Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Oct. 17th, 2017

[The Chair (Mr. Robert Oliphant (Don Valley West, Lib.)), Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I call to order this meeting, which is the 75th meeting of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

We are considering our order of reference, which was received in November, on a study of immigration to Atlantic Canada, known as motion number M-39.

We welcome our witnesses, who are here to provide their expertise and their thoughts on the fairly critical and important question of attracting and retaining immigrants to Atlantic Canada.

With us today we have two witnesses joining us by video conference, and Mr. Poschmann, who is here in person.

I would like to start with the video conference—and the committee will get to know me—because I've had it disappear from time to time, so let's begin there.

We're going to start with Mr. Dykstra, who is with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, for about seven minutes.

[Reint-Jan Dykstra, Director, Canadian Federation of Agriculture]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members, for this opportunity to speak on immigration in Atlantic Canada. As a representative of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and an immigrant myself, I'm pleased to discuss how critical an effective immigration system is to agriculture and Canada's rural communities.

The CFA is Canada's largest general farm organization, representing 200 farm families. Canada's agrifood sector contributes $108 billion to Canada's GDP while employing one in eight Canadians.

Canadian agriculture was actually identified as a key growth sector in this year's federal budget, which is targeting growth in agrifood exports to $75 billion by 2025. This growth is possible only if the agrifood sector continues and can overcome the chronic labour shortages constraining the sector.

A 2015 study conducted by the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council identified 59,000 vacancies across Canadian agriculture—a vacancy rate of 7%—while forecasting 114,000 vacancies by 2025, this despite increasing wages and decreasing unemployment in the sector.

These vacancies result in $1.5 billion in lost sales each year, while also making it harder to transfer farms to the next generation. The average farmer is over 55 years of age. Uncertain access to labour and a smaller pool of experienced workers make finding the next generation all the more difficult. Estimates suggest that over $50 billion of farm assets needs to change hands over the next decade. Finding the right people to continue farming is critical to continued growth in the sector.

Therefore, immigration is critical to the future of our industry.

First I would like to briefly discuss my own background to give you a better sense of where I'm coming from. We—my parents and younger brother—came to Canada in 1979, after exploring many avenues in Europe. The Netherlands was too small to allow for expansion to sustain three families. We started in Canada with one farm, milking 30 cows. Today, together with my wife Bethany and three of our four sons, we operate three farms and milk 300 cows while employing four full-time employees. We have experience in hiring and we know it is not easy.

For many farmers across Canada, the continued inability to recruit Canadian workers has required them to look abroad. This often requires access to international workers as a last resort when extensive efforts to find Canadians have failed. This occurs for a number of reasons.

Agriculture is located primarily in remote rural parts of Canada. This limits the availability of local labour, as rural populations continue to stagnate and, in many regions, decline.

My home province of New Brunswick is a clear example. New Brunswick's population has declined by half a per cent since 2011. Even in the previous five years, which saw a 2.9% population growth in the province, that growth was uneven across the province. While some southern New Brunswick cities and towns experienced double-digit growth, less populated communities in the north saw continued declines. This is particularly true of the youth, with many leaving the province for post-secondary school and not returning, posing a significant challenge for agricultural businesses.

The remote locations, combined with perishability and seasonality, create an extremely challenging labour environment.

This is why the CFA supports funding for the Canadian agriculture and agrifood workforce action plan, a multi-faceted strategy to improve access to our domestic workforce with a national career initiative while also improving access to international workers and new Canadians.

At this point, if Canadians are not available, farmers' only alternative is foreign workers, for both seasonal and full-time permanent positions. Despite approximately 50% of agricultural jobs being year-round, there is no clear pathway to permanent residency, because agricultural skills and labour needs are not prioritized within Canadian immigration programs. Express entry is geared towards high-skilled candidates, despite the pressing need for workers in the agrifood sector, who are generally considered low- or semi-skilled. While some food processing employees have come in through express entry, any chance of obtaining permanent residency was shut down in 2016 when job offers were reduced from 500 points to only 60. Combined with other skill requirements, any chance to bring in agriculture or agrifood workers through the program was lost.

