Thank you, Mr. Chair, and committee members. Thank you for inviting us to present our recommendations for budget 2013.
My name is Brad Severin, and I am the chair-elect of the Alberta Chambers of Commerce.
Our organization represents 126 chambers of commerce, representing 23,000 businesses. We are Alberta's largest business organization.
In submitting information for your July budget survey, we touched on numerous topics. For the purposes of this presentation, I will highlight three priorities, all of which relate to Canada's changing demographics and business realities. These topics involve enhancing foreign worker programs, encouraging older workers to remain in the labour force, and reinstituting severance transfers to RRSPs.
I'll begin with foreign workers and their importance to sustaining Alberta's economy. The growing labour shortage is a constraint to our province's, and therefore our country's, economic growth. The Alberta government estimates that by 2019 Alberta will have 114,000 more jobs than workers. The shortfall takes into account interprovincial migration, immigration, and greater labour force participation by underutilized segments of our population.
The temporary foreign worker program was established to serve temporary labour needs for both skilled and unskilled employees. Many Alberta businesses rely on this program, especially for unskilled workers in the industrial, agricultural, and retail sectors, as they offer a stable, diligent workforce.
Because temporary foreign workers are vital to sustaining our economy, employers want to ensure the program continues to operate as efficiently as possible. The Alberta Chambers of Commerce appreciates the steps the Government of Canada has recently taken to improve the system, and today we are offering suggestions that will make it even more efficient and reflective of our businesses' labour needs.
We believe the temporary foreign worker program should be used to address immediate shortages while enabling foreign workers to use other immigration programs for permanent residency. Specific concerns Alberta employers express with the temporary foreign worker program relate to labour market opinion approvals declined without justification, the lack of an appeal mechanism for Service Canada decisions, changing application processes and vital information, national occupancy classification codes that do not adequately recognize and differentiate between skill levels, and barriers to transitioning temporary foreign workers to permanent residency.
Our recommendations in this area are highlighted in the pre-circulated brief, and we draw your attention to those.
Another pool of labour that greatly interests Alberta businesses is its older workers. As evidenced in a 2011 Statistics Canada study, Canadians are delaying their retirement. The Alberta Chambers of Commerce is keen to ensure the Government of Canada takes all measures within its powers to remove tax and other disincentives that discourage older workers from continuing to work past the age of 65, because many Canadians clearly want to do so.
Federal retirement programs and policies such as the Canada Pension Plan, tax-assisted private savings policies, and part-time pension policies do not reflect our country's current demographic retirement and life expectancy realities.
We are recommending policy changes that address each of these realities. We recognize that these recommendations will have fiscal implications; however, with increasing life expectancies, removing financial disincentives for older workers to participate in the labour force could increase the age at which people choose to retire, thereby increasing federal employment income tax revenues and reducing overall government retirement program liabilities.
We first recommend that the Government of Canada expand the current 60-70 age range at which people are eligible to access their CPP benefits to 60-75, and provide progressive deferral incentives for individuals who access the pensions during the newly expanded range.
Second, we recommend that the government amend RRSP policies to provide greater flexibility for Canadians to save for retirement after age 72.
Third, we recommend that the government develop harmonized and flexible part-time pension policies that provide incentives for Canadians to transition out of the labour force after age 65.