Madam Speaker, I am truly honoured to once again be able to rise in this House to speak and of course debate, while representing the great folks of my riding of Sudbury, representing their voice and the voice of the New Democratic Party here in the House of Commons.
We are debating Bill C-31, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on February 11, 2014, and other measures. I believe that this is act 1 of many acts to follow.
What we have is a budget bill that is over 350 pages long. It is not a play. We are not debating a play. This is not act 1 and act 2. What I can really say is that there will not be a happy ending for many Canadians when this budget bill passes.
I would first like to talk a little about the hiring credit for small businesses. Just last year, 560,000 small businesses in this country used that hiring credit. Now, when we think about the 2.4 million small businesses in this country, that is a significant amount of small businesses that are using that.
Let us not forget that in this country, the real job creators are small and medium-sized enterprises, the economic engine of our country. It is not Bay Street but Main Street that is actually creating the jobs.
If we are actually cutting the hiring credit for small businesses, when we know there are 2.4 million businesses in this country and 1 million of those businesses offer employment to more than 1 employee, we really should have thought about this before the government actually removed this credit from the budget.
The cost of this program was approximately $235 million. That is a significant amount of change. Let us not diminish that. However, when we look at the corporate tax cuts that the government has made over the last few years, from 22% down to 15%, that cost is approximately $1.3 billion.
We heard from the former finance minister—bless his soul, a very good man—that this became money that the corporations are sitting on, and they are not creating the jobs that we want and that we need in this country. On one hand, we have small businesses that are creating the jobs, creating one-third the growth of the GDP in this country, and then on the other hand we have the corporations that are sitting on the money that they are saving in the corporate tax rates, not creating jobs.
We keep giving the large corporations the breaks, and we are doing nothing to help the small business and medium-sized enterprise in this country. That is shameful.
The government has an opportunity to actually put that small business hiring tax credit back in place. Let us make sure that more than 560,000 of these small businesses in this country utilize that hiring tax credit, because right now not only are they losing that hiring tax credit, but they are getting hit and hit hard by the government's inaction on merchant fees. It is $4.2 billion per year that our small and medium-sized enterprises have to spend just to accept credit card payments in this country.
What we are not saying is that the credit card companies and the banks cannot recoup their costs and make a profit. However, do they have to do it so much so that small businesses are now saying that one more increase will break their backs, or that they are shutting their doors, or that they are not hiring people, or that they cannot expand their business?
I have the 2013 state of industry report from the Canadian Convenience Stores Association, which was just released. This is what it is saying in its statistics: last year, all of the convenience stores across this country lost $254 million. They lost money, but they also had to spend $832 million just to accept credit card payments. That means they cannot hire more employees.
A total of 61% of all convenience stores across the country say that they cannot hire more employees. They cannot pay down debt as quickly. That is 51% of all of these businesses. They cannot invest in equipment and expansion, which also has a ripple effect in our communities.
They cannot increase the employees' wages and benefits. They cannot increase donations to charity. As a former executive director of the United Way in Sudbury, I can attest that the small and medium enterprises in my community, and I am sure right across the country, are the businesses that invest in our charities. They invest in our communities. If we can keep more money in their pockets by addressing this merchant fee, they would continue to address and invest in their own communities.
They have to increase prices. Small and medium-sized business owners from coast to coast to coast, whether they are the Canadian Convenience Stores Association, the Retail Council of Canada, or independent business owners, will say that if we do not do something now in relation to merchant fees, we are going to be in trouble, because they are going to stop investing. They are going to stop hiring people, and we need them to hire people. We need to continue to grow our economy by supporting our small and medium-sized enterprises.
So far what we have seen from the government is the elimination of a hiring tax credit and doing nothing on the merchant fees. It created a voluntary code that is still full of loopholes.
The CFIB and others continue to push the government to act. Even the Competition Bureau asked the Competition Tribunal to investigate some of the anti-competitive practices that are in place in this country when it comes to Visa and Mastercard. The Competition Tribunal investigated. We were expecting a decision in December 2012. It came out in July 2013, and what did it do? It punted that decision back to Parliament. The Competition Tribunal is saying that this is a decision Parliament needs to act on. Instead, we have not heard an iota of any type of change on these requests from the tribunal to make sure that we can support our small and medium-sized enterprises.
Surely when we are looking at this 350-page budget document that would change everything from veterans to FATCA to all the other things that are in there, could we not have put one small regulation in place to prevent the anti-competitive practices being used by Visa and Mastercard and some of the banks and help our small businesses continue to grow? That could have been a simple change, but it did not happen.
One of the other things we were hoping to see in this budget implementation act was on OBSI. OBSI, the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments, provides a great service to all Canadians, both consumers and businesses alike. What we have seen are the slowly diminishing powers of OBSI. Again, one quick regulation could have shut the door and stopped some of the banks from leaving. Instead, the Conservative have left it open. By leaving it open, we are going against the recommendation of the crazy, left-wing IMF and the World Bank that a single dispute mechanism for all consumers, small businesses, and all businesses in this country is the way to go. Instead, what we have seen is the Conservative government allowing banks to leave and choose their own law firms to be their ombudsmen for their consumers.
While OBSI is at an arm's length from the financial institutions, we are now allowing the banks to hire their own law firms to act on behalf of consumers who are having a problem with the banks. Again, that is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. That cannot happen, but it does.
Unfortunately, we have seen the Conservative government choose not to put that regulation into an omnibus budget bill. It has 350 pages and it has really closed the door on ensuring that small businesses get the support they need to continue to grow our economy.
As I said at the beginning of my speech, this is act no. 1. Act no. 2 is coming, and there really is no happy ending for this.
