Thank you.
The Burnaby Board of Trade represents roughly 1,100 member businesses, entrepreneurs, and organizations from Burnaby and across the lower mainland. We work at making business better by providing our membership with insightful leadership, advocacy, education, and a platform for collaboration.
We're also unique in that we approach all issues with a triple bottom line perspective. We consider economic, social, and environmental factors whenever we consider an issue.
In repeated consultations with our members, both explicitly to inform our pre-budget submission and through other unrelated outreach such as our innovative business walk programs, we've seen a consistent focus on a few key priorities from our members, which all impact the issue of productivity. These issues are transportation and mobility, employee attraction and retention, housing and real estate costs, and business investment. It is these areas on which we suggest the federal government focus in budget 2018 as a way of improving the productivity of our workers and businesses.
In the area of transportation and mobility, as Burnaby is a dense urban city of more than 220,000 people, transportation and the efficient movement of goods, services, and employees is of significant interest to the business community. Traffic and congestion cost businesses both time and money by delaying the movement and delivery of their products and their workers.
While commuters and drivers of personal vehicles often have options for different travel methods or travel times, businesses often do not. Our manufacturers can't deliver product by bus. Continuing the government's investment in both rapid transit and major transportation infrastructure would be the most direct way for budget 2018 to achieve tangible improvements in efficiency and productivity in the movement of our goods, services, and people. If employees are stuck in traffic and congestion is slowing down the movement of products and services around our region, productivity suffers. As a recent Canadian Automobile Association study found, congestion in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal is responsible for adding nearly 88 million hours annually to Canadians' commutes. That's over 10,000 years' worth of extra time every year that drivers in those cities are stuck in their vehicles.
In the area of employee attraction and retention, businesses tell us that attracting and retaining staff is a major issue, and having vacancies and staff turnover can be detrimental to productivity. Our members also tell us that government can play a role in helping business by ensuring people can access training for the skills we need in our workforce and by ensuring our immigration system allows us to attract the kind of talent our economy needs.
That said, many of the existing training programs still require a considerable investment from businesses, making it difficult for companies operating with limited capital or cash flow to avail themselves of these programs. In particular, in many of the high-skill sectors, there is significant competition for talent, which creates disincentives for employers to invest in training for employees who can easily move to competing firms. A focus on working with the provinces and territories on delivering innovative and effective training programs that can overcome these barriers, such as the unemployed stream of the Canada jobs grant here in B.C., would be welcome in budget 2018.
In regard to immigration, we have long advocated for a focus on skill-based immigration and suggest that initiatives such as the temporary foreign worker program should be targeted at filling the unique skills gaps our businesses are experiencing.
Regarding housing and real estate costs, the rapid rise of real estate costs in our urban centres, and increasingly in suburban and exurban areas, is now a business issue. Last year, for the first time, we saw a considerable number of businesses raise this issue as a concern and cite it as responsible for rising business costs, increasing lease and rent rates, and the difficulty in attracting workers from outside of the region to move here. Further action is warranted by the federal government in budget 2018 to work with its provincial and municipal counterparts to address the rapid increase in housing prices and the decrease in affordability through a focus on both supply and demand factors.
Business investment is crucial to both innovation and economic growth. When companies invest in improvements to the tools, equipment, and infrastructure their workers use, it increases their productivity, spurs innovation, and drives economic output. However, many businesses can't justify or accommodate a big upfront investment. Programs would be welcome to offset that initial capital outlay or speed up the recovery of that investment through savings or capital cost depreciation.
In our own efforts to encourage businesses to make investments to increase their environmental sustainability, we have seen first-hand the difficulty many have in making initial investments if the benefits take too many years to accumulate. Often small businesses have limited cash flow or lack the capital to justify or accommodate a significant upfront expense, even if it will have benefits and will pay for itself in the long term.
Budget 2018 should build on current government actions that encourage and incentivize investment in new equipment, technology, machinery, and software, which help boost the competitiveness and productivity of our local firms. Budget 2018 should also specifically look at creative ways of helping businesses overcome potential upfront financial barriers to making these kinds of capital investments.
We feel that proactive approaches that encourage and incentivize business investment are a far better approach than are punitive measures, such as the proposed changes to the taxation of private corporations, and, especially in this context, the proposed restrictions on holding passive investments within a business. We should look for ways to empower businesses to invest in innovation and productivity and not put barriers or potential barriers in the way of that kind of investment.
Thank you for the opportunity to share our thoughts and those of our members with the committee today.