At the same time, provincial nominee programs vary considerably. Some are open to farm workers, but most offer no avenue to permanent residency for our sector. The CFA strongly encourages this committee to expand its analysis across Canada, because the rural immigration issues facing Atlantic Canada affect agriculture and food across Canada.

On the Atlantic immigration pilot, one of the most pressing labour needs of the sector is for general farm workers, which are categorized as NOC level C. While they are eligible under the pilot, a lack of awareness amongst farm employers has limited the uptake, with provincial outreach focusing on higher-skilled professions.

Farmers also find it challenging to identify experienced farm workers who meet the education and language requirements, despite a wealth of motivated and experienced candidates. Many international farm workers, despite having extensive agricultural experience, do not have high school diplomas. At the same time, while they can often meet the language requirements for listening and speaking, a level 4 in writing and reading is rare because of the limited use of these skills in many farm settings. Limited uptake on the part of farm workers is directly tied to these challenges.

At the same time, there is a broader disconnect between new Canadians and the opportunities that exist in agriculture and in rural Canada. With settlement services primarily located in large urban centres, employment in agriculture is disconnected from many Canadians, particularly the recent influx of refugees, who often have agrarian backgrounds.

To address these challenges, the CFA proposes the following: first, given the industry's significant labour needs, identify agriculture as a target for the pilot and for broader immigration policy; second, introduce flexibility within eligibility criteria to accommodate unique agricultural skills requirements, which often extend beyond traditional education, while allowing for additional time to meet language criteria; and finally, implement the Canadian agriculture and agrifood workforce action plan as a long-term road map to address agriculture's chronic labour shortages.

Canada requires a long-term rural immigration strategy to ensure immigration policy can capitalize on rural employment opportunities. This begins with pilots like the Atlantic immigration pilot, but requires further support for industry-led pilot projects and research that can help integrate new Canadians by bringing settlement agencies together with agricultural stakeholders.

I thank you for your time.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jenny Kwan]

Thank you very much, Mr. Dykstra.

We'll go next to Mr. Campbell via video conference.

Mr. Campbell, you have seven minutes.

[David Campbell, President, Jupia Consultants Inc., As an Individual]

Thank you.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak before the committee. I am currently the president of a private economic development consulting firm here in New Brunswick, but I was previously the chief economist with the New Brunswick Jobs Board Secretariat. In that role, we spent an awful lot of time thinking about immigration, looking at the data, and trying to understand the best path forward. We had some influence in the Atlantic immigration pilot, and we think a lot of what was done under that program has been successful. We think there is potential for enhancing that even further.

I know that your committee has heard a lot of data, so I'm just going to zoom in on a couple of specific points that I want to raise, which you may or may not have heard yet.

The first is around the shrinking regional labour market. Across the Atlantic Canada labour market, the number of people working or looking for work peaked in 2012 and has been dropping ever since. Between 2012 and 2016, it's down by about 29,000. At the same time, the labour force across the country—the total number of people working or looking for work—has expanded by 600,000.

If you look closely at that 600,000, you'll see that 624,000 landed immigrants have been added to the national workforce, while the workforce number for those born in Canada has shrunk by 27,000, so there are more people who were born in Canada leaving the labour market every year than there are joining the labour market. Across the country, immigration on a net basis accounts for all of the workforce growth across the country.

We need to be thinking about the national context when we look at Atlantic Canada. If you look at the younger population, those between the ages of 25 and 44, you see that the workforce in Atlantic Canada peaked way back in 1990 and has declined by 124,000 people since then.

