Good afternoon. My name is Jocelyn Bamford. I'm the president and founder of the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada. I am also vice-president of our family business, Automatic Coating Ltd., in Scarborough, Ontario, where we employ 90 people and own over four patents in the corrosion coating arena.
For the past few months, I've attended many committees and round tables on the pandemic recovery. Here is what I have observed. Many panels are made up overwhelmingly by NGOs, academia, not-for-profit associations and unions. Actual business owners, those people who actually employ people, represent just a tiny voice. This means that the voice of those who are paying for everything, for every government program, is under-represented. The makers' voices are drowned out by the takers'.
Please be aware of this when you're forming your policy. Those of us who had to show up every single day to keep the economy going are relegated to being told how we should open up by those who could stay safely at home during the height of this pandemic. This is wrong. The 92% of businesses in Canada who employ 100 people or fewer need to be heard on how the government should open up the economy.
First of all, we need to get back to work. We cannot sustain our country and our economy if we don't. We are at the highest level of unemployment in 38 years. Those of us who continued to work, as we were deemed essential, learned quickly how to adapt to ensure that our plants could continue to operate safely. We acted quickly to secure and manufacture PPE. We implemented new policies and procedures. We hired extra staff for cleaning. We purchased an abundance of cleaning products. Some business owners even installed tents on their front lawn so they could social-distance during breaks and lunches. We installed plastic barriers. We invented new head and face protection for all of our employees, all this while the federal government was trying to call the very thing that was protecting our people—plastics—toxic.
We are incredulous that in this time of extra cost, the federal government would heap more cost on manufacturers in terms of doubling the carbon tax. It seems as though the federal government is trying to do everything in its power to drive us out of business.
What do we need to do? Canada needs to bring back manufacturing. For the past three years, since its inception, the coalition has been warning all levels of government that there would be catastrophic effects from policies designed to drive both manufacturing and the resource sector out of the country. Those two sectors are completely interwoven together. The lack of PPE and medical supplies in our country demonstrates this. Imagine what would happen during the next crisis if we not only didn't have PPE but we also didn't have resources to operate our hospitals.
What do we need to do in order to return our economy to full operations? We need testing. This includes rapid COVID testing, faster turnaround time in testing and antibody testing. Health Canada needs to rapidly roll out these tests. One of our members who services refrigeration units had to quarantine the entire service staff due to a false COVID scare. Rapid testing could have prevented this nine-day waste of productivity for the entire team. This is what needs funding.
What we do not need is to have the federal government follow the failed Ontario green energy policy. This policy made electricity four times the North American rate for electricity due to subsidies of expensive and inefficient wind and solar, carried disproportionately by class B industrial users in the form of a global adjustment charge. In fact, one of my members just received a bill for $200 of electricity and a charge of $20,000 of global adjustment. It's these types of bills that push companies out of Canada. Carbon tax will be to fuel what global adjustment was to electricity in Ontario. It makes us uncompetitive, especially when you have products coming in from other jurisdictions that don't have these costs.
In addition, small and medium-sized businesses need more support from the Canadian International Trade Tribunal. Canadian companies must compete with foreign-dumped steel and other products. The CITT, the organization that's to guard against this, seems many times to ignore this. When they do call out unfair trade practices, the federal government overrules the CITT, as in the LNG Canada project. SMEs are not only shut out of North American large projects due to “buy America” policies, but we're also shut out of Canadian large infrastructure projects. We saw that again this week with Atlas Tube being left on the sidelines for a $200-million Alberta solar project, which instead went to a Chinese company. Canadian companies should not have to compete with subsidized foreign companies in our own infrastructure projects.
The coalition has signed on with the Canadians for Responsible Recovery, www.responsiblerecovery.ca—