Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think we should oppose this motion for two reasons.
The first is that this is a federal program. It's a program run by the Government of Canada, and to avoid a patchwork of programs across the country that have different standards and different criteria, I don't think we should agree to have it transferred to provinces that so wish it.
The second reason we should oppose this motion is that the original program, the old program, had some problems, and we had to change it. The new program is a significant improvement over the old. As my colleague Mike Lake just mentioned, a lot of major international companies that make billions of dollars a year received public money to hire staff.
I see the list here. Here are just a couple of examples that were pointed out to me by the government: over $10,000 for Rogers Television; over $24,000 for Ford Motor Company of Canada; over $20,000 for Bacardi International, which is a major manufacturer of libations. Clearly these companies should not be receiving public money to hire people. They're for-profit companies that have a very good bottom line, and the money should be better targeted toward not-for-profit companies.
In fact, what the new program will do is target most of the funding to not-for-profit organizations. Significant moneys have been allocated for the government to do that. In excess of $80 million this year will be allocated to companies to hire summer students. Specifically, the latest budget allocates $77.3 million for not-for-profits, and $8.6 million for public sector employers and private sector employers with fewer than 50 employees, so as to remove the criteria that allow a company with 50,000 employees, or over 100,000 employees, like some of the larger multinationals, to take public money to hire people when in fact they can do it on their own dollar.
For those two reasons, I think we should oppose this motion.