In the information I sent to the committee in advance, I show a direct correlation between GDP growth over time and workforce growth. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were thousands of people added to the workforce every year, and that provided the talent for entrepreneurs and industries to expand and for GDP to grow. As that workforce has been shrinking, the GDP growth in New Brunswick specifically has been close to zero, and actually, on an average annual basis, it is 0.3% since 2009. Our GDP growth has been flatlining, and that has a lot to do with the labour market.

I would argue that this is probably the biggest public policy challenge facing Atlantic Canada, at least in our lifetime. All of the other initiatives, such as the supercluster initiative and all of the other important initiatives being done by provincial and federal governments, will not be successful unless we can get the labour market growing again.

This is a huge challenge. I estimate that we need roughly 150,000 new people through immigration over the next 15 to 20 years in New Brunswick, and that kind of boost in immigration hasn't been seen since the mid-19th century as a share of the population. We don't have a track record and we don't have the infrastructure in place to support that, so we have to do a lot more federally, provincially, and locally to take this issue seriously and to make sure that not only are we attracting new immigrants aligned with workforce needs but that we're also doing whatever we can to retain them.

The second point I want to raise this morning with you is this issue of what I call “levelling the playing field”. Large urban centres across the country that have a history and a track record on immigration have integrated immigrants well into their workforce over the years. You will see in the documentation I sent you that over 50% of those working in the Toronto administrative services sector are immigrants, and 76% of those working in manufacturing and utilities occupations in Toronto are immigrants. In New Brunswick, that number is 3%.

In the big centres across the country, there's a long track record of hiring and integrating immigrants into the workforce. We don't have that here, but the bigger issue is that these employers are hiring immigrants off the street. This is a big distinction, and it is one that we ran into when we started rolling out the Atlantic immigration pilot.

We went to the national and international firms that are based in places such as Moncton and Saint John and said that we had a deal for them. We said that we would allow them to recruit internationally and bring workers into their facilities in Moncton or Saint John or wherever in the province.

These firms responded that they hire a lot of immigrants in Toronto and Montreal and in their facilities in Calgary and Vancouver, but they don't have to recruit them internationally. They're recruiting them off the street. They said that we were asking them to undertake an additional hurdle in doing their recruiting in eastern Europe or in Asia or South America.

This has been a bit of a challenge. We have to figure out how to make attracting workers to important industries in Atlantic Canada as easy as possible. I understand that we can't flood in tens of thousands of people who don't have jobs and just hope that they attach to the labour market, but we certainly have to do a better job.

This is a national issue. Look at it across the country. Since 2010, the largest urban centres of the country have seen very robust employment growth, while mid-sized and small urban centres have seen very weak employment growth. That's from Sarnia and Thunder Bay right across the country, for the most part, so this is an issue that's facing not just Atlantic Canada but the entire country.

The last point I want to make here in my introductory remarks is what I call “addressing the elephant in the room”. I know there are a lot of folks who think that because the labour market participation rate is relatively low in New Brunswick and across Atlantic Canada, there should be more workers here to work at the jobs that are available. In fact, I think there is some potential for that, but for the most part, if you can't find workers locally—if an employer in good faith tries to recruit locally, pays competitive wages, and can't find workers—we shouldn't be putting them at a disadvantage.

If you look at the labour market participation rate among the population aged 25 to 54, the core labour market, you'll see that it's actually as high in Atlantic Canada as it is across the country, if not higher. Look at urban centre labour market participation rates. Again, they're very similar. I have charts in the documentation I sent to you that show this. The labour market participation rate in urban centres is as high as it is in other urban centres across the country, if not higher.

We do have a higher share of our population that collects employment insurance every year. That is an issue. It's not something that.... Anyway, the bottom line is that when it comes to employment insurance, there are people who use that program because of the seasonal nature of some of our industries, and we shouldn't use that as an excuse not to make sure that we have workers for key industries. Again, part of this is an urban-rural issue. In most urban centres across Atlantic Canada, the EI usage rate is as low as the national average.

