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 that the budget as a whole did build on the October economic statement by adding some important measures that will have a positive impact on Canada's competitiveness at relatively low cost to the treasury.
I've just returned from Calgary, where we had a meeting of our members with all four of Canada's western premiers in turn, the premiers of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. We also had a round table discussion on the state of the economy. Clearly the outlook in western Canada is pretty robust. In Ontario, Quebec, and parts of Atlantic Canada, it's considerably more troubling. I think the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States is clearly spilling into real estate prices, making it harder for businesses and consumers to borrow in that country, and it's clearly going to spill over into our country to some extent. All of that is simply to say it reinforces the need for a prudent approach to fiscal policy and to the management of public spending.
If I may, let me address three specific provisions in Bill C-50 that I think support the broad thrust of the budget: employment insurance, student aid, and immigration.
On the first, we strongly support the creation of the proposed Canada Employment Insurance Financing Board. I think the business community has argued for many years that employment insurance premiums should be set by an arm's-length body on a break-even basis, and that the funds collected through these premiums should be managed in a segregated fund. We do have a continuing concern about the tendency to use the employment insurance system to provide benefits that might better be characterized as social programs. Over the longer term, we believe that money raised through employment insurance premiums should be focused more precisely on its core mandate of providing insurance against temporary job loss, and that other programs should be funded through general revenue. However, that said, the creation of the new board marks a critical step in the right direction.
Next let me speak to the issue of student aid. In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, we must ensure that every single Canadian is both able and motivated to participate and succeed in post-secondary education. Now, when I say post-secondary, that may be through university or college, it may be through apprenticeships, it may be through training and lifelong learning both within and beyond the workplace. The Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation got off to a rocky start, but over time it found ways to work constructively with provincial governments, and I believe it became a catalyst for innovation in improving access to post-secondary education in this country. The government has opted to dissolve the foundation and replace its scholarships with a new and hopefully more robust approach to student aid. The design of the new rules is going to be critical in ensuring that the federal resources allocated to student aid are as effective as possible in overcoming the financial barriers to success in post-secondary education.
I also believe that government should move to preserve and build upon the research capacity developed through the foundation. Here, I would suggest passing its research mandate and funding to the Canadian Council on Learning, which I believe has become an important credible source of information about how Canada is doing in the field of education and what policies work best in enabling every Canadian to achieve his or her full potential.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, let me speak to the provisions of Bill C-50 that affect immigration. Canada is facing serious and growing shortages of skilled labour. These shortages are most acute in the resource sector, but they are affecting businesses of all sizes in every industry and in every region of this country. These shortages are only going to get worse as our population ages. Both Canadian employers and potential immigrants today face a huge frustration, a backlog of some 900,000 applications that under current rules have to be processed in the order they're received. The result is that a skilled worker ready to contribute to Canada's economy faces a wait of up to six years before even having his or her application processed. My understanding is that delay could grow to 10 years as early as 2012.
This legislation would give the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration some discretion to set priorities within the system. It would help in particular to speed the flow of immigrants with skills that are urgently needed in our economy. While any legislative provision for ministerial discretion may cause concern, the process outlined in this bill for issuing ministerial instructions does provide both transparency and accountability. The fact is that the current system is not working. It's not working for immigrants and it's not working for Canada. We need improvements now, and we cannot waste years more in pursuit of perfection. Whatever flaws anyone may see with the process proposed here, it does represent a clear improvement that will start to make a difference right away.
On all three of these issues, employment insurance, student aid, and immigration, Bill C-50 moves public policy toward better solutions. In each case there is more work to be done, but we support the intentions of the bill and we are prepared to work with the government to ensure that the resulting new programs and institutions achieve the best results possible for Canadians.
Mr. Chairman, thank you.