Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members. On behalf of the 665,000 CUPE members who work hard and deliver quality public services in communities across Canada, I thank you for the opportunity to be here.
I will summarize our main recommendations from the written report that CUPE has submitted to the committee, and I'll propose a bit of a twist on what the federal government can and should do to foster a competitive economic environment.
While it's not often appreciated this way, investment in public services plays a very important role in improving any nation's productivity and competitiveness. For example, it's been estimated that each dollar in public infrastructure investment generates an average of 17¢ per year in cost savings to Canadian businesses. Improvements in public health have increased productivity by at least 20% across OECD countries. A post-secondary degree increases individual earnings and presumably productivity by about 40%, and increased educational attainment is responsible for about 20% of overall growth in productivity in Canada.
Public investment in child care provides a social return of two dollars for every dollar invested. It significantly increases employment and economic output, and it pays for itself through increases to government tax revenue. Improved universal public pensions, which this government introduced at the beginning of its mandate, increase economic growth and generate more jobs, because they generate more demand for lower-income families. They improve productivity by reducing barriers to labour mobility during your working life.
For years we've been told that we need to lower corporate taxes, cut back public spending, deregulate, privatize and sign more international trade and investment treaties to create a competitive business environment, and that this would lead to prosperity for all of us. But what we've seen as a result of this policy prescription is a growing concentration of wealth at the top, dwindling productivity growth across industrialized nations and mostly stagnant wages in Canada. If you take out Alberta from wage growth, everyone else's wages have stagnated. Even organizations that have commonly advocated for the previous measures of lowering corporate taxes and deregulation are now starting to rethink their approach.
We think it's time for a new paradigm for productivity and competitiveness, one that focuses on people. For example, the research shows us that improvements in health care are responsible for about 25% of the increase in labour productivity in industrialized countries in recent decades. It makes sense that workers are more productive when they have their basic needs taken care of, when they have high-quality post-secondary education that they can afford, and when they don't have to worry about bridging the gap in their families' various care needs. This is why CUPE recommends several measures to restore the social wage in Canada, which will boost productivity, competitiveness and well-being for all Canadians.
The first is to establish a national, universal, single-payer pharmacare plan. We recommend that it be developed with the provinces and territories to make sure that all Canadians have access to safe and effective prescription drugs, with a national formulary and an arm's-length federal agency to manage the plan.
We recommend that the federal government commit to sufficient long-term funding to establish a national early-learning and child care framework, working with the provinces, territories and indigenous peoples, that will ensure universal, affordable, inclusive and high-quality child care for all Canadian families, and we recommend that in this budget, we invest at least a billion dollars toward that aim.
This is a bit of a higher goal. We recommend that you create a dedicated post-secondary transfer to the provinces, increasing transfer funding by 40%, and work with the provinces to reduce and eventually eliminate tuition fees for post-secondary education.
We recommend a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour. Again, that increases demand for low-income families. It supports local communities and increases economic output. We recommend a modernized fair wage policy that applies to all federal contractors. The federal government should set the standard in establishing fair wages and good work.
We recommend converting the Canada Infrastructure Bank to a truly public infrastructure bank that uses only the lower-cost public funding, and convert federal funding for more costly P3s into funding for publicly financed and operated infrastructure.
We recommend that you level the playing field for national businesses and tax foreign e-commerce companies like Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon and Google on the business that they do in Canada. It's only fair and it would generate about $1 billion in tax revenue.
Finally, I would submit to the committee that Trump's tax cuts are a short-term “sugar rush” for the U.S. economy and are likely to be either undone or result in significant cuts to public services in the U.S. Either way, there is no rush to follow the United States down a path that has seen large U.S. corporations continue a trend of short-term stock price boosting through, for example, share buybacks, and has not seen any significant investment in physical infrastructure or in workers.
I look forward to your questions.
Thank you.