Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and honourable members. Thank you for inviting us here today.
We submitted a written submission to the committee, and it had at least 10 significant issues in it. I don't propose going through all of them, certainly not in five minutes. Let me speak about two that we think are of pre-eminent importance.
Regarding the first, you'll have heard a lot from witnesses about a skilled workforce. I can't say how often this issue comes up in our normal work. Employers of all kinds are constantly speaking to us about the problems in finding skilled workers. No matter what sector you're in—high tech, natural resources, the services sector—the human resource problem is very much with us.
To the credit of the current government, in its election campaign and since, it's had ambitious ideas and laid out some plans and initiatives that we're very interested in. We congratulate you for taking them on and we'll pledge the support of the membership of the Chamber of Commerce to all of the heterodox ideas that are being talked about with regard to internships and various other mechanisms to transition people from education into employment.
It's a maddening thing that Canada has one of the highest-educated populations in the world, but we have an extremely long lag time for young people before they enter the job market, even if they have a very good degree. All of the tools for work-enabled learning are worth exploring. As I said, it's to the government's credit that you're taking that on.
On a less positive tone, the election came along in the middle of a huge reform in Canada's immigration system. It was really the largest reform that had been undertaken in decades, with the creation of something called the express entry system. I can sum it up by simply saying that whereas in the past, our governmental bureaucracy reviewed the job needs of the economy and then calibrated the immigration system accordingly, under the express entry system the government sought to ask the economy itself, asking employers what they would like, what they need, and then introduced those factors to the immigration stream.
Unfortunately, in the frenzy of the politics around temporary foreign workers the government found itself actually cracking down a little bit, so that we now have the express entry system limping along, trying to come into being, but still having oversight and a lot of fairly heavy government restraint on the use of workers coming in as immigrants. Of course, we also have a lot of unfinished business with regard to temporary foreign workers.
I personally know of major investments, some of the largest investments in Canadian history, that are hesitating today because of uncertainty with regard to their ability to get workers and their ability to source workers from outside of Canada if they can't find the necessary skills in Canada in short order. We believe that Canada is bleeding from a wound that we've inflicted upon ourselves.
Very quickly, because I know your time is short, I want to also talk about the other major preoccupation that we have, which is infrastructure. The government is talking about major programs in infrastructure. We're very strongly supportive of that. Infrastructure is a highly virtuous investment in our opinion. Not only do you get an excellent multiplier for the investment—I think I used 1.7 or 1.75—but you also get a legacy of improved facilities that are usually environmentally beneficial, and there's certainly a quality-of-life benefit.
The trick, however, is to make sure those investments are economically empowering. There's a great demand on you for various social investments. I'm not for one minute going to say that many of them are not worth making; however, with the kind of money we're talking about, we should be capable of megaprojects. The kind of money that will be talked about in the budget, that was talked about in the campaign, is nation changing. It's new power from British Columbia into Alberta to get out of coal-fired plants. It's significant reduction in congestion in the two most congested cities in Canada. It's a whole series of efficiencies to allow exporters to get to the markets and make us all wealthy. So we're very strong supporters of that.
I would also say that infrastructure is extremely egalitarian. It is true that it benefits big business. It is also true that it benefits ordinary workers. If you're fixing furnaces and you cannot get around to various jobs around Toronto because you're spending your time in traffic, you're harmed. If you're a new arrival in Canada driving a taxi cab and you cannot get around to the jobs, you're harmed as much as the president of a major corporation.
We strongly support that, but we do think it needs a considerable amount of rigour in the application of the monies to ensure that.... Even $60 billion can be frittered away.