Thank you very much for inviting us again to discuss priorities for next year's budget. Our national president, Paul Moist, had really hoped to be with you today, but he's speaking at the opening of a national health care conference that we have today in Victoria.
CUPE is Canada's largest union. We represent over 600,000 members. Our members work on the front lines providing quality public services in health care, education, municipal-community social services, clean water, and electricity. Just yesterday we heard that two of our members--paramedics in British Columbia--died tragically when their ambulance plunged off a cliff into a lake on Vancouver Island. These are men and women who spend their lives saving the lives of others, so I hope you will join us in expressing condolences to their friends and families.
Our members don't just deliver public services, but they also depend on accessible, affordable, and quality public services. Forget about the myth of the overpaid public sector worker. The average salary for our members is below $40,000 a year. The value of public services that each Canadian receives is about half that--$17,000 a year. So when public services are cut, our members are hurt twice: first, through their own lost jobs and wages; and secondly, because the value of public services they receive is diminished as it is for all Canadians.
This is why we're such strong supporters of what Andrew just spoke about, taking this opportunity to improve our pension system so that all working Canadians can rely on a decent income in retirement. The best way of doing this is by increasing CPP benefits to 50% of the average wage over seven years. This could, of course, be pre-funded through a gradual increase in premiums, so this would have little direct fiscal impact on governments.
As part of this, the federal government should also increase the guaranteed income supplement benefits for seniors by 15%. This would help lift 200,000 seniors out of poverty.
We also agree that the extended benefits for employment insurance that expired on September 11 should be renewed for another year.
We also strongly recommend that the deadline for infrastructure stimulus be extended until at least next July. The need for these investments won't disappear at the end of this fiscal year, and it's detrimental to have an artificial deadline that could result in inappropriate haste, projects lapsing, and job losses.
We still have 1.5 million Canadians out of work. Recovery from this recession is slow at best. It's not time to turn off the taps; it's time to make sure that we continue to invest in public infrastructure, create jobs, and support the most vulnerable in our communities. We also need to move forward with new strategic infrastructure programs to build for the future. A key proposal that we have in our submission is for a national clean water fund that would help municipalities pay for the estimated $22 billion required to upgrade their wastewater facilities to new national standards that were announced earlier this year. These new standards are unfunded and could lead to the largest property tax increases in history for some mostly rural communities. So we're proposing a commitment of a billion dollars a year from the federal government, over 20 years, to be cost-matched by provincial and municipal governments. Additional direct support is also needed to improve water and wastewater facilities for first nations reserves and communities beyond 2012.
In the next two years, before a national agreement is concluded, the value of transfers to the provinces should also be protected. With the exception of Ontario, all equalization-receiving provinces are expected to face a reduction in these payments next fiscal year, with most of these provinces also likely to suffer an overall decline in their combined major federal transfers.
So how to pay for this? All of these measures, and much more, could be easily paid for through a combination of fairer taxation measures and better spending of federal dollars. This could include eliminating the $1 billion P3 fund that subsidizes privatization; equitable taxation so that stock options and income from capital gains are taxed at the same rate as employment income; cancelling further cuts to corporate income taxes and restoring rates to 2007 levels; and more equitable taxation of the financial sector, such as with the financial activities taxes that the International Monetary Fund just recently proposed.
I've included some charts as well--I gave them to the clerk--that help to illustrate some of the impacts here. You can see with this one that reductions in the corporate income tax rate have actually led to lower, not higher, investment by businesses. A reduction in the share that government revenues across Canada receive from the economy is equal to about $60 billion over the past 10 years.
I also have a chart here that shows the enormous shift in household debt and deficits that has occurred toward the household sector because of low wages; meanwhile corporations are amassing large surpluses that they're not investing back into the economy.
Thank you very much.