Finance Committee on May 5th, 2020

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

My next questions are for Mr. Bolduc, from the FTQ.

What measures have been taken to protect workers' health and safety on work sites and in factories? Do you anticipate any health and safety issues?

What can the federal government do, within its jurisdiction, to ensure a safer workplace for workers?

[Denis Bolduc]

Thank you for your question, Ms. Koutrakis.

From the beginning of the health crisis, any of our actions on a potential return to work have been focused on workplace health and safety.

With respect to construction, we've taken steps to ensure that workers have access to water for handwashing at the work sites. We've also ensured that they have access to protective equipment and that they follow physical distancing protocols. Even that was a little difficult.

When we're talking about a return to work in this context, the priority is to protect workers. By protecting workers, we're also protecting their families, friends and acquaintances.

As for the second part of your question, the federal government will have to help the provinces get more protective equipment, since a lot is needed. The entire world is looking for masks, gowns and face shields. The federal government needs to step up and help the provinces obtain protective equipment.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, all.

We'll go to Mr. Ste-Marie for one question, Mr. Julian for one question, Ms. May, and then two others.

Mr. Ste-Marie, go ahead.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Chair, the message may not have gotten through, but my colleague Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe will speak now and again during the next two and a half minutes allocated to the Bloc.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Okay, Alexis, go ahead.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

I thank all of the witnesses for their presentations.

My question is for you, Mr. Bolduc. I imagine that a number of the employees you represent had not accumulated enough hours before the crisis to qualify for EI. However, after the crisis began, these people became eligible for the CERB. When the CERB ends, these people will be in a weird situation. What do you think Ottawa should do to help them? Should it renew the emergency benefits or review the EI rules over the long term?

[Denis Bolduc]

That's an interesting question. Earlier I mentioned certain sectors for which the government will have to extend the CERB.

We've been calling on the government for years to completely overhaul the EI regime. I'm talking about calculating the benefit period, the benefits themselves, the dispute process and the entire process to appeal decisions. We have a lot of ideas about this, but the EI regime will absolutely have to be reviewed.

Furthermore, we've been critical of the so-called black hole for many years. Workers in seasonal industries like the fishing, hotel and tourism industries, are worried about falling into that black hole and ending up with no income and no EI. We have suggestions to remedy this situation, and it would be important to do so.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bolduc.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Julian, you're on.

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

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to go back to Mr. Neumann.

You spoke earlier about a new industrial strategy that we need to be putting into place in Canada, and Mr. Wilson referenced this as well. We need to make sure that we have manufacturing jobs here in Canada and finally, after decades of waiting, put into place an industrial strategy. How important is that and what are the key components of that industrial or manufacturing strategy that we need moving forward?

[Ken Neumann]

Thanks, Peter.

First of all, what I said earlier with regard to manufacturing is that we have a [Inaudible--Editor] time to reset. If you look at the history of the governments of the day, we don't have a long-term strategy when it comes to manufacturing.

I'll just share some statistics with you. If you look at the past 20 years, GDP from industrial production has essentially been stagnant. Manufacturing today accounts for about 10% of Canada's GDP, down from 16% in 2000. If you go back to the 1950s, we were at 30% of the GDP. You want to compare that with Germany, where manufacturing today is in excess of 60% of GDP.

We've not really focused on it, and here's our opportunity. We've heard a lot of discussions in regard to procurement. I see it every day with the industries we work in. We work in steel, we work in aluminum, we work in forestry. Why is it that we still cut our logs and put them on a ship and send them to Asia, and they come back to us as some piece of furniture or whatever you may have? Why are we still using steel from China that is going to go to Site C, or to the LNG, or to build a bridge in Montreal or a bridge in British Columbia?

There's no reason, when we talk about “Built in Canada”.... We should be proud of the kind of work we do and the abilities we have. We have a strong steel industry. We have an aluminum industry, we have a forestry industry. The fact is that this is an opportunity.

We can talk about just last week. We are just in the process of dealing with the CITT, where someone is trying to get rid of an order from the CITT on solar panels. They're coming from China. Give me a break. The reason they're coming from China is that they're cheap. The fact is that we can produce them here in our own backyard.

It's as simple as being able to build windmills. You talk about retrofit, you talk about green energy, and that's what it's all about, but you must have a strategy from the leaders of the government to basically say that we're going to get into manufacturing to do these things. Then we wouldn't be in the situation we are with the PPE.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you very much, Ken and Peter.

Ms. May, you can have one question.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Thank you. It's actually a perfect segue from what Mr. Neumann was just saying. I have a question for Mr. Wilson along the same lines.

It seems to me that after this pandemic, we have a real opportunity to rethink our economic strategy as a country. We've been very embedded in the notion of exporting raw products. We know that we've had a crisis in productivity and competitiveness, and the more we export manufactured goods, the better our competitiveness and productivity indexes will be.

I'd like to ask Mr. Wilson if he sees an opportunity to rethink how we imagine our economy from raw resource exports to more manufacturing and value-added products.

[Mathew Wilson]

Thank you very much, Ms. May, for that question. I think we spoke on this issue before, so I think you know that the answer is yes, we should be rethinking all of these things.

