themselves. We have employment insurance premiums. We have WSIB, and I am sure there are very similar programs across the country. Therefore, as a small business owner we are not just dealing with paying the taxes that are removed from someone's pay. We are also doing matching contributions.
There are many things to consider, but I think that is the one thing on which we have to sit back and get into the shoes of a small business owner.
Making business decisions can be very difficult. I fear with this change to the CPP that the government is asking small businesses to make that same decision I had to make in order to have a successful business. To reduce costs, we had to reduce expenses. An easy way of reducing expenses is the hardest job, and that is by cutting staff. It is cutting human resources, and we need to talk about that.
On Friday, I asked the member for Foothills about the challenges in his region, where over 200,000 jobs have been lost in Alberta. In my region I saw a similar thing happen between 2008 and 2010, when we went through the global economic downturn. I asked him in particular if the CPP tax hikes would hurt new businesses. Obviously, the answer is yes.
Changing direction, we also have to make sure that Canadians are aware of what this program is. In the CFIB's Ipsos poll, it was noted that 40% of Canadians think the government contributes to the CPP. We have to make sure that people realize that is not the case. It is the employees and the employers who contribute. It is not about the government here.
We cannot confuse Canadians when we are talking about CPP and are throwing in the point that the GIS has been increased. All we are doing is taking the three pillars of retirement and confusing the average Canadian who has not had an opportunity to sit down and study it.
Retirement is about three pillars. It is about the CPP contributions of the employee and the employer. It is about the social programs, such as old age security and the guaranteed income supplement, and it is about personal savings. This government has reduced personal savings with its changes to the tax-free savings accounts. However, the bottom line is that more money cannot be taken out of Canadians' pockets.
I want to finish with a quote that I am sure the government has heard many times:
Whatever the reason might be to expand the CPP, it is not to eliminate poverty. The poverty rate among seniors is now as close to zero as we can get. Yes, a little over five per cent of seniors today still have income below the poverty line...
That was Fred Vettese, chief actuary of Morneau Shepell and co-author of the finance minister's book, The Real Retirement. This segment was taken from The Financial Post, June 5, 2016.
I would really ask that we look at these things and recognize that CPP is not about poverty reduction. These proposed CPP increases would hurt, especially when we are going to be seeing things like a precarious carbon tax and the cancellation of the small business tax reduction by the current government.
