Human Resources committee  Can you repeat the question?

Human Resources committee  Yes, I would agree.

Human Resources committee  You mean under Bill C-56?

Human Resources committee  Yes, but on the general account there is some money owed to employers and employees.

Human Resources committee  Yes, it is.

Finance committee  Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. With me is Dan Kelly. He will be assisting with answering questions. CFIB is a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization representing 107,000 small and medium-sized businesses across Canada. They collectively employ more than one

Finance committee  That would be the ideal situation, but, unfortunately, at this point in time the inconsistency of responses that our members get from CRA leads them to feel nervous just calling and getting responses. The idea is that if they're doing their due diligence and they do something und

Finance committee  Fair enough.

Finance committee  We believe one really low-cost way to make government more efficient and also enhance productivity is to deal with red tape and with paper burden and regulations. We believe we've given some strong ideas to the government on how they can start streamlining regulations and red tap

Finance committee  I can start with that. One of the areas that EI currently covers is training. It spends about $2 billion per year on training. That comes out of the EI account. Repeatedly, when studies have been done on how effectively that money is being used and whether the EI training dollars

Finance committee  Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. CFIB is a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization representing more than 108,000 small and medium-sized businesses across Canada who collectively employ more than one and a quarter million Canadians and account for $75 billion in

Finance committee  We were told to bring 12 English and 6 French. We called and asked. I do apologize.

Finance committee  We did specifically call and ask. Sorry about that. As we found from this report, freezing EI premiums was most important for both the general SME population as well as for these growth-oriented entrepreneurs. Also important, especially to the growth-oriented entrepreneurs, was

Finance committee  As I mentioned in my opening remarks, payroll taxes, generally, have a pretty big impact on small companies, and from the perspective of small business owners, CPP is a payroll tax, since they pay 50% on behalf of their employees. We have actually surveyed our members on that a

Finance committee  That would be one of our key recommendations going forward. We feel there is growing uncertainty in the global economy, and even in our own business barometer we're seeing a little less confidence than we saw at the end of 2008-09. But having said that, it's not as bad it was. W