Finance Committee on Nov. 2nd, 2009

[Don Herring]

Thank you, David.

Importantly, what we're seeing right now is that a huge percentage of very skilled people are without work. We in Canada have the only recognized trade that exists in any drilling community anywhere in the world. It's a red seal program. It works across this country. We have put a significant investment into it, and we're very concerned that if we continue to operate at the virtual sub-economic levels we're experiencing today, we will begin to lose these people permanently.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Okay, thank you. I do appreciate that.

Moving on quickly to Mr. Knight, thank you for your comments and also for stepping up in January last year when the finance minister and I put you on the spot and asked what you need to be able to catch up and be prepared for this wave of students coming who weren't going to be able to get a job and who are going to go back to colleges and universities. We do appreciate the fact that you did step up and put forward some good jobs, some good construction projects and infrastructure that we've been able to answer.

You commented about first nations education and colleges. I was just at one of my first nations in southern Alberta, where they have what I guess is an apprenticeship program, a pretty nice welding shop where they're teaching students how to weld. Referring back to Don Herring, those sorts of things are what we need in Alberta.

What are we missing in those pieces of our first nations' further education?

[James Knight]

The reality is that many aboriginal graduates from high school are not getting the financial support they need to take those programs. There is a program that's intended to do that for these learners, but it was capped in 1996 at a 2% growth rate, which is less than inflation. So while we are in fact graduating more aboriginal learners from high school, which is marvellous—albeit we still have a distance to go—the support programs to help them transition into post-secondary education, including for an advanced skill like welding, are not keeping up with the demand.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

Thank you.

To Barrett Xplore, I like your first suggestion, because it doesn't seem to cost anything, so let's expand on that. I think the spectrum auction is a little confusing to those of us who weren't involved in it. I think those of us who represent rural regions in this country understand the role you play. That's what I deal with. Our family and most of my constituents deal with rural broadband-delivered entertainment, and much of our communications. It's not as if we necessarily live in remote areas, as Monsieur Laforest said. I would argue that I don't live in a remote area, but a rural area.

Can you elaborate on the spectrum auction and what we need to change in that to be able to have an impact on some of our rural constituents?

[John Maduri]

Yes. I think the first point to make is that there is an emerging category of providers, most of whom, I'd say, are local in their communities and who create employment there. These are not the big names we're usually familiar with; these are the folks who are working hard to bring broadband to your community.

Spectrum is the lifeblood of the industry; you need spectrum to execute. So to use the Calgary example, if I could, to acquire spectrum for the rural areas sitting around the city of Calgary, an operator today would have to bid on spectrum in an auction for let's say a population of one million, when in fact all they really needed and wanted was to get access to 100,000 rural homes and businesses in and around the city proper.

So if there's one challenge to broadband for rural Canadians, it's that with lower population density, it's just much more costly to reach them. Can you imagine now if we, as an operator, have to get access to those 100,000 people in the rural boundaries around the city and have to bid on the city of Calgary to do so, and to which we have no intention of providing delivery? That, in my mind, is just one simple way in which the rules need to change.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Menzies.

We'll go to Mr. Martin, please.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and witnesses.

While Mr. Menzies was speaking, I just got an e-mail. The parliamentary budget officer now estimates that the structural deficit will be $167 billion over the next five years. That's better than his original prediction, which explains the tone of Mr. Menzies' voice as he tries to figure out how he's going to pay for all of these very worthy proposals we hear of. I guess it sharpens the pencil to the point where there has to be a business case for some of these things that we're putting forward today.

In that light, I want to start with the College of Physicians and Surgeons. I think every province now spends about 40% of its budget on health care, if not more, and I'm absolutely shocked to see that we're nowhere near having our medical records available electronically, when other counties did this years ago—to a level of 98% in the Netherlands, according to your figures, and 95% in comparable countries like New Zealand.

What possible reason could there be holding us back, above and beyond the $500 million you're talking about? What's the holdup here? Because electronic records will save us a fortune, never mind patient safety.

[Dr. Andrew Padmos]

Well, thank you. I don't want to be facetious, but I think human nature is probably at the root of it, and the causes would be subdivided into political, bureaucratic, and economic.

There's no question that getting people to sign on to electronic medical records has been somewhat difficult, but the systems they've been asked to sign on to are really very difficult and unattractive to operate. Even at this late stage, in my own tiny practice, it is impossible to go to one screen and be able to navigate through the records of one patient and be able to access narrative reports, laboratory reports, and diagnostic reports. This requires multiple exits of and re-entries to different programs and applications, and that's in a centre that's supposed to be advanced.

I think we have a lot of work to do. It's highly technical. Some of it is system-related, and some of it is related to the fact that our medical system operates as a bunch of entrepreneurial individuals hooked together by a common commitment to patient care but not by a system that supports them.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Well, that's a very thorough answer, but it still really bothers me to hear you say that only 12% of family doctors are using electronic records, and the rest are still using paper charts. I just can't imagine why. Surely there are best practices in other countries we can draw from. We should use the program the U.K. or Australia used, or some place where it works.

[Dr. Andrew Padmos]

That's correct.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I'm not saying this in any critical way; I'm just baffle-gabbed by it. I'll move on, though.

