Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning. CUPE is very privileged to represent just over 600,000 Canadians, people delivering front-line public services from coast to coast to coast. Our members don't just deliver these services; they depend on them as accessible, affordable, and quality features of our lives, and they're hit twice by restraint measures if they occur: they lose their jobs and they lose the services.
The average salary for a CUPE member is just under $40,000 a year. The value of public services in totality that each Canadian receives is worth about $17,000 a year. Three years after the financial crisis struck, we continue to be in very difficult economic times. We ask this question: are we any further ahead? Further recessions are imminent or arguably under way in the United States and Europe, thanks in large part to austerity measures, little progress on financial sector reform globally, more bank failures, particularly in Europe in the last week, and bailouts.
We still have in Canada officially 1.3 million Canadians out of work and many more who have given up looking for a job. We've had slow job growth and negative real wage growth since the recession hit three years ago. Household debt—and I know Mr. Carney has spoken to this committee about this—is at record levels: 150% of income. Public services are being cut and workers are being laid off while government maintains planned corporate tax cuts, which are adding $0.5 trillion in excess cash that, for the most part, corporations are hoarding and not investing at this point in time.
The sale of luxury goods going up and dependence on food banks rising speaks to rising inequality in our country. Supply-side economic policies of corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and cuts to public spending haven't worked. We have a demand-side problem, worsened by structural inequality. The International Monetary Fund, and recently the Conference Board of Canada, raised alarm about rising inequality hurting economic growth in Canada.
Warren Buffett and many others are calling for government to raise taxes on those with the best ability to pay. Alex Himelfarb, a former Clerk of the Privy Council, wrote in The Globe and Mail on the weekend about that very subject matter. No wonder people are fed up and increasingly taking to the streets around the world. We need job growth, and workers also need decent real wages and services. We don't need government policies interfering with free collective bargaining rights. That will make labour relations worse in our country. If workers don't have a voice and are constantly threatened by strong-arm measures favouring employers, they can't be expected to work productively.
Austerity measures and federal spending cuts announced in the last budget were a mistake. We need to sustain and expand services, jobs, and spending, which are historically low in terms of the share of our economy. Public infrastructure investment was instrumental in stimulating economic recovery three years ago. Funding for future years has been depleted. We need additional infrastructure investment, better planned, with a long-term commitment.
I'll close with our three general recommendations. First, we need to sustain and expand services, jobs, and spending, in particular cancelling damaging federal program spending and job cuts from the last budget and protecting current rates of increase for social and health transfers to our provinces.
Second, we need to promote investment in sustainable growth and job creation, in particular making a long-term federal commitment to investment in public infrastructure, particularly public transit, to the tune of $18 billion needed over the next five years. We could start with an additional cent from the federal gas tax, which would be worth about $400 million, provided to municipalities to devote to public transit.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, we need to implement fair tax reform both to improve the functioning of the economy and to generate revenues to pay for public services. Here are two examples: set aside planned corporate tax cuts, and implement fair taxes on the financial sector—a financial transactions tax or a financial activities tax could generate about $5 billion a year in Canada.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We look forward to any questions.