Bonjour mesdames et messieurs. I will speak in English. While my children are fluently bilingual, my high school French is unfortunately not going to do more than get me into a bar fight. I with stick with English, with your indulgence and the greatest of respect.
Ladies and gentlemen, the difficulty in going fifth, behind a whole bunch of really smart people, is that all the good stuff has been taken. I'm going to be freewheeling my remarks a little bit more, and hopefully we'll keep it a little more conversational.
Let me start by saying thank you to all of you for your service to our country and for sitting on this committee. I know well what you are going through. I served as an MLA and cabinet minister in the province of British Columbia for two terms, and actually I sat on the provincial version of this committee. I know what a privilege it is to get to know intimate little corners of the country that you never thought you'd find yourself being in, but I also know that it is not glamorous work. It is a grind. It is also very important work that you are doing, so thank you so much for doing that.
Member Sorbara, to you in particular, when I was first elected, I had three children under the age of five. I know well what it's like to be missing them, so thank you for that additional sacrifice that you are making.
Gentlemen, I stand before you as the CEO of a 130-year-old non-profit organization, which is a little different from many other kinds of chambers of commerce and boards of trade in the country. We have a very unique history, and we have a very unique approach to the world in our diversity, first and foremost with respect to the industries and the size of the companies that we represent.
We don't have any one dominant industry within the membership of our organization, which represents, through its membership, about one-third of the working people in the province of British Columbia. Eighty per cent of our members are small to mid-sized enterprises, many of them family-owned. That is the nature of business in British Columbia; we're a branch-office kind of place. Much of the wealth is generated by small family-owned businesses, multi-generational—of not a bad size in many cases, with a couple hundred employees. We are not a headquarters kind of town as Toronto is, for example.
We are also a very progressive organization. We are not your traditional “cut it, burn it, pave it” kind of free enterprise-oriented organization, although we are definitely a free enterprise organization. We build communities. Part of our history is that we are very focused on issues and have taken leadership positions on issues like homelessness in the Downtown Eastside, in which you'll find the poorest postal code in all of Canada. We were considered a tipping point in that particular conversation about seven or eight years ago, and likewise with mental health and addictions, housing affordability, etc. We have a much broader focus on how we do business, which will become pointed for the last part of my remarks.
Your invitation to speak before you today was greatly appreciated. Thank you. You asked me to focus on two areas: the productivity of our people, and the productivity and competitiveness of our companies.
With respect to our people, I would refer you to our December submission with respect to the budget, in which we spoke about a couple of key things lifted directly from a piece of work that our organization did a couple of years ago, which we refer to as the greater Vancouver economic scorecard. I will distribute copies to the committee.
Effectively, this was an unprecedented study that took two years. We did it in conjunction with The Conference Board of Canada. We studied this region as a region, as opposed to the 22 different municipalities that comprise it. We compared ourselves to 19 other jurisdictions around the world to figure out how we were doing. One of the areas that we came to where we needed some focus was indeed the area of human capital. I'll focus on that one area, because the scorecard itself is quite a comprehensive piece of work. In that we identified that we had to attract, develop, and retain human capital.
On the attraction side, we recommended, through our letter from December of last year, that you focus on areas of foreign credentials and recognizing them, on streamlining and revising the temporary foreign worker program, and in particular on those who are abusing it to make sure that abuse is curbed, so that the true intent of that program and the very important role that it plays in our economy in British Columbia is actually delivered. On the side of developing human capital, we focused a lot on areas of post-secondary education and the investments that need to be made there strategically, as well as on retraining people as appropriate, as we go through economic and industry changes in British Columbia—which have been remarkable in the last 25-odd years that I've had the privilege of living here.
On the retaining side of things, we focused a great deal on housing affordability. We're about 15th out of 17, unfortunately. We have a very low grade on that scorecard that I referenced. Our ability to attract and retain people under the age of 35 in the Lower Mainland is one of the worst in the world, to be quite candid. We found ourselves placed 15th out of the 17 jurisdictions that we studied.
