Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for this opportunity to address you.
When we heard about the opportunity to write a brief on what we would like to see in the coming budget, we looked at all our current policies and what would be the most important. The thing we have been addressing since we first began this organization in 1893 is poverty. We're still battling poverty in Canada.
Understand, please, that poverty costs us all. It expands our health care costs. It burdens our policing services and diminishes our educational outcomes. Please look at the possibility of investing in our people, investing in our students.
The subcommittee on cities of the Senate's standing committee on social affairs put out an excellent report in December 2009: “In From the Margins”. We ask you to look at that report, please. Look at some of the recommendations, especially the first recommendation, which says to look at the possibilities of getting people out of poverty instead of maintaining them in their poverty. Give them a hand up out of poverty, rather than a hand-out to keep them poor.
We also would like to remind you that helping people to get out of poverty expands our economy and improves our productivity as a nation. It makes our labour force more flexible.
It expands our economy in a very uncertain world, and expanding our economy right now is probably the most important thing we have to face. The world economy being so very uncertain today undermines our economic growth.
We believe that reducing poverty in Canada and thereby expanding our economy would create very positive waves that would strengthen other nations, as well as Canada, and would improve the world itself.
We've had success with seniors in Canada. We've done very well in getting our seniors out of the deepest poverty. This is an excellent success story. Look at some of those same policies and programs that we've used for seniors and try to apply them to the very poor, and I'm sure we will see an improvement in this area.
The second recommendation we have is to increase support for education and skills development. Simply keeping our students in high school is only part of the problem. A big problem we face today is upgrading our education in a very high-tech and rapidly changing job market. This can be a major barrier. People can be almost qualified for a job, but not quite, and therefore they're kept out of that job. Employers are constantly complaining they cannot find employees who are fully qualified for a job, and these employers, many of whom are operating on a small margin, cannot afford to absorb the upfront cost of training.
So we're asking you to look at the possibility of the federal government subsidizing very short-term upgrading. We're not talking long-term upgrading at all. We're talking about upgrading that would take anywhere from a few hours to a few days and about maybe looking at it from the same standpoint that you have with the summer student program, in which an employer pays part of the cost and the federal government pays part of the cost.
But look at the benefits you would get. You would have a person getting into a job that actually exists, so you would have an employer who fills his job opening, and his company would be more productive, more competitive. The government would win because it would receive more income tax revenue. This is all very revenue positive.
The last thing we would ask is to please look at fairer taxes.