Finance Committee on Oct. 5th, 2018

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, Roberta.

Mr. Julian.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Thank you to all witnesses.

Mr. Summerville, I'd like to start with you. You're putting forward a very compelling argument that we need to prioritize providing supports for Canadians who are suffering from mental health issues. No family is immune. My family is part of that. I'm sure each member around this committee table could mention similar circumstances, so we have to take this seriously.

In British Columbia we have a historic establishment, the first Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions in the country. Judy Darcy is the minister. She shares New Westminster in the legislature with me. She is the provincial representative and I'm the federal representative. Do you not think that would be an important approach for the federal government to take, to put in place a federal ministry for mental health and addictions that then allows, really, that priority to be given to mental health issues?

I understand and agree with your push for funding, but don't we need to take it up even further so that we provide the supports to Canadians who need those supports?

[Dr. Chris Summerville]

That's an excellent question, because in fact, when the members of CAMIMH met this past week, Mental Illness Awareness Week, we did discuss such a role, that there would be a federal minister of mental health and addictions.

Mental health and addictions have to be addressed simultaneously, because they are both primary disorders. Unfortunately, they're not, in most cases, addressed simultaneously. It's not just about funding. It is also about a systemic change at the very heart of how we plan and deliver mental health and addictions services.

In light of the deprivation, the stigmatization, the ghettoization, the discrimination, etc., of people enduring mental illnesses, it's going to take a whole lot more than funding. In fact, we have to move toward a recovery-oriented mental health system. The current one treats symptoms. It oftentimes does not result in quality of life. Everyone around this table, according to how they have talked, is affected by mental health and addictions in the workplace.

So, yes, I would fully agree, as the CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, but I'm sure that all of the members of CAMIMH would be delighted to see such a position and role.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Thank you very much.

[Member speaks in Halkomelem]

I bring greetings from the traditional territory of the Qayqayt First Nation and the Coast Salish peoples.

Thank you for your work. It is very important what you're doing and a very compelling presentation when you talk about indigenous students who are travelling, on average, 2,000 kilometres from their home to study—in many cases much farther than that. The challenges that this represents, not just financial but the cultural challenges in moving from often small indigenous communities to a large city, are incredibly hard to often overcome, yet your success rate is phenomenal.

I certainly support your call for funding, but what are the other obstacles that the federal government needs to deal with in the next budget for post-secondary education for indigenous youth?

[Chief Roberta Jamieson]

I think it will be very important to support, as I mentioned, the call from indigenous organizations and from Universities Canada for more support for education. It's one thing to recruit students into university. It is another to retain them.

We've been doing some work. In fact, we had a round table in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago with Universities Canada, presenting the results of a survey. We took the temperature. We asked our students, over the three years since the TRC report was tabled, what had been happening, what was working and what were the challenges that remained.

Of course, financial barriers were number one, but beyond that, students wanted the institutions to embrace them as indigenous people. They want to see indigenous professors. They want to see curriculum. They want to see more than lip service being provided. Some of the universities, like the University of Winnipeg and in Thunder Bay, are requiring every student to take a course in indigenous relations so that they understand the shared history we all have of Canada.

We have to change the environment so that it's welcoming and supportive. Student centres are very high on the list. Students are far from home and they would like to be able to go somewhere where they can access elders' counselling. They want support from other students when they feel alone or they don't have access to ceremonies, for example. All of these things universities and colleges are really striving to provide, but they also need support.

Of course, the key is also going to be to change the K-to-12 completion. If we can get more students in that pipeline and support them when they reach.... We have a picture we use in our materials of students standing on a summit. Why? Because that's what you have to do to graduate from high school if you're an indigenous kid, and once you get there, I think Canada ought to be willing to provide you with bursaries to achieve your potential.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to move to Ms. Friendly.

Ms. Friendly, we've had a few decades of corporate tax cuts. We have a half a trillion dollars sitting in corporate bank accounts, yet we have as much inequality as we've seen in the last century. Don't we need to look at another approach in terms of competitiveness?

When we look at universal medicare, universal pharmacare, universal child care, those are elements that contribute to addressing this profound inequality that we're seeing. At the same time, we are providing benefits to our businesses and enterprises to help them be competitive. For medicare, the subsidy to our companies is $3,000 per employee, per year. Isn't child care the same kind of competitive advantage that we should be looking at?

[Martha Friendly]

I think that's precisely the point I'm making. In fact, child care is embedded in all of these agendas. It's embedded in the indigenous education agenda. It supports post-secondary students. It certainly supports women in every way that you can imagine.

I'm only talking about it as a program for adults, but that's only one of the two main facets of early learning and child care. The other one is that it's a program for children. We know that, as a program, early learning and child care is good. It's good for all children. It does provide more vulnerable children with more advantages—cognitive advantages, language advantages and social advantages—if it's well done.

When we talk about how it fits into a competitiveness agenda, there is specific research on how this helps women enter the workforce. There's research with regard to women of different socio-economic categories. It helps employers, because there aren't worker absences and things like that. You can add up all of the research, but it really is so that it is an impediment to a society, in a whole variety of ways that I don't think I have even enumerated here, if we don't have the kind of systemic approach to early childhood education and child care that really successful countries have developed. In this we're way behind most of the OECD. Today universal child care is accepted as a pillar of a modern society. Essentially, you can't have a modern 21st-century society unless you've paid attention to this program, which delivers multi-benefits to different people.