I would just urge you, when you look at this issue, to understand it at a strategic level in terms of the importance of immigration in the long term. Look at it from a very specific export and strategic industry perspective, because if we can't find workers for those industries—and agriculture is certainly a very strategic industry for the region—and those industries actually start to decline, their investment in this region.... By the way, they are doing that: a number of firms in Atlantic Canada have moved operations to places like Toronto and Chicago. They could access workers with the same wage rates they were paying down here more cheaply in the larger urban centres. If you go to those facilities, you'll see that almost all the workers are immigrants.

We need to have a little more nuanced understanding of the challenge here, I think, and a nuanced understanding of the opportunity. We need to make sure we put this issue front and centre, because the rest of it, all of the other things we do—the investments we make in post-secondary, superclusters, and roads and infrastructure—won't matter if we don't have the people who are able and willing to work in the industries we have down in this part of the country.

I think I'll leave it at that and take any questions you might have.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you, Mr. Campbell.

Go ahead, Mr. Poschmann.

[Finn Poschmann, President and Chief Executive Officer, Atlantic Provinces Economic Council]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Am I on now?

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Yes, you are.

[Finn Poschmann]

Thank you to the committee for the kind invitation to address an issue profoundly important to me and to my region. As a disclaimer, for the record, I work for an independent, non-partisan think tank, a charity. I don't speak for any government and may not speak for my board or our members.

As a starting point—and we've heard a lot about it—the overarching imperative for the Atlantic region with respect to immigration is that we need more of it.

In the Atlantic region, natural population growth slowed a lot in the early 1990s and turned negative during 2012. Since 1991, the Atlantic provinces' annual population growth rate has averaged 0%, and the total population growth has necessarily been zero over that period. Together with demographic aging, this makes sustaining public finances, pensions, and services very difficult for all of us.

The natural rate of population increase depends on the lifetime fertility rate of provincial residents. Because the Atlantic provinces' total fertility rate is lower than the Canadian average—and trends in fertility don't shift easily—immigration is tremendously more important to future population growth in the region than it is elsewhere.

Immigration, even many levels higher than Canada has seen in recent decades, cannot meaningfully change the age structure of the Canadian population. In the Atlantic, however, even a small number of immigrants who are attracted and retained can make an important difference to population growth trends.

In 2014-2015, Atlantic Canada accounted for 6.6% of the total Canadian population, but only 3.2% of new immigrants. Were Atlantic Canada to have matched the Canadian average for immigrant attraction and retention relative to the resident population over any sustained period in recent decades, the region's population growth rate would be trending upward, rather than flat or down.

In other words, a few thousand people goes a long way in the region, and the Atlantic immigration pilot program the federal government announced earlier this year is indeed welcome.

What's the catch?

Mr. Campbell touched on it. It's not news that economic growth in the region has been sluggish. Among Canada's 10 provinces, for instance, the Atlantic four have recently had the highest unemployment rates, above 8%, and they typically have the lowest employment-to-population ratios overall, including urban and rural areas.

Rural residents in the region, like many in the rest of Canada, tend to look at the levels of unemployment and underemployment, and wonder, “Where is the case for more bodies?” I've had federal officials say the same thing to me. Implicitly or even explicitly, the story is that more immigrants must equal more unemployment and a higher employment insurance bill or a higher provincial social assistance bill.

Employers see this rather differently. They search everywhere for skilled bodies, for the knowledge and experience they need, and they routinely find themselves looking outside. This scenario plays itself out across the region, urban and rural, for large and small businesses, and it plays out across the full range of skills, from the low end of the skill range to the high end.

The role of the labour market impact assessment with respect to temporary foreign workers remains dubious. Where required, the LMIA requires potential employers to prove a negative—that no Canadian worker is available to do the job. This is a rather pedantic bureaucratic exercise, and this policy prescription is past its expiry date. Efforts instead should go to developing routes to permanent residency and eventual citizenship, and the Atlantic pilot is an example of how to test approaches to this issue.

