Industry committee  I would include them as some of the key areas that are going to be hit within the consumer products field. Again, many of them are often reliant on the U.S. as their major or largest market. So yes, they're under exactly the same pressures here; there's price compression on their

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  If you look at the composition of the industrial base in Ontario and east and it, you will see it is very highly dependent on the automotive, forestry, and resources and forestry processing sectors. Those are the ones that are going to be hardest hit.

Industry committee  On the numbers issue itself, it's difficult to address this because I don't think anybody has seen how Finance calculates this. It would be nice to sit down with Finance and figure this out. Our calculations going forward, if we're looking at refundability from the current year

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you, members of the committee, for inviting us here today to speak on such an important issue. As Avrim was saying, we're representing a sector of the economy that is really the most productive, the most innovative, the sector that is at

Finance committee  Let me go first. I think, first of all, the half percentage point cut we saw in the Bank of Canada rate yesterday was probably a good indication of looking ahead and thinking, things don't look too good. Four or five months from now, demand in the U.S. economy is expected to be

Finance committee  I think, giving full credit to the government for lowering the corporate tax rate, introducing the two-year writeoff last year in the budget, making the commitment to improve regulations to invest in infrastructure and the borders, and investing in R and D and schools and things

Finance committee  That's excellent. We have about 900 companies from across the country coming out to do business in Alberta. When you look at the issue of interprovincial trade, I think it's a good case study of what we have to do to remove some of these cross-border issues. Some companies can

Finance committee  That's a good question. I hope you're going out in March and you'll be participating in our national buyer-seller forum.

Finance committee  I agree with what Mr. Lazar has just said. Continually extending it by one year doesn't give you that much additional certainty for planning your investments. For many companies, apart from those companies that were probably going to make investments anyway in off-the-shelf techn

Finance committee  If you look at last year when the government introduced the two-year writeoff and looked at the fiscal cost that it estimated, it was estimating that somewhere around one-quarter of the investment would be covered by the two-year writeoff. I think there was perhaps some indicatio

Finance committee  In the budget the government did two things around the R and D tax credit system. It committed to improving the administration of the system, which is extremely important. We'll see how that works out, because that's been in the works for some time.

Finance committee  In terms of the additional allowances, there was an increase in the allowance for small Canadian-owned companies to take advantage of the credit. I think the estimated benefit is around $70 million over a period of two years. What we were looking at was to make the tax credit re

Finance committee  No, I think the strategy that you set out is correct. Our point of view in saying that this was “Disadvantage Canada” was just to say that not making these crucial investments puts Canadian companies at a global disadvantage.

Finance committee  Our assessment of the budget was that the tax measures in this budget and the investments weren't adequate to meet either the challenge or the urgency of the situation.