Finance committee  Yes, I would.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  They would be pretty unhappy. It's the payroll taxes. As I talked about in the presentation, payroll taxes have the greatest effect on the growth of a business. They pay 50% of the cost of CPP for every employee. To increase the CPP would have a substantial impact, and we have fo

Finance committee  For smaller firms, payroll taxes certainly have an impact on their choices about hiring. I think a lot of them would probably take a second look at whether they could afford to hire someone because now they would have to pay more for that person. On CPP, the other thing I want t

Finance committee  We support the increase to 50-50. As I said, it's the norm in most other levels of government. It's appropriate for public sector pension employees to be paying 50% of the bill. We also support the increase of the retirement age to age 65 for all new employees.

Finance committee  I think increasing the age of retirement to 65 would, hopefully, help cut some of the costs. Putting more of the public sector employees' contributions higher would also help sustain the cost to the system. However, these are small measures at this point. They're a great step in

Finance committee  Yes. We've asked about what they would do. Generally, it's exactly that. They invest it back into their business. Sometimes they add extra employees, Sometimes they buy new equipment. Sometimes they pay down debt, to be fair. Right? These are things that are real for small busine

Finance committee  No. I can most assuredly tell you there isn't some big pot of gold sitting in the closet of the small business owners that we represent.

Finance committee  A hundred and nine thousand.

Finance committee  I find that's an interesting comment to be made. Since employment insurance is an insurance, you are paying a premium. It's supposed to be there for those people who are paying the premium. Hence, that's why we have always called it a tax, because essentially what happened was th

Finance committee  Do you mean funding for economic development?

Finance committee  Our members don't necessarily ever benefit from any types of grants or programs from economic development agencies.

Finance committee  That changed in 2009. At that point in time when the Canadian Employment Insurance Financing Board was created, all that money then disappeared and it was down to zero, once again. We thought it was the right idea, but it was the wrong time.

Industry committee  Thank you for the opportunity to be here. With me is Monique Moreau, who will assist with the questions at the end. CFIB is a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization that represents more than 109,000 small and medium-sized businesses across Canada. Our members represent all se

Industry committee  Yes, 70% of our members told us in our 2012 survey that they had a website. There, it is just broken out by size of firm, so you have a perspective on the smaller versus the larger firms.