Meanwhile, for many employers and in many communities, access to fresh bodies is their number one concern. When I talk to small businesses and large businesses, and I say, “What's your issue?”, it's absolutely universal: it's getting bodies. This does speak to the likely success of the immigration pilot from a hiring perspective.

As indicated in the background material, which you may have, prepared by our director of research, David Chaundy, early data indicate that people are showing up. As I said, a few thousand people in the Atlantic provinces goes a long way in percentage terms. It takes surprisingly few of them to offset the decline in the fertility rates, especially in P.E.I. That's good news.

Our report also indicates that the provinces have had success in taking up most of the available slots within the provincial nominee program, through 2016 at least, with solid numbers for the Maritimes through the first seven months of 2017—in other words, through July. That's good, even if it raises a question this committee might like to ponder: why are there numeric limits on the PNP, the provincial nominee program? I can't come up with any answers that make economic sense to me.

There is more on the good news front. A decade ago I would have been quite concerned that successive waves of immigrants were not catching up economically at the pace they had previously to be on an employment par with native-born Canadians or prior immigrants. Recent data suggests that while this remains a concern, it may not be a growing one. It's looking better. Immigrants find work, or they create it. They start businesses; it's natural. They pay taxes. For many of us from immigrant families, and that includes me, nothing seems more natural than to seek to create something in a new country, something that wasn't there before. That is good for all of us.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I think my time is up. I thank you for yours.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you very much.

Just before we turn to the questioning, I want to welcome three students who are joining us and watching our committee work today from Glebe Collegiate Institute and Bell High School.

Welcome. We will be on our best behaviour because we're being watched by students. This is, as you know, the citizenship and immigration committee. Just so you know, on this side we have government members, on this side we have opposition members, and in this committee we take turns asking questions.

We will begin with a government MP, Ms. Zahid.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses.

My first question is for Mr. Campbell.

At our meeting yesterday, we heard from Cape Breton councillor Amanda McDougall that while there was excellent access to settlement and other support services in major centres such as Halifax, smaller communities, such as Cape Breton, were having much more difficulty with retention. People who wanted to stay could not get access to the help they needed. Does this track with your experience? Do you have suggestions on how to address this regional inequality?

[David Campbell]

The first challenge is that a lot of these immigrants are coming without actual jobs. We need to do a better job of matching the job opportunities in the community to the immigrant population that's coming in. That's the first thing we need to do.

The second thing we need to do is a better job of retaining these immigrants. I think that is a challenge for a small community, because it doesn't have the kind of ethnocultural community groups, infrastructure, and ecosystem to support them. I think we need to target specific countries and do a better job of trying to cluster our immigrant populations so that they can have a little bit of critical mass in terms of a population base, even in small communities. We certainly need to do a better job of retention by integrating them into the communities, looking more closely at churches and civic groups and the role they play, and also looking at the settlement services. As my colleague said, in smaller areas, settlement services tend to not be as developed as they are in the urban centres. We need to do a better job of that.

This starts fundamentally with an economic base. A lot of the immigrants who come to Atlantic Canada—the ones who leave—don't have a solid economic foundation. They get all the points. They get to come to the province or the region, but they don't actually have a job or an economic opportunity along with that. They don't necessarily attach properly to the labour market, which was the main reason, by the way, for the Atlantic immigration pilot. We had economists from Romania working in call centres because they passed all the tests and got all the points they needed to come to Canada, but they couldn't find a job in New Brunswick. If you want a call centre worker, go find somebody with the skills; don't go find an economist. That is an actual example.

Even in Cape Breton we need to do a better job of finding specific job opportunities for these immigrants even before they arrive. We can use the school system better, use the community college system and the university system as a conduit for new immigrants to integrate into the community. I think there is a lot more we can do.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

If people are coming from different ethnic communities, are there areas where they are given help to integrate into their own ethnic communities, communities with the languages they can speak more fluently?