On the charitable tax credit, it does bug me somewhat that if you donate $100 to me, you get $75 back, but if you donate $100 to a charity, I think it's 15% back for the first $200. It seems to be upside down. The first $400 that you give me is 75% tax-deductible, and then it diminishes from there on to the maximum allowed donation. With charities, the first $200 you give is at 15%, and then the remainder is at 29%.

There is a movement for tax parity for charities. There's a private member's bill and a bit of a campaign in Parliament currently to give charities the same tax credit as political parties and politicians. Does your organization have a view on that initiative for tax parity for charities?

[Hilary Pearson]

No, I don't think we have an articulated view on that. I represent private funders' foundations, and we are concerned about the overall trend in giving in Canada. The data certainly suggests there are fewer individual givers to charities. Charitable giving in absolute terms is larger, but the number of people giving is lower, which means there are fewer people giving larger dollar amounts.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Yes, but you want to crack that person who's giving $100 or $200. Surely, we want more of them. And it seems the tax credit is upside down now: we reward the bigger donors more. Most donations are $200 or less.

[Hilary Pearson]

The median is about $250.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

So even if you reverse the existing tax credits, it's 15% for the first $200 and 29% for the remainder. Even if you flip those, I think you get a lot more ordinary working people considering another donation.

[Hilary Pearson]

I guess the challenge is to try to figure out how to get that average up across the country, to get everybody to give a bit more. We would like to have more people giving and we'd like to have more people giving more. The stretch tax credit idea is one that we felt had some possibility of consideration by the Department of Finance. It's not creating a new system. It's adding on to the existing system and adding an incentive to what is already there.

I take your point. I think it's probably worth reviewing the whole system.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

You have 45 seconds.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Community colleges.... One of the irritants--I'm a carpenter by trade--in going to community college is when you do the school portion of your apprenticeship, you get a two-week penalty, a two-week waiting period, as if you've been laid off. You haven't been laid off; it's part of your apprenticeship. Do you think that waiting period should be eliminated so we don't lose apprentices due to an interruption of income maintenance when they do their school component?

[Terry Anne Boyles, Vice-President, Public Affairs, Association of Canadian Community Colleges]

The association has actually spoken for the elimination of that two-week waiting period because we find that the financial implications for the family units as a whole have been detrimental to the completion of apprenticeships until perhaps a later time in life. The impact on the carpentry and construction industry is quite significant.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

We'll go to Mr. Pacetti, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you to the witnesses for appearing. It's very interesting, but it's a tough job for us, as you can tell, to get questions in due to a limited time period.

My curiosity piques me, and I have to ask a question to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. It's fine if we separate the environmental aspects of your sector and just look at it from a purely business perspective and ask, “Do you really need to be looking at tax incentives”--I'm not going to call it corporate tax handouts, or whatever it's been labelled--“for your industry, for your sector?”

[David Collyer]

Perhaps I can start by responding to that and I'll invite Don Herring to add his comments to it.

As I said in my remarks, it's certainly not for us to judge how, across the country, you choose to make your decisions. We can only speak to our industry. Certainly in the last 12 to 18 months we have seen a very significant downturn. It's a combination of factors. Certainly the economic recession and the effect of commodity markets in the last period have led to significant unemployment. It's not as much in Calgary and Edmonton as it is in rural areas. It's the services sector that's being impacted. It's people outside the major centres who are feeling the brunt of the downturn. That's probably felt more so in the services sector than it is in the operating sector, and for that reason I invite Don to make a couple of comments.

[Don Herring]

Certainly.

This year we were running an average of 200 drilling rigs in western Canada, as David indicated, from those operations in the rural areas of western Canada and in parts of Atlantic Canada and in the north. We also run rigs in Ontario and Quebec. A year previous to that, we ran 350, and two years before that, 500.

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

I understand, but my time is limited. I understand the statistics. The statistics are very similar to other sectors, other areas and other regions of the country.

The question is this. At what point in time does business take corporate responsibility for the actions they've taken in the past? Shouldn't they be planning for the future? I'm okay with the accelerated capital cost, with perhaps your asking that your sector be eligible for the accelerated capital cost, because everybody is getting that. But to come to government now to ask for specific incentives just for your sector I find a little bit excessive. It's the same thing with asking for money for research and development. Everybody is asking, but to increase and to lay out more money for specific sectors is what I find a little bit uncomfortable in suggesting. So if you could be more specific, I would be more comfortable if more people would benefit from a certain program. When we're doing industry-specific or sector-specific, it becomes more uncomfortable for me.

I just want to ask Ms. McAlister a question for the caregivers. In your first recommendation, it's quite extensive. You're asking for money for equipment to extend the definition of what someone could deduct for a caregiver, but we're just going to make it more complex and more difficult--or easier, actually, for Revenue Canada to say no for people eligible. Shouldn't we just increase the amount, once you're eligible, to receive a caregiver amount? What would you see that amount increasing to?

[Marg McAlister]

Yes, I think we agree.

I was giving an example of some of the expenses that might qualify for claiming a caregiver credit. A very simple and easy step would be to enhance those two credits that are already in place, by increasing--