The bottom line is that we don't have to produce everything in Canada for ourselves. I think some people may be going a little bit too far on those things, but we could be doing a lot more in this country. We could be upscaling things. Even in the development of our natural resources, it's not just about turning logs into lumber that goes into homes. It's about the technology that goes into harvesting the logs and producing the timber in the first place.

We're so focused on just a narrow niche of what is actually happening in manufacturing and value-added activities. There's a wide range of opportunities out there, and maybe I'll talk about two. I've mentioned a lot of areas of manufacturing strategy in this country, but maybe I'll mention a couple.

First, we need to focus on technology adoption. You mentioned the words “competitiveness” and “productivity”. We are laughably behind most of the rest of the world, and we need to do something about it. If you want to talk about productivity levels, the bottom line is we're so unproductive we can't compete with most of the people we're opening our trade agreements with, and that is a big problem. Our share of globalized trade continues to fall because we're not competitive. It simply costs too much—and we're unproductive—to make things here. We need to fix those types of elements.

Second, we should be targeting areas where we have natural advantages, not trying to create brand new things that don't exist that we have no reason to be involved in. We should be looking at what our resources look like, from human capital right through to our natural resources and how we can harness those better. I'm in southern Ontario right now, in Guelph, in the heartland of the industrial and technology sector of Canada, and those two sectors barely talk to each other, yet manufacturing is going to be driven by technology as we go forward and is largely being driven by it today. There's so much more we can do to drive scale-up and innovation in those sectors.

Maybe I'll stop there, because I know we're running out of time, but it's absolutely true, and I hope the government actually gets around to doing something about it. There have been a lot of conversations and a lot of plans written, but not enough implementation of them a lot of the time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you all very much.

We'll go to Mr. Cumming and wrap it up with Mr. Fragiskatos.

[James Cumming, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

You'll be happy to know, Mr. Chair, that I'm going to direct my question to Mr. Fash, who's been sitting there quite patiently.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Good.

[James Cumming, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I spent the best part of my career in the construction and development business and I know it's a grind-it-out tight margin, a tough, tough business. I know, Scott, you've done some work on red tape and regulation. Can you talk briefly about how much of an impediment that is to productivity and profitability for the firms you represent?

[Scott Fash]

Thank you very much. It's no problem; I understand there's a lot to talk about, so I do not feel bad that I did not get further questions.

It's been a substantial focus, not only for us but obviously for the Government of Alberta, to reduce red tape. What I keep hearing from a lot of the builders who have been around for years and years is that it used to take two weeks to get a permit and now it's a minimum of three months. In Alberta or in most of Canada, your construction season only lasts about four or five months, so a three-month delay in getting a permit is a killer.

As building codes get more complex and buildings get more complex, as processes get more complex, these things seem to be just adding more weight. We have new policies and codes at the federal level, then the provincial level, then the local level. It's basically just this pancaking of policies over and over that address the same problems and make things more complex.

Our view and our hope is that coming out of this process, we'll be able to get into a bit of a new normal, or we can maybe rethink some of these things and figure out how we can be a little more strategic in the policies we really want to focus on and those that maybe we don't need to worry about as we try to battle through this recovery.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you both very much.

Just on that point, Scott, I was thinking about something somebody said earlier. Part of our problem in government, from my own perspective, is there's too much thought that goes into process and never enough into results. We should be trying to get results rather than process.

We're turning to Mr. Fragiskatos. Go ahead, Peter.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. The question is actually for Mr. Fash as well.

Mr. Fash, you gave a great presentation and you've articulated a number of different ideas.

What is one key that we can take away as a committee and from there recommend to the government? What key thing do you think is of paramount importance? What would you underline as the most important issue for you and your sector right now? You can focus on Alberta if you wish, but I think making it even more general by looking at the country as a whole would be beneficial. I think a lot of the issues you've raised are standing out for many home builders right across Canada.

[Scott Fash]

I think consumer confidence is going to play a huge role in the ultimate recovery of my sector in particular, but I know in many others as well.

Past that, even prior to COVID-19, when I would meet with businesses and ask them what the big thing was that they thought was hurting their business, they kept coming back, over and over, to the mortgage stress test and the mortgage rules. When I prepare an advocacy strategy or put things together for annual general meetings, that is the one item they all want to talk about. It is the item they believe has impacted their business more negatively than anything else.

I know CHBA nationally has done a ton of work with MPs from multiple parties in trying to come up with some solutions. What I hear often from those members is that if we're not going to fix or adjust it federally, they would at least like to see some sort of regionalization that understands or respects the fact that the housing market in Alberta is very different from markets in other major centres across Canada, specifically when this relates to housing affordability.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Okay, thank you both.

I do have one quick question to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Ben, for whatever reason, I think there's an awful lot of misunderstanding about your industry and the achievements you have made by way of technology.

You said that you could help lead the recovery. You also said that what you really need is recognition and support for industry as part of the solution. Do you want to expand on that a little? Then we'll close.

[Ben Brunnen]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

In terms of leading the recovery, we are a substantive contributor to Canadian GDP across all provinces, so finding ways to encourage and attract investment in our industry will help substantially in levering growth for Canada, for the Canadian economy, and pulling us out of this very deep contraction, from an economic perspective.

In terms of recognition for our industry, we have undertaken some of the most significant investment technology—