Finance committee  You can disagree.

Finance committee  Absolutely. I think taxes are the price we pay for a fair and healthy society. If we have progressive, fair, transparent taxes, we all benefit. We can always borrow. Borrowing costs are really low right now.

Finance committee  Our research shows that asset recycling is very often used in order to privatize. It's kind of a back door to privatization. It's sold as something to increase efficiencies. We would sell something that has a revenue stream to the private sector and then we get more money to make

Finance committee  Actually, the Auditor General did a report showing that in Ontario it's more expensive and that the risk stays in the public sector, and what we're sold is that the risk is privatized. The profits are privatized, and the risk remains in the public sector. Also in Saskatchewan the

Finance committee  I'm here on behalf of the 3.3 million members of the Canadian Labour Congress, and I want to thank you for the opportunity to present our views on this budget implementation act. The CLC brings together Canada's national and international unions, along with provincial and territ

Finance committee  I think it is certainly time to have a review of the tax system, and the fairness in how business taxes interact with the personal tax system. It would be broader than just tax expenditures. One of the big problems with tax expenditures, as I think you all know, is that they ar

Finance committee  Thank you. Ms. Raitt, you're absolutely correct. The mix matters. It's important for workers to have that CPP that will be there no matter what. You'll have it until you die. The problem with the TFSA is that you can run out of money, but with CPP you can't run out of money. If

Finance committee  Thank you very much. I'm here on behalf of the 3.3 million members of the Canadian Labour Congress, and I want to thank you for the opportunity to present our views on the changes to the Income Tax Act that are proposed in Bill C-2. The CLC brings together Canada's national and

Finance committee  Yes, I can send an email to the clerk. I have a PDF of the study that I can send from HRSDC.

Finance committee  I also don't have a mandate to say yes or no, but our position is that oil should be moved in the safest way possible, that there should be environmental guidelines for moving it, and that those jobs are critical in Atlantic Canada.

Finance committee  Unions such as Unifor and Canada’s Building Trades Unions have programs that run the gamut, because it is a complex problem. There are pre-apprenticeship programs that try to attract women or under-represented workers to have them get some of the skills necessary to enter the tra

Finance committee  Certainly. I'm actually a member of an employment insurance working group that has put out a pre-budget statement. In that statement, we cited federal government research from HRSDC showing that employment insurance is the single most effective automatic stabilizer that the gover

Finance committee  The changes that were made forced people to take lower-paying jobs or jobs outside of their original jobs. We lose the human capital that had been created if they have to take jobs outside of their normal work or end up with lower wages. We lose capacity. The company loses capaci

Finance committee  I, as an economist, don't use the term “middle class”. I find it quite meaningless, but if somebody were forcing me to talk about the middle class, I would probably go with the 20th to the 80th percentile in terms of income.

Finance committee  Sure. Manitoba in particular has done some innovative things around pay as you save. We have a report on the Green Economy Network in which we outline some of what has been done. You can take a look at that and how you can have programs to incentivize people to do this private se