Finance Committee on Oct. 18th, 2006

[Tyler Charlebois]

When you look at how the millennium program was first introduced by the previous Liberal government, there were some issues with the provinces. As the millennium program has gone on, they've started to remove those issues. They're starting to work very well.

From our perspective, when the millennium program started to work well with the provinces, students were actually starting to see an extreme benefit. In Ontario, over $108 million is going through the millennium bursaries to Ontario.

It's an extremely important fund. We fully support it. I think there were some problems, but they've been fixed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Brian Pallister]

Thank you for the “Coles Notes” answer. We forced you to it, Tyler. We appreciate that.

Mr. Christopherson, welcome, sir.

Over to you, for four minutes.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you all for your presentations.

Mr. Field, you briefly mentioned income trusts. There's certainly one point of view about income trusts and their impact on seniors. Could you give me what your organization thinks, from a national point of view?

[Art Field]

We are looking for a regulator so that people who have trouble with income trusts have an avenue to go through to be protected. Right now, I understand there's no regulator. If you lose all your money, you don't have money to go to a lawyer to prove that your broker wasn't being up front or honest with you. I understand that with some of the income trusts, people are getting back less than what they put in. Yet they need this money to live.

You see that a lot of the corporations are doing these income trusts. Bell Canada is one...and was it Telus here a week or two ago? Who's going to be next? General Motors? If the government loses their tax base from their corporations, then our health care, which is a big thing for seniors, is going to be in trouble.

Those are a couple of things, Dave, that would affect us. There are stories out there of people losing their money, and that a lot of companies are doing income trusts.

We're looking for a regulator so that you have an avenue to protect yourself if you do end up being defrauded, or whatever you want to call it. We also want to protect the health care system. At our convention, 15% of the resolutions were on health care, because of the problems. We need it. A lot of these seniors are not rich people, they're just hard workers. We're living longer than we ever did before. Sometimes they're living too long and they run out of their money. So they need the help.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thanks very much, Art. Let me just say it's great to see you again. I'm glad things are going so well.

Mr. Toft, I know when I was at provincial pre-budget consultations for finance, we would hear about parents in the same situation as you're in. My sense of it then--this is going back just a few years--was that this was a ticking time bomb in terms of the number of now adults who have developmentally challenged issues and who are being taken care of by their parents. The parents are getting older. The real concern--and my understanding is that this impacts literally tens of thousands of families across Canada--is that they're terrified about what's going to happen to their adult child. They've dedicated their life to providing the supports, as obviously you and your wife and family have done. You've made preparations through your sons, but others aren't nearly as lucky. I know there are probably scenarios that scare the living you-know-what out of you too.

Has anything changed? Is it getting worse? Or is everything fixed now and I should get off this?

[John Toft]

Nothing has changed. We founded the Families Matter Co-op last year in Ottawa. I moved down here from Red Lake, in northwest Ontario, came to the nation's capital, and found a complete lack of service for my son. It's only through fighting that we've been able to get any support for him. But the situation of the famed 85-year-old widow with a developmentally disabled 60-year-old son is real. We've met her. We've met many of these people, and that's why we have this co-op and why I'm here to fight for developmentally disabled people.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you for doing that, sir.

Thank you all for your presentations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Brian Pallister]

Thank you, Mr. Christopherson and Mr. Toft.

We'll continue now with Mr. Pacetti.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Thank you to all the presenters. It's always interesting to have you here.

Mr. Colby, I'm a CGA, so I guess I have a bit of a conflict of interest, but I still have to ask you this question. In your brief you spoke quite a bit about productivity, but you concentrated on the income tax cuts. There's also an educational component. The CGA's education is important. What do you say to that? Shouldn't there be some money invested in education, or is it just about tax cuts?

[Everett Colby]

You're talking about apples and oranges. I don't think anybody would argue that investment in education is not good, especially with the aging population Canada's facing. While I am sympathetic and empathetic to the plight of the colleges and universities, I also have an obligation on behalf of our association to look at a more global picture. We see benefits to tax cuts. For example, some of the recent cuts allowed for donations of property to universities and colleges, and they can help provide some private funding to these organizations. Sometimes they may go hand-in-hand, but the crux of it is that they're two different situations.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

I didn't want to give the impression that it was just about income tax cuts. Education is important for the organization. I understand that you released some studies in the past, not just about the demographic challenges that Canada is going to face, but on health. I think you're going to be working on another study as well.

[Everett Colby]

We've been conducting a number of studies over the past few years, and we're quite excited about one that's going to be announced and released on October 31. It's on business regulation. As a matter of fact, there's an economic news luncheon at the press club that I would invite you all to attend. Last fall we started a survey and conducted it among publicly listed small and medium enterprises, which form the bulk of the capital investment and business structure of Canada. Over the past six months, we've joined that with a similar study done in the U.K. to try to find some answers about government regulation of business and its impact. We'd be happy to share the results of this with the committee.

[Massimo Pacetti, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Colby.

Mr. Toft, the estate planning part of your brief recommends “working with the provinces to enable RRSPs and RRIFs to be rolled over to discretionary trust for people with development disabilities”. Do you know how that's coming along?

[John Toft]

No, I don't. That's Ken's expertise.

[The Chair, Conservative, Brian Pallister]

Thank you, sir.

The Chair now recognizes Mr. St-Cyr.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all. This question is for Mr. Charlebois.

In your submission, you ask that we establish a transfer payment to the provinces specifically for postsecondary education. A great number of groups, university students and professors, have come forward to demand an increase in education funding. Many of them wanted funding to attain the level it had in 1995, before the cutbacks, taking inflation and the increase in the number of students into account. They requested a hike of 4.9 billion dollars.

Does your Association agree with this request?

[Tyler Charlebois]

Yes, it would be a figure that my association.... I know that a lot of our partner associations across Canada, in terms of student groups, would support that figure, and it's something that the Council of the Federation has put out, and as well, the Premier of Ontario. We would support any investment like that into a dedicated transfer, and that specifically.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

I seem to understand that your alliance has 22 members, associations from various colleges. How many of them are from Quebec?

[Tyler Charlebois]

We only represent colleges within Ontario.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

That escaped me. I’d like to talk about a subject that perhaps has not been discussed in Ontario, that is to say the recognition of the provincial jurisdiction, including Quebec, in the field of education. At the very beginning of your submission, you mentioned a Canada-wide agreement on postsecondary education. That reminds me a bit of the Health Act that has never prevented the federal government from imposing cutbacks for many years, cutbacks of billions of dollars in health funding. I think we’re wrong to believe that such an agreement would protect education.

Would you be willing to agree to what every Quebec student association is requesting? That the Quebec government and therefore the people of Quebec are not submitted to any restriction and that Quebec could freely exercise its jurisdiction in the field of education without being submitted to any kind of financial penalty with regards to transfers that are allotted to Quebec?

[The Chair, Conservative, Brian Pallister]

Merci beaucoup, monsieur.

We continue now with Madam Ablonczy.

[Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Chair, I'm going to pass my round to Mr. Trost.

[The Chair, Conservative, Brian Pallister]

Mr. Trost.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Thank you.

My question to Mr. Colby is this. The presentation by the accountants here talked about specifically simplifying and making more consistent the tax code. Do you have any specific examples of specific items that would be very good and the most beneficial or specific areas where this would be most helpful to the economy, to the efficiency of taxes? Just pick your best one.

[Everett Colby]

Yes, I was going to say we don't have enough time for me to give you a complete list—