Finance committee  I can't speak from the school standpoint, but I can from the business community standpoint. Businesses right now, particularly small and medium-sized businesses, are feeling a lot of inflationary pressures in the economy, and it's sort of that the drip-feed of every additional cost is another thing that's squeezing the bottom line.

Finance committee  There's a gap between what's in Bill C-8 and what we heard from some of our members in the industry, particularly around the harsh climate realities of the Canadian agricultural industry. Again, grain drying, for instance, is quite important to make sure the products are being dried out properly and you don't have a spoiled grain product.

Finance committee  As businesses are starting to reopen, the cost of everything is going up. Certainly, one of the things the government can tangibly do to help businesses be more competitive and to help them to be safer is having this tax credit, because ventilation certainly has been proven to be one of the ways to reduce a transmission vector for COVID-19.

Finance committee  We don't as an organization—I get someone else to do my HVAC work for me, so we're far from experts in that field—but certainly we would point people towards either their municipal or their provincial health authorities for the best place to go about what is the right HEPA filter to have in the workplace.

Finance committee  On the data piece first, we don't have any current data on that, because it's quite a rapidly changing environment at the moment. In terms of the T2200, this is something we've heard about right from the beginning of the pandemic and the work from the home environment. Whether you're a big business or a small business, it's a huge administrative burden to have to issue individual forms to your workforce.

Finance committee  For a lot of businesses that are in the travel, hospitality and tourism industries, cash flow is a big problem. They missed out on the 2020 and the 2021 tourism seasons, which is when they bring in the dollars to keep themselves going through the off seasons. Not having those extensions would certainly further aggravate the credit crunch or liquidity problems that a lot of these companies are having at the moment and get them through at least to the 2022 tourism season when they can start to build up their cash reserves.

Finance committee  One of the big things we've heard from businesses, whether it's an office environment or a consumer-facing environment, is that confidence is critical to getting people back in the door and back at their desks. There are a lot of different ways in which you can do that, whether it's vaccinations or rapid testing.

Finance committee  Most of the work the chamber has been focused on has been around the physical sort of hardware kit, and certainly there has been far more demand than there is supply for the business community. What I would say is that chambers, in our experience, genuinely do provide a role, both for their members in the community and for businesses that aren't members, in terms of being able to have a central distribution hub for these things.

Finance committee  The provinces will receive their test kits from the federal government, and the provinces will then distribute those test kits down to the local chamber in the community. Then businesses will go to the chamber's physical location, whether it's a warehouse or, in some cases, a storefront, and they will physically pick up the test kits from that chamber and bring them back to their workplaces.

Finance committee  Certainly in a free and democratic society such as ours, predictability and the rule of law are absolutely critical for members. That's something I think we have heard time and time again over the last number of weeks from them on this issue.

Finance committee  Chair and honourable members, it's a pleasure to be back at this committee. The economic and fiscal update, which I'll call EFU for short, included a number of critical elements for Canadian businesses. I want to focus my remarks on both the elements within Bill C-8 and provide a broader perspective on some of the elements from the EFU.

International Trade committee  I think there are two separate issues that I'll try to quickly touch on. In terms of the cross-border travel rules, one thing that we've been quite concerned about, for example, is the requirements for the predeparture PCR test for fully vaccinated travellers, as well as the arrival test that people have to do if they are fully vaccinated.

International Trade committee  I fully agree that we need to be proactive about it. The White House commissioned a bunch of supply chain reviews. The Canadian Chamber participated in the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Energy ones. The case that we continue to make is that we can't go there with a supplicant list of things that we want them to do for us.

International Trade committee  Yes, certainly. On the whole host of buy American issues, we always engage a lot with our colleagues at the United States Chamber of Commerce. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, I think, is our best business ally in the beltway in Washington, D.C., and certainly the U.S. chamber has traditionally taken a very strong line on any type of buy American measure, because they generally do believe in and support the importance of cross-border trade.

International Trade committee  I'm sorry. Just to clarify the question, are we talking about the EV tax credits or the electric vehicle industry as a whole?