Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for the opportunity to be here this afternoon to share with you the perspective of small and medium-size companies on Canada's immigration system. I hope this will help you in your deliberations on part 6 of Bill C-50. You should have in front of you a copy of our Dece

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. So on the first page, I just want to give you a quick overview of who CFIB is. It's a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization that represents the interests of more than 105,000 business owners across the country. These are primarily small and medium-size companies t

Citizenship and Immigration committee  CFIB'S positions on issues, just so you know, is always based on feedback we get from our membership. We gather this feedback through a variety of surveys throughout the year. We then pass on these results to you, the decision-makers, so you can incorporate some of their ideas an

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I don't think any of us are disagreeing with what you're saying. In fact, the last chart that I showed on my particular presentation really illustrates the fact that the immigration system, as it exists today, primarily lets in folks with professional degrees. Yet that's not wher

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I believe the majority of our members would prefer a permanent immigrant. At present, however, it's easier and faster to go through the temporary foreign worker system.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, we were not consulted on this aspect of the immigration bill. We have been consulted on other elements of it.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I believe workers of any kind are what are needed today. Again, going back to Monsieur St-Cyr's question, we believe there probably should have been more consultation prior to this and an understanding of what we're getting into. I do think that is something we're concerned abo

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think we haven't actually had those discussions, but that said, a big concern of ours right now is succession of entrepreneurs. The fact is there's not only a shortage of labour, there's a shortage of entrepreneurs. Certainly, we do see immigration as one aspect that can be use

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, we don't have any. We've never looked at that.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We're actually about to embark on our own survey that is going to try to do that. Because we do get frustrated with this image or this myth that small businesses don't train. In fact they do, and they do it in droves. What's really frustrating is that so many of them train people

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We would absolutely agree. Again, it's not the silver bullet solution. It's one of many different avenues and ways that we need to deal with this issue, but it's probably one of the most significant, and the fact remains that Canada does compete with other countries in finding th

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would actually argue that they are training. They're training more and more. Too often, though, only formal types of training are recognized when we look at the data. We know that in smaller companies informal training is as important, and in fact it's even more important, and

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This is his time and he can use it any way he likes.

Human Resources committee  We're still analyzing the data, and one of the things we do want to look at is the rural-urban split, because all our business members are in rural as well as in urban settings. So we'll be able to look at whether you can find that in a rural setting as well.

Human Resources committee  Can I also mention that in 1996 our labour market was in a very different place. Our unemployment rate was much higher. We didn't have the shortages we see today. The programs and the benefits that were set up at the time reflected the needs at that time. We need to now rethink w