Thank you, Mr.Chairman.
It's nice to be back so soon. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to the committee today about parts 1 and 2 of the second budget implementation bill.
I'm going to keep my remarks very brief so maybe you'll catch up some time. I'm going to focus my remarks on the new penalties and criminal offences to deter the use, possession, sale, and development of electronic suppression of sales software that is contained in this bill.
I would also like to say that we are very supportive of the increase to the lifetime capital gains exemption, and of indexing it to inflation.
As we presented to the committee just this past Thursday, the restaurant industry is made up of thousands of small to medium-sized businesses—over 80,000 of them, as a matter of fact. They collectively serve 18 million customers every day and they provide rewarding jobs and careers for more than one million Canadians. Restaurants are the number one source of first-time jobs, and one third of us have worked in a restaurant at some point in our lives.
Many people have a romantic notion of opening their own restaurant, but reality hits when they see the incredibly long hours that restaurant owners must work, including holidays and weekends when the rest of us are out having fun. They give us a place to gather with friends, family, and colleagues, or sometimes just a place to grab a quick cup of coffee on the way to the office or a snack for the kids after school. They nourish our communities.
Restaurant owners are honest, dedicated business owners who pay their fair share of taxes and they want those who try to cheat the system to face the appropriate penalties.
A few years ago, the Quebec government addressed concerns around fiscal evasion by requiring restaurants to have sales recording modules on every cash register. This added a huge financial burden and red tape to thousands of law-abiding businesses to catch a few who were trying to cheat the system.
The Quebec government offered some financial assistance to business owners to install the black boxes. This was in response to concerns we raised, but restaurants had to bear the cost of the printers, as well as the cost to reconfigure their existing computer systems and point of sale registers. There is also the ongoing expense of maintenance of the equipment, which is considerable, along with ongoing training of staff to achieve compliance. These moneys could be put to better use creating jobs than penalizing companies that are already compliant.
Quebec's legislation also requires that every customer be provided with a printed paper receipt whether they want it or not. In businesses where speed of service is critical to success, this has resulted in significant service slowdowns, not to mention the environmental impact of millions of pieces of paper daily that customers don't want and leave behind.
We ask the federal government for a fairer and more targeted approach to fiscal evasion, an approach that would go after the source of the problem rather than the hard-working business owners who pay their taxes and operate in full financial transparency.
We support measures in Bill C-4 that introduce significant penalties and make it a criminal offence to create, supply, and use electronic sales suppression software. We think this is a smarter approach that gets at the root of the problem rather than unfairly targeting one industry. These measures will rightly target the underground economy, not the above-the-ground economy.
We look forward to working with government and the Canada Revenue Agency to ensure that our members are aware of these new measures.
Thank you.