My name is Jocelyn Bamford. I represent the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada. We represent primarily small and medium-sized businesses in manufacturing and other areas.
We want to thank you for having us here today, because very often the voices of small and medium-sized business get lost in a lot of legislation that comes to pass. We are not competitive in Canada. We're not competitive for business. Our energy cost is not competitive. I pay between 18¢ and 21¢ per kilowatt-hour for my electricity. I could move my business to the United States and pay between four and six cents per kilowatt-hour.
This is just a cascade of effects. It's death by a thousand cuts. We are not competitive because there is going to be a price on carbon; we do not have tax reform; and we don't have accelerated capital depreciation. There are many other components that make us not competitive.
If we want businesses to grow and the economy to thrive, the only way to do that is to have more jobs and more people paying taxes. That's our way through economic prosperity.
Right now the biggest problem in our electricity, especially in Ontario, is the variability of cost. With a global adjustment, you can have a swing of $10,000 in one month. As people come off the grid with some of the technologies they're utilizing, that cost for global adjustment just goes up.
The cap-and-trade pricing that was on in Ontario wasn't borne by large emitters; it was borne by the small and medium-sized companies such as ours. Large emitters got credits. Small emitters couldn't participate in cap and trade. We just got to pay through increased natural gas pricing and diesel costs. This makes it uncompetitive for us to compete in areas where there isn't carbon pricing in place.
The fact of the matter is that Canada contributes 1.6% of greenhouse gases globally. If we burden the small and medium-sized companies with carrying this cost, we see four phenomena. We definitely have seen, in the last couple of years, these four phenomena come to pass. One, companies are going bankrupt. Two, companies are moving outright to the United States or other jurisdictions. Three, companies are staying here as a head office, but moving their growth to the United States, where they don't have the burdens of unaffordable energy. This is just as damaging. Plus, they have a lot of incentives to move there. The fourth phenomenon we're seeing is that companies have had enough and they are selling to large multinational companies. Then we are going to have an economy that's completely controlled by outside forces.
None of these four phenomena are good for Canada and the economy.
It behooves small and medium-sized businesses and manufacturing to reduce their energy cost. For us, it's our third-largest cost. Anything we can do to reduce that, we have done. If you look at our plant, you see that we invest over $1 million every year, most of which goes to trying to address energy efficiencies and run more efficiently to get our costs down.
We went to Queen's University to do a study on what we should do, keep our plant here or move it to the United States. They did a very in-depth study on a number of factors, and they recommended, in fact, that we move our growth to the United States. That's a very telling and concerning study, and one that we should heed.
What should we do about this? We have many solutions. The biggest problem is the Wild West of energy savings. We have people coming to our plant all the time, telling us that they can save $1 million on electricity. What you find is that the consultants also sell things. The gentleman who tells you how to reduce your electricity cost on the one hand, pulls out a card that he's selling solar panels on the other, or that he's selling combined heat and power. There's no support for small and medium-sized businesses on what solutions are actually legitimate.
I've heard a lot of stories about members in our coalition that have invested millions of dollars in the hope of getting out of energy policy, only to have their energy pricing go up. There is no support with regard to this new technology. There are a lot of unscrupulous spenders in this space, and there is no support or help for us to find what is an efficient, cost-effective, long-term solution.
In many cases, if people come off the grid and put in a combined heat and power unit, they will actually increase greenhouse gases. Similarly, if they move their business to the United States, to places that do not have energy as clean as we have in Ontario, they end up raising greenhouse gases. So, by putting in some of these burdens—carbon pricing, cap and trade—you actually drive companies out, and you drive greenhouses gases up.
What do we need to do? We also need better SR and ED credits. The SR and ED credit program is extremely difficult and has wound down in the last five years. We need accelerated depreciation for new capital, as they have in the States, or hyper-depreciation as they have in Germany. These things would allow companies to reinvest in new technology and help us reduce our energy costs.
We need pipelines. We need to get pipelines through this country, and we need to get them now. When a lot of companies were moving offshore, a lot of fabricators in Ontario retrenched into the oil and gas industry, and now that pipelines aren't going through, we have people out of work. We need to get our pipelines through.
You can have your natural resources in an environmentally friendly way. Our company is proof of that. We've developed and patented three pieces of technology that allow you to rehabilitate pipelines in an environmentally friendly way. This is technology that has come from Canada and can be exported globally.
We need to relook at Bill C-69 because we're concerned that there are going to be no major projects going through. That is going to negatively impact manufacturing across this country, but specifically in Ontario. A lot of people don't recognize that in Ontario, since the downturn in the economy, there is almost an equal number of companies in the resource sector as there is in the auto sector. We need to recognize the damage that Bill C-69 could do to some of the manufacturers in this province.
Exports need to be exempt from tariffs if they have carbon pricing on them. We need to make sure that we're playing on an even playing field because right now we can't compete.