Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I have some concerns about this motion from a couple of perspectives. If it's saying the budget should be amended to allow for what this motion calls for, then it would ask for an increase of funds and that would eventually become a confidence matter. If it's not asking for additional funds to cover the notion behind this motion, then it's taking away funds from others who might have received them, in the sense that you would be reducing the pool of recipients.
The recommendation states that:
Additional wage subsidies would be paid on the condition that sponsors share in the cost (e.g., for every $1 paid in excess of the minimum wage rate in each province/territory, the federal contribution would be 50% in the case of not-for-profit....
etc., and 25% for private.
So it's not necessarily an issue about minimum wage in that recommendation. It's saying that if the sponsor pays more, we top it up to a certain amount. If you have a fixed pool of resources and you top up and match the amounts proposed in this resolution, you're going to narrow the pool of recipients. I ask this committee if that's what we want to do at this time. Do we want fewer people receiving more, or do we want more people receiving less but have more people out there working?
It would seem, based on what Mr. Martin said and given the state of the economy, you would want to have more people working than not, more students working than not. The budget itself, of course, has added $20 billion over two years, as has been mentioned, and you want that to be going out to as many out there as you can.
This motion has some problems for me, because all it's going to do is either increase the budget amount, which is a confidence measure, and I'm sure Monsieur Lessard and his party will not support it. In fact, they won't support the additional $20 billion because they voted against it, as did Mr. Martin's party. But that being said, it would be a confidence matter.
If you're saying it doesn't affect the amount, then it's going to affect the number of students receiving it, and that's a pretty big step for this group to take. Instead of having 1,000 students, we will narrow it down to 800, because we want to give the effect of this formula of a dollar for a dollar, or a dollar for fifty cents, or twenty-five cents for a dollar. I'm saying that before we go down that path we should think about it.
I don't like the motion as it sits. If it were to say you want the government to take some things into account in arriving, through the formula, at where the $2 billion goes, that would be one thing, but to say we want more for less, a smaller number of people, I would have to oppose it.