[David Campbell]

Again, in smaller communities, that's more difficult. In larger areas like Halifax and Moncton, we're seeing that happening a lot more. We're actually seeing churches and other groups catering to specific ethnic communities. In smaller areas like Cape Breton, it might be more of a challenge, but it is fundamental.

That's why I said this is the biggest public policy challenge of our time, because it's going to take a major effort. We put lots of effort into certain areas, but I don't think we're putting enough effort into this one. Even with the Atlantic immigration pilot, unless it's changed.... It didn't come with any new federal dollars.

In reality we need to think about how we fund immigration. I like to say it costs $250,000 to take somebody born in New Brunswick to the point where they enter the labour market. If you bring in an immigrant, the cost to get them into the labour market is almost nothing, so if we have to spend $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 in public dollars to get that immigrant effectively integrated into society, it's still cheaper than a native-born Canadian. I understand the facetious nature of that comment, but it's an interesting point as we look at how we develop labour markets in the country.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

I know that a number of years ago some IRCC offices in Atlantic Canada were closed. I understand that P.E.I. is still without an IRCC office. Has this lack of services and on-the-ground presence impacted your relationship with IRCC and the department's understanding of the immigration challenges in that region?

[David Campbell]

I think it has. They closed their office in Moncton as well, and Moncton is attracting more immigrants than any other part of New Brunswick. In my opinion, doing that was a mistake. You need to have these people on the ground to understand the challenges and to be able to work directly with the immigrants in local communities. Anywhere there's a concentration of immigrants, we need to have those federal facilities.

[Salma Zahid, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

The next question is for Mr. Dykstra. Earlier in our study we heard from a number of witnesses, including Jordi Morgan from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and former New Brunswick premier Mr. Frank McKenna, that it would be desirable to find a way to link temporary foreign workers to this program to provide them both a path to permanent residency and a recognition that they are already here and working and are more likely to be retained. Is that something that you see as both feasible and desirable? Do you see any challenges with that?

[Reint-Jan Dykstra]

Of course it is very desirable to do that and to take that path. The one opportunity that is lacking, again, has to do with the services the rural areas have. If they come to a rural area....

I'll use my hometown, Salisbury, as an example. We are 20 minutes away from Moncton. These folks, when they come as temporary foreign workers, are usually housed by the farmer, so they don't have to find housing to begin with, but then they're still a long way away from the facilities that can help them overcome their first few years.

What we have seen over the years is that certain ethnic communities come to New Brunswick, stay for a few years, and then migrate to central Canada, where there are larger centres for their ethnic communities. That is frustrating as heck, because just when you get acquainted with them, they leave, unfortunately. For that reason it is urgent that we let the temporary foreign workers stay but that more money be used and invested in retaining them in the rural and smaller communities.

If you look at Ontario, you see the ethnic communities everywhere. Unfortunately, in Atlantic Canada you hardly see them. They have huge difficulties in staying in this area because of the lack of people in their own ethnic community.

When I first came here, there was nothing in my area either. Now, we chose to do that, and we all make choices. I wanted to be absorbed into the Canadian system as quickly as I could, so we left our past behind. At the same time, a lot of the ethnic communities want to retain a lot of what they have done and what they do and want to pass that on to their children.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you very much, Ms. Zahid.

We'll move to Mr. Saroya.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Mr. Chair, thank you so much, and thank you to the panel for coming.

We all want Atlantic Canada to do well. We all want Atlantic provinces to do well. We all want more immigration. We all want to make sure we go back to the 1966 level of 10% of the Canadian population. At the same time, we want to make sure that we keep the people we bring, that we have jobs for them, that we have a plan, that we have a system to keep them.

I'll tell you a personal experience. A few years back, I met somebody who immigrated to Manitoba. He couldn't find anything there. His address was in Manitoba, but in the meantime he was looking for a job in Toronto.

