Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members. On behalf of the 665,000 CUPE members who work hard and deliver quality public services in communities across Canada, I thank you for the opportunity to be here. I will summarize our main recommendations from the written report that C

Finance committee  I just wanted to say that loan guarantees are actually one of the things the government can do really well. It often doesn't cost them money and it's useful to sustain industries—for example, right now, where we have the steel tariffs or the softwood lumber tariffs. In particular

Finance committee  I would agree with that.

Finance committee  Absolutely. I think if you talk to business leaders, they'll often say that their biggest advantage is their workers. You saw Amazon investing in Vancouver because of the access to high-quality graduates from university there. What we see is that when you have this Trump strategy

Finance committee  Absolutely. Bill C-377 and Bill C-525 were awful pieces of legislation that targeted unions. We're very glad that most of that has been undone, particularly in terms of privacy for our members, with Bill C-377. The Canada Labour Code review is a good opportunity. There's a lot t

Finance committee  Regulations often serve a purpose, so it's not costless to get rid of regulations. First of all, it takes a great deal of time and energy to look down and ask, “What was the purpose of this regulation? How do we serve this purpose but allow the investment in business that we need

International Trade committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me here to speak on behalf of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, or CUPE. CUPE is the largest union in Canada. We represent over 700,000 workers across the country in about 2,000 different local unions working in diverse sectors

International Trade committee  Before being the economist at CUPE, I was the economist at the Canadian Labour Congress. I definitely was involved in consultations around previous trade agreements under Stephen Harper's government. Those consultations were very much one-way. It would be a webinar. You would try

International Trade committee  That's one of the problems with the way that we negotiate trade deals, because you don't know what the changes are going to be until it's kind of.... We didn't know the whole deal until December because the United States made changes to it. It's very difficult to do any kind of e

International Trade committee  Definitely there are parts of the labour chapter that are aspirational, but there are also requirements, especially concerning Mexico and the right to collective bargaining. Right now, only about 1% of trade unions in Mexico are democratic, independent trade unions. The current

International Trade committee  There is a unique side agreement with Mexico that deals with they what they call “yellow unions”. The rapid response mechanism is between Canada and Mexico, and between the United States and Mexico; it doesn't apply between Canada and the United States. So there are those two par

International Trade committee  This is a difficult issue. The United States has a much more transparent process that includes legislators. Canada doesn't have that. There's also a process in the United States whereby lobbyists, or people who want to be included in the consultation process, can get clearance to

International Trade committee  Yes, that domestic process definitely needs to be strengthened. In many trade deals or under the OECD rules, we have a national contact point where they can offer good offices. If there's a disagreement, they can say they'll provide a neutral place to meet. However, there's no po

International Trade committee  Because of the goodwill, it happened, but....

International Trade committee  They would have calls, but there would be very little information in the call. It would be after the round, and there really would be no opportunity to give input until after the parliamentary process had happened. The process still hasn't changed to allow input earlier on.