Thank you.
I thought we only had two and a half minutes so I made my notes short, but I can always elaborate.
We're very pleased to be here. I'm the chair of First Call, and First Call is a coalition of provincial and regional organizations. Combined, the partner organizations have over 100,000 members, so we represent a sizable part of B.C.
All the partners are committed to the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which says children and youth should have first call on society's resources--hence, the name, First Call.
Our brief, which was sent ahead of time and which I believe all of you have in front of you, has six recommendations. In the two and a half minutes I thought I had, I knew I couldn't read all six of them, so I'm going to let you just take a look at either the executive summary or the arguments around the particular recommendations. Many of them will be familiar to you in terms of raising the child tax benefit, child care, etc.
I did want to say that we note in our paper that the Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum shows that there is no one way to achieve productivity and economic growth, which was at the heart of the questions you had asked us to comment on.
For example, in the report that was just released last week--we give you the previous year's data in our brief--Switzerland is now ranked as the number one country overall this year, but the report also notes that, “Scandinavian countries remain among the top performers with Finland, Sweden, and Denmark ranked 2, 3, and 4th respectively.” And the U.S. now ranks sixth, and Canada now ranks 15th.
The report notes that the Scandinavian countries have strong public institutions, budget surpluses, and low public indebtedness--critical factors in terms of issues around productivity and competitiveness. At the same time, we know that they have relatively high levels of taxation, but it is smart taxation.
One of the important things to think about is how we begin to pay for the programs that we desperately need if we're going to begin to grow from our rank of 15th to somewhere higher up on the competitiveness chart. Canada clearly has the capacity to have similar outcomes compared to the Scandinavian countries if, as we note in our brief, much more attention is paid to eliminating wasteful tax expenditures, thereby increasing revenues, and no longer pursuing tax cuts that make little difference to ordinary Canadians but wind up costing the federal treasury huge sums of money.
For example, in the last budget--and in previous budgets, as this is not about any one particular party--there was the equivalent of some $10 billion annually in tax cuts that were offered. That would have been more than enough to eradicate child poverty in this country.