Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, once again, to all of our presenters. As we had said before, we would like to have much more time to flesh out your proposals, but we are all very tight on time here.
We've had a lot of discussions here today about employment insurance. There have been some very inaccurate comments made. We need to remember--and I think Mr. Yussuff did make the point--that this is insurance, employment insurance, and every insurance program is funded through premiums and shared between employers and employees. That's a critical point.
This $54 billion notional surplus is in the past. We need to deal with the present. That money is no longer there, so we need to deal with the present. That's why, in budget 2008, we froze premium increases. We froze the premiums where they were. This was before there was any recession even on the horizon. We realized we had to do that to protect employees, employers, and the potential unemployed. We can't claim that at that point in 2008, in the budget, we saw this recession coming to the degree that it has hit us. That's why we established an arm's-length board: so that notional surplus could never again be borrowed by politicians. It will remain an arm's-length board and that's where it needs to be, but this has to be actuarially sound, so after a two-year period the premiums will increase. But this board has been given a mandate to limit the increases. I just wanted that on the record.
I do want to ask a question. We've talked--and Mr. McKay raised the subject--about productivity, but the other point is competitiveness. We have made an effort to reduce taxes in this country, to lower the overall marginal effective tax rate to stimulate business, to make us competitive, and to hopefully improve productivity. That's a difficult one to put a handle on and to analyze. Will the fact that we've set the goal to get to the lowest marginal effective tax rate in the G7 by 2015 help the chamber?
I will refer my question to you, Ms. George. Will that help with productivity?