Finance committee  I know that with a new project, the American depreciation rules will depreciate the entire project rather than classes of machinery and equipment—for instance, classes of assets—so there are other factors apart from the rate. But I agree. Indeed, in my mind, what we should be d

Finance committee  Straight-line depreciation would be much better. It's clearer. But on a declining balance basis, I think we'd be looking at a 45% rate to bring it into some level of comparison with the United States. I know it's difficult to move to a straight-line balance, because most of the o

Finance committee  Yes. Any reduction in EI taxes is going to be a very good....

Finance committee  I really haven't run the numbers on that. I think any—

Finance committee  It's becoming harder to hire temporary workers these days.

Finance committee  I think when you take a look at the types of jobs in manufacturing, these are very well-paying jobs. They're not only middle-class jobs, they're knowledge-intensive jobs. Today even within manufacturing companies more and more of those jobs are not necessarily in actually produci

Finance committee  Yes. Companies need customers, and it's customers who drive the innovation. It's customers who drive the new product development, the need for new technology, the retooling, and the skills that they require. The first thing is new customers. The reality is that Canada is just

Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  We have about 10,000 members.

Finance committee  I think they could probably find a use for it.

Finance committee  It does. We've lost actually about 700,000 manufacturing jobs—

Finance committee  —across the country, even though the total levels of sales are actually at record highs. But we're seeing very different things within manufacturing and the business of manufacturing, because some of those jobs have disappeared and some of the companies have. It was very easy t

Finance committee  There are a couple of things. I think we've lost a type of job as well as a number of people. We've lost jobs in areas of manufacturing that are low-value commodity products and low-value commodity jobs. Many of those were manual jobs on the shop floor. That's the type of job tha

Finance committee  Well, I think it is an outstanding liability for the government. These are tax credits that at some point, once a company becomes profitable, can be exercised and credited against revenue. We're trying to find a solution that can transfer those credits into some form of direct ex

Finance committee  These are already liabilities—