We also inextricably linked housing affordability to investments in public transit. You will forever, from this point forward, see our organization do that. We will not talk about housing affordability without talking about investments in public transit, because in a modern metropolitan area such as we now live in, you can't actually separate the two. I'll come back to that very slightly in just a moment.
The only further comment I made on housing is that we urge the federal government to get back in the game. There was a time, 30-odd years ago, when the federal government played quite a role in a housing strategy that was federal and actually coordinated efforts with municipalities and provinces to address some of the challenges we're currently facing. Frankly, it could have prevented them a wee bit, too, particularly when it comes to issues of rental housing stock.
Turning to businesses for just a moment—I recognize that I'm now at the point of needing to turn the mike back to the committee—we had a variety of recommendations around the business competitiveness side of things, focused a lot on our geography and where we are: the Pacific gateway. We're very unique here. We are the St. Lawrence Seaway of the 21st century. I can get back into that in the Qs and As if you like.
We had a lot of focus on optimizing the supply chain; interprovincial trade; air competitiveness, specifically with YVR; the shared capitalization of airports and ports, which we strongly urge you to leave alone; and then finally, again, the investments in public transit south of the Fraser River in particular, and the Broadway extension as well.
But I could not sit in front of you without talking about the changes in small business taxation that are being proposed. I'll finish my comments on this.
In this context, I have to remind you—or educate you, if you don't know—that in British Columbia we're unique when it comes to the small business community. Over six out of 10 jobs in B.C. come from the small business community. That's the highest in Canada. Over a third of our gross domestic product comes from the small business sector. That is also the highest in Canada. We also support the highest number of women-owned or -operated entrepreneurial ventures in all of Canada. We have a very special relationship here with the small business community.
Perhaps poignant for this conversation, I had the pleasure of serving as the small business minister for this province for two years, so I know this stuff fairly well, and I'd be glad to carry on with any conversation in the Q and A.
We have seen something rather unique happen in our organization in the last three or four weeks. It's unprecedented. We are not a radical, dramatic, “step back on our heels” kind of organization. We're a pretty polite bunch. We get along with governments of all stripes and have done that for over a century and a quarter, but we've never seen our members react the way we've seen them react to the proposed changes that are on the table at the moment.
In the last three weeks, we solicited input from our members and anticipated about 5,000 emails to be generated. As of yesterday, we've produced over 25,620 emails to the members of Parliament in British Columbia through inviting small business members to make their views known. Of the two or three dozen issues that may exist out there on this particular conversation—it's fairly complex, and I recognize that—I want to focus on two. With that, Mr. Chairman, I'll wrap up.
First, I want to focus on the ongoing and fundamental disconnect that exists between the narrative of the federal government, specifically including our Prime Minister and our federal Minister of Finance, and the advice and the analysis of the experts: the accountants, the advisers, and the financial planners of hundreds of thousands of Canada's small business owners. These trusted specialists have repeatedly and emphatically stated that the federal government's assertions and assessments about who is impacted and how they're impacted are arithmetically inaccurate. It's not about politics. It's about math. They are factually incorrect, and they are simply wrong.
The second point pertains not to tax rates or any financial issue, but to the philosophy and the culture of entrepreneurship in Canada. At issue are the accepted, legitimate, and legal mechanics, not loopholes. Let's be very clear. These were deliberately designed to encourage human behaviour around creating jobs and employment in the small business space, but they have for decades defined the sacrosanct relationship between government and small business. It is not needed and it is not the government's place to further dictate how, what, and when a business owner pays people or puts money in or takes money out of a small business.
If the government continues down this path, what we risk compromising is the ability of small businesses to do what we do: to fund a local soccer team, a hockey team, Rotary Clubs, hospitals, hospices, soup kitchens, and food banks. Thus, and in conclusion, these changes not only threaten Canada's golden goose of the economy, but are also poised to undermine small businesses' role as a cornerstone of Canada's communities.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.