Thank you, Chair, and members of the committee.
Thank you on behalf of the membership of the Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce for the invitation to present our recommendations for the 2012 federal budget.
Briefly, our chamber is an association of approximately 1,700 employers in the Waterloo region. For any of you outside the province of Ontario, that's an area about an hour's drive west of the greater Toronto area. We have a diversified economy. Manufacturing, information technology, the universities—all play a main role in our economic development. So we have a very diverse economy.
With respect to our recommendations, we submitted a brief two months ago in the middle of August regarding our recommendations. I had a phone call yesterday from somebody on one of our advisory committees who said that based on some recent economic developments across the globe our recommendations might be a bit outdated. But I think there are still some priorities here that we would like to see next year in the budget.
We made a recommendation for restraint in program spending of about 1.6% annually. That was the number advanced by our colleagues at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. Given the economic realities and the need to see some significant belt-tightening across the administration of the federal government, we feel this is a reasonable projection.
There is one other recommendation that we've made that I'd like to underline for the committee this morning. I think we're quite supportive of the federal government's direction in this particular area. We recommend that you not decrease in any way transfers to the provincial governments. We've just come through a provincial election here in Ontario. One of the key issues in the provincial election and in the federal election last spring is the health care portfolio. In the community we come from, the per-resident funding for hospitals, mental health, and senior services is significantly lower than the provincial average. We are a growing community, and the transfers, the funding for health care in our community, has not matched our population increases, so the per-resident funding is somewhat lower than in the rest of Ontario. Any cuts in federal transfers would be detrimental to our community, so we'd like to send a strong message that we would not like to see cuts in this area. Minister Flaherty has indicated in his last three budgets that he won't be doing this. And we would strongly support him in that area.
Another area that's a huge priority for our membership is the need to cut red tape for business. We heard this in the federal campaign and we also heard it quite strongly in the provincial campaign. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce made a submission to the Red Tape Reduction Commission earlier this year. They identified cutting red tape in taxation as a key priority. They pointed out that the per-employee cost of compliance in the taxation area for small business is significantly larger than for larger business. I think those are some areas we'd like to address. We support Minister Flaherty's initiative with the establishment of the commission to review this area, and we look forward to the recommendations coming out of this process.
Our third recommendation has to do with infrastructure. We would like to see some significant investments in post-secondary education. We have a board of directors of 17 to 20 people. Three of those people represent our local post-secondary institutions: Conestoga College, the University of Waterloo, and Wilfrid Laurier University. They have been quite supportive over the last number of years in telling the chamber that we need to support, as a community, investments in the post-secondary institutions across this province and country, particularly bricks and mortar. There were some earlier discussions on the last panel about the need to increase our skills and training capacity. From our perspective in our community, we've identified this as being a priority as well. Our initial way to address this concern is by investing in campuses, bricks and mortar, buildings, so that universities have the capacity to meet the training demands of our community and communities across Canada. Economic circumstances may be difficult this year, but over the longer term we would like to see the investments in the post-secondary system.
Thank you, Chair.