Evidence of meeting #54 for Finance in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was research.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
We want to make sure that they're working and that they were just a primer. They were not an expectation to continue in the following years.
I see your first request is that the home renovation tax credit be extended for one more year. You're not the first one to ask for that.
Chair, Government Relations Committee, Canadian Retail Building Supply Council
I would point out to you one thing that became apparent in the last couple of weeks. It's not only through the normal sales process that we are seeing the HRTC increasing activity at the retail level. We're all aware there is an underground economy, and an underground economy certainly affects the income of the government as far as lost tax revenues go. What's being reported back to us is that a lot of the cash transaction that was happening isn't quite happening to the same extent anymore, because people want receipts. So there's a benefit there.
Chair, Government Relations Committee, Canadian Retail Building Supply Council
There you go.
Chair, Government Relations Committee, Canadian Retail Building Supply Council
Yes, absolutely.
Conservative
Chair, Government Relations Committee, Canadian Retail Building Supply Council
I know of her, yes.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
She has relayed some of those same comments to us and we do appreciate them.
That's all I have.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
Okay, thank you very much, Mr. Menzies.
I'm going to ask a couple of questions here just to clarify.
I wanted to ask Ms. Pearl-Weinberg about her third recommendation, allowing application of capital losses against income.
A number of us have received representations from Nortel employees. There are two issues there. One issue is with their pension and the bankruptcy. One issue is with respect to those people who received equities over the course of working there, and then obviously with the drop in the stock price, they lost all value there, but now they're being assessed that as income.
Chair, Taxation Working Group, Investment Funds Institute of Canada
Are you talking about the deferred stock option?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
That's right. Is this intended to deal with that part? They would like to see it fully equalized so that it's not considered income at all. But is this intended to deal partly with those types of situations?
Chair, Taxation Working Group, Investment Funds Institute of Canada
To be honest, that was not our intention, but certainly I think it would alleviate, to a certain extent, those issues as well.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
Has your organization looked at their issues, or looked at their recommendations or their challenges specifically? Do you have any comments on that?
Chair, Taxation Working Group, Investment Funds Institute of Canada
I'm not sure if IFIC has looked at it. Personally, I have looked at it, but I don't think it's something that IFIC looked at, per se, because of the nature of how people invest in our funds.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
Okay, I appreciate that.
Ms. Wolfson, you raised some very big issues here and I wanted to quote you back. You said, in particular, that you wanted to register your appreciation for the sustained investment in research, science, and technology made by the Government of Canada over the past few years.
I'd like to bronze this and give this to my good friend John McCallum. He won't accept it from me, so perhaps he will from the University of Toronto.
I take your point, especially about the investment in human resources, the indirect costs of research. Those points have been made very well by other institutions, and by the AUCC as well.
I wanted to ask a question, which you can use to boast, but it's a bit of a challenging question as well. As you mentioned, the BlackBerry is a real game-changing technology in Canada. Name one to three other game-changing innovations from the University of Toronto over the last five years.
Vice-President, University Relations, University of Toronto
I wish I had the notes for when my presentation was 10 minutes long, because I had a couple of examples.
The first is stem cells and the work that's been done in terms of discovery. Tony Pawson, who just won the Kyoto prize for $10 million, looked at how you use stem cells to create “life-altering” in its best sense. That's a discovery.
Marny can speak to another one.
Marny Scully Executive Director, Policy and Analysis, Office of Government, Institutional and Community Relations, University of Toronto
Some of you may have recently seen in the paper that Ted Sargent and his research team developed a device the size of a BlackBerry that detects prostate cancer in 30 minutes. That's the most recent example of a huge innovation.
Vice-President, University Relations, University of Toronto
Shana Kelley was the other person.
In terms of the environment, the most extraordinary invention has just been done at the University of Toronto in our engineering faculty using nanotechnology--the University of Toronto is Canada's strongest university for nanotechnology--using nanofibres to create auto parts. A guy named Mohini Sain develops auto parts essentially out of vegetable fibre. That will change radically how we work.
The second most interesting piece is.... You'll forgive me for not knowing parts of a car. It's the big thing inside the motor, the case or whatever it is; I'm a lawyer, not a car mechanic. This you can pick up with your hands. I can pick it up. Just the weight: all the parts, developed in that big thing that the battery goes in and everything else--this is a major embarrassment--can be picked up. So the cost to run a car and the energy efficiency and the need for the use of carbon fuels is astronomically different.
We could go through this and I could give you thousands more.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative James Rajotte
The reason I ask about research, especially of universities, is that those are the stories that have to be told to us and to Canadians to say this is why we invest in research. When we talk about granting councils and we talk about indirect costs of research, when we talk about funding buildings, frankly Canadians' eyes glaze over and they ask what it's all for. So we're funding people in lab coats in universities; that's interesting, but what are they doing and how is it affecting my life?
We were at the University of Alberta, and Lorne Tyrrell took us around and said the investments in hepatitis research means this. So I would encourage you to do that.
I'm out of time, but I would also say that I wouldn't differentiate between a new economy and a natural resources economy. Coming from Alberta, I think they're very much married. I have a friend who just developed his own robot that makes screw piles both for the energy industry and for the solar farms being built here in Ontario, and he decided he needed a robot that he takes around the world with his team to build them all over. Often in those kinds of industries you're forced to make technological and innovative things as well.
But I am out of time, and this is our final panel here.
We thank you very much. It was a very interesting, diverse panel, and very good discussion. We thank you for your thoughts and your presentations. We look forward to our report at the end of November.
Thank you, colleagues, for our cross-Canada tour.
The meeting is adjourned.