Mr. Dykstra, you threw out lots of numbers, such as the 59,000 vacancies and so on. As you are aware, the tax changes and the tax planning under private corporations that the Liberals have under way will obviously cause drastic changes in the agriculture sector. Your organization outlined the following: “The proposed changes will increase complexity and uncertainty to any farm business that has incorporated, which represents 25% of all farm businesses across Canada.” Could you please speak to how these changes will have a negative impact on Atlantic Canada's economy and on keeping those migrant workers in Atlantic Canada?

[Reint-Jan Dykstra]

With regard to retaining and investing in farms, every one of us invests on a daily basis, regardless of the tax system at play. We have to learn to live with the tax system, including how it's implemented and how the shortcomings of the tax system work. We try to alleviate those through working with the tax system in a fashion that is fruitful for each of the individual entrepreneurs.

Basically, not having those 59,000 people working on the farms where they could potentially be working is a lot more costly, whether they are skilled or low-skilled or unskilled. The cost is exorbitant. As stated in my presentation, $1.5 billion worth of losses could have been earned and could have stayed in the country. Now we import all the product that normally would have been produced within the country. That is where the shortcoming comes in. That is where our tax dollars have to come to work: how can we alleviate that shortcoming of $1.5 billion?

If you as a committee are serious about alleviating this problem in all of Canada, but specifically in Atlantic Canada, I encourage you to find ways to retain the numbers of people we require in Atlantic Canada and in Canada as a whole. If we can keep them here, we can basically then make money with those individuals, and those who have the desire to come can have a future here in Canada for themselves and their children.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you.

To Mr. Campbell or Mr. Poschmann, the energy east pipeline was cancelled as of last week. The Liberal federal taxes are going up, including increases in CPP and a carbon tax. In the provinces of P.E.I., Newfoundland, and New Brunswick, the PST, I believe, or the provincial tax, has gone up to 10%. The total HST is 15%. All new migrants coming to any new place mostly work for lower wages, and sometimes for minimum wage. Please, how will this affect bringing people back to Atlantic Canada?

[Finn Poschmann]

I'm happy to take that.

There's no question that the Atlantic provinces are high-tax provinces relative to most of the others, and some of them have backed themselves into difficult fiscal situations. On the other hand, notwithstanding some history, Nova Scotia, for instance, is cruising with a balanced budget. P.E.I. is near there, and New Brunswick is not that far off. The influences in Newfoundland and Labrador are a little different, mostly oriented towards oil.

The no-go decision with respect to energy east was primarily market-driven. A secondary reason was regulatory barriers. It's unfortunate for the province of New Brunswick. Things may change in the future, or they may not. Time will tell.

With your permission, I'll speak on the urban-rural question. Think of population centres as gravity centres. The bigger the population, the bigger the gravitational pull. That includes neighbourhoods that have a particular ethnic focus. It is always going to be the case that population centres will attract more people more readily and more easily than a rural area simply because that's where the opportunities are and that's where the higher wages tend to be.

Meanwhile, in the resource sector and in the agriculture sector, it's a competitive world. The resource firms, as well as farms and the agriculture sector, have had to boost their productivity to stay competitive. They automate their processes and they hire fewer people than they used to. They still need people, but there's no question that there's a long-term economic draw away from rural areas to the centre.

[Bob Saroya, Conservative, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Poschmann.

Before I introduce a motion, I want to make sure what you think the impact would be if, pursuant to standing order 108(2), the committee immediately undertook a study of no less than two meetings on the proposed changes to the tax system outlined in the government's consultation entitled “Tax Planning Using Private Corporations” as publicly released on July 18, 2017, in order to assess the potential impact on the government's proposal with regards to immigrants, small business owners, and self-employed immigrants.

How would this affect your communities?

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I believe you're presenting that as a motion.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

He's presenting it as a question.