Again, we're not saying it's a one-size-fits-all program, but there are certain things that we know about it that are across the board. It needs to have good people working in it. They need to have decent salaries. They're almost all women, by the way. It needs to be in decent facilities. It needs to have enough people. It also needs to fit parents' schedules for work. I want to emphasize that. Unless you build it to be systemically funded as opposed to a user-pay market, which is what we have, you can't meet the needs of our precarious workforce with non-standard hours for workers and so on.

There are a lot of facets here. It's not a tiny little consumer item. How does it fit into a competitive society? There's a long list of ways. That's why it needs to be addressed systemically. Canada is lucky, in a way, because we haven't done much on this yet. There's lots of learning to be had from other places about what to do and what not to do.

I hope that answers your question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

We'll have to end it there.

Peter managed to stretch his seven minutes into 10, Mr. Sorbara, which means you get five.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

That's all right. Sometimes I don't mind sharing.

There was a comment made earlier by one of the presenters, I think maybe Roberta, about the juncture we're at in our country's history. I think it's important to sometimes step back from that and look at that holistically, because our work, I believe, on the indigenous file, if I can call it that—I don't think “file” is a fair term but that's the best one I can think of right now—was long overdue. I grew up in northern British Columbia, in a beautiful little town-city called Prince Rupert with a wonderful indigenous community. First peoples have been there for thousands of years. I think the work we are doing, both urban and non-urban indigenous, is groundbreaking and life-changing for many people.

Roberta, you made a comment about folks not having the network. They don't know who to call and stuff. I agree, and your organization provides that bridge and that education. I think that has to be applauded.

To Mr. Julian's comment, in the world we live in today, poverty rates throughout the world are falling. It's a fact. Look at the UN or OECD. In Canada we've put in place a number of pillars, including the Canada child benefit, in which we've put an additional $5 billion a year going to families, means-tested, across Canada. That is lifting literally 300,000 children out of poverty. You can go and look at the base data on it and differ on a few numbers here and there, but that's the trend. I think we are going the right way. We are making those investments that are making a difference in people's lives.

To the organization that has advocated for a national child care plan, the government did come to an agreement with every single province across the country in the first part of its mandate to do that. Ontario voters, unfortunately, in the last election rejected a province-wide day care plan. We need to think about why that happened. I'm an MP from the province of Ontario, and I need to think about why voters rejected that.

I'll stop there and ask questions.

To Indspire, how big can we get your program to become? Could you answer in 30 seconds, please; I only have five minutes.

[Chief Roberta Jamieson]

Thirty seconds...? Okay.

If we could fund the 130,000 students who will be on the horizon in the future, at $20,000 full funding, it could be huge. I'm a realist. That's why I'm saying 14,000 students annually is something I'm willing to take on and scale up to serve, and it could be done for an investment of $225 million over five years.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Thank you, Roberta.

I want to speak to you, Craig and Michael. I come from your world. I know it quite well. Competitiveness is a big thing. If I understand correctly, you were advocating not for a change in the top rate but for actually pushing the band higher in the top rate so that it would kick in at a higher income. Is that correct?

[Michael Smith]

We're advocating for both, for a change in the top rate and an increase in the band.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

But you would not be advocating for us to pursue the policies the U.S. has in terms of giving a deficit-to-GDP ratio of nearly 5%, would you?

[Michael Smith]

We don't think the approach the United States has taken is affordable at this point.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

We do want to ensure, and I've spoken to many tax practitioners and economists like Mr. Alexander, that we use what's called a “shotgun” approach, to use the hunting term, with regard to key measures, including, say, capital cost allowance, which you'd think would be effective.... I know that Jack Mintz disagrees because of the cash flow profile, but would you say that a capital cost allocation, or movement on that issue or policy proposal, would be effective?

[Michael Smith]

Do you mean increasing the capital cost allowance rates?

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Yes.

[Michael Smith]

I think that's helpful, but in a low-interest environment it's not as effective as some other tools. It also tends to be fairly industry-specific. Some industries are more capital-intensive than others.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Mr. Alexander, do you want to comment? I'll give you my remaining 20 seconds.

[Craig Alexander]

When I go abroad to pitch Canada and I try to get foreign companies to look at Canada as a destination, I basically pitch Canada in three areas.

Number one, come to Canada because we have the most educated, most skilled workforce in the advanced world. It speaks to a lot of the other comments you've heard today around skills and education.

Number two, come to Canada because you can serve the Canadian market but you can also tap the U.S. market. Up until just recently, that had been in question as we were renegotiating our free trade deal.

Number three, come to Canada because we tax capital at a lower rate than the United States does. I don't think we need to maintain the spread we had with the United States, but even a symbolic level of corporate taxation that is slightly below that of the United States.... I don't want to see a race to the bottom, but I do think that when we are trying to market Canada abroad to attract investment to create jobs and growth, having an overall tax rate that's slightly below the U.S.'s makes for a very strong pitch.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

I would encompass that because it relates to standing of living and it relates to paying for programs that the YMCA and YWCA want to fund. We need to look at and pursue policies on competitiveness. That closes the gap on the productivity per worker. I know this is not language you use every day, but it closes that gap in the productivity per worker in Canada versus the productivity per worker in the United States, because that's what determines, effectively, our standard of living.

[Craig Alexander]

Today's comments were focused on taxation, but in our submission we talked about how to accelerate growth, how to enhance regulation, how to create the workforce of the future and attract international capital to Canada to drive economic growth and competitiveness. The submission has a broader discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, all.

Ms. Alleslev, you have five minutes.

[Leona Alleslev]

Thank you.

I'd like to continue that conversation, if I could, because you talked tax, but you also, I think, talked about corporate tax and personal tax and the coordination with the provinces, because it's an entire tax envelope. Am I correct?

[Michael Smith]

Correct.