Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Canadian Construction Association welcomes this opportunity to present its views and recommendations. CCA is the national voice of the non-residential construction industry, representing some 20,000 individual member firms located in every region of Canada.
I guess the simplest way to demarcate the Canadian Construction Association from my colleagues from the Canadian Homebuilders' Association is perhaps simply to say that while housing starts are music to their ears, it's building permits that make our world.
Mr. Chairman, our submission and comments here today directly respond to the committee's request for specific measures to ensure a skilled and healthy workforce, a competitive economy, and state-of-the-art infrastructure--all within a prudent fiscal environment. The details are in our written brief, so I will simply highlight a few of the recommendations therein. They are grouped primarily under four main areas, and indeed most are building on announcements that were made in the previous budget. In five minutes before this committee we tend to be critical and come forward with what might be termed negative criticism. In many cases we would applaud the government for its last budget, but I don't want to take all my five minutes just to speak about what you've done, but would prefer to speak about where we think you can go further.
First of all, with respect to infrastructure investment, while the federal government has committed to impressive investments in Canada's key physical infrastructure, we are concerned that the investment timeframe is too long and will result in additional costs and further deteriorating infrastructure. We recommend that the ramping-up period, the phase-in period, for three programs in particular be accelerated by at least two to three years, so that by 2008-09 the new deal for communities will be in full swing along with the new highway and border infrastructure fund and the municipal rural infrastructure fund. We also urge the federal government to establish a minimum threshold for continuing investment in these programs, and that certainly will be part of the current discussions ongoing with the provincial and territorial governments on the fiscal imbalance where infrastructure is a key part of those discussions.
The second category is meeting Canada's human resource needs. We are facing unprecedented demand in our industry but at the same time a dwindling workforce, primarily due to an aging and retiring workforce. Our preference is to grow our workforce within Canada. We do that by promoting construction as a career of choice to youth, under-represented groups such as women and first nations peoples, and removing barriers to labour mobility so that unemployed workers can get to where the work is. We also do this by strengthening proven training systems in our industry, such as the apprenticeship system. We were very pleased with the measures announced in the last federal budget that recognize the importance of the apprenticeship training system in our industry and others, but we must go further. The current measures are restricted to red seal trades. This should be expanded as quickly as possible to all construction trades.
There are barriers to apprenticeship training built into our current employment insurance system. Removing the two-week waiting period and allowing apprentices while at school to supplement their income by working in high unemployment areas such as Alberta without risk of losing their EI eligibility would be great improvements to addressing a labour shortage and ensuring that EI does not operate as a barrier to apprenticeship. Look at measures to assist EI recipients in relocating on a temporary basis to seek employment in high demand regions of the country. Alternatively, look at tax incentives for prospective employers. We had mobility provisions in the EI some time ago. Unfortunately, those provisions only dealt with permanent relocation of EI recipients. In our industry we need a mobile workforce that can move from province to province to meet our demands, and in many cases those workers do return to their home province.
The third grouping is the need for strategic tax reform. There are a number of specific measures in the brief, and I'd like to highlight some quickly.
With respect to the small-business deduction, great strides were taken in increasing the threshold in reducing the rate, but that is perhaps one of the most underrated and underutilized tax measures, levers, that we have to increase technology integration and productivity, for who knows better where to invest in their company, in their business, to achieve greater productivity and competitiveness than the entrepreneurs themselves. And this measure when it was introduced was introduced to ensure and to provide an incentive for business owners to reinvest in their firms.
Finally, take a look at employer-provided vehicles. It is a terrible inequity that is occurring when we have the Tax Court of Canada finding for taxpayers with respect to the use of employer-provided vehicles, and CRA and Finance Canada turning a blind eye.
There are also measures in there on environmental incentives for reducing diesel emissions that we would like you to look at.
Thank you for the opportunity to express our views.