Finance committee  This was one of the best parts of the 2023 budget. It's a major victory for small business owners, who have been calling for reductions on credit card processing fees for some time. We have had a couple of reductions. One was under the Conservative government and one was under th

Finance committee  Immigration challenges are a big part of some of the labour shortages they face. It is good that we have been increasing the numbers of immigrants and there has been more flexibility on the temporary foreign worker program but—

Finance committee  —delays in processing applications continue to plague business owners. They need workers for a job at a particular point in time. When that doesn't happen, it puts huge pressure on the business owners to try to fill the gaps themselves.

Finance committee  Sure. Really quickly, our members do see the tax on tax on tax as one of the many implications of this. The lack of any kind of rebate coming their way is another of the issues. This is going to hit them at escalating rates and they're not able to pass those on. Some will and, o

Finance committee  As a non-partisan association, I encourage all parties to talk about CEBA loans often, until such time as businesses are able to repay them. This is a big deal. These are not small loans for a lot of small businesses: $40,000 or $60,000. When the CEBA loans were first issued, it

Finance committee  Sure. Thank you for the question. Look, there are lots of pressures on lots of Canadians from different walks of life, including small business owners. Related to some of the previous questions, one of the big worries on my plate right now is the deadline for the Canada emergenc

Finance committee  This becomes even more worrisome as we look ahead to the further rounds of carbon tax increases that we're facing. Our main piece of advice to governments when businesses—or any Canadian, for that matter—is struggling is not to make the problem worse. Sadly, we've seen it right

Finance committee  It's a really important question. Carbon taxation has mixed views among Canadians, as we all know. That's equally true for Canadian small business owners. For small firms, it is a really bad deal. The only reason why anyone could suggest that some Canadians are getting more in r

Finance committee  In the budget as a whole, I'll just reference that the credit card processing fee reduction was the big win and the thing that we're most pleased about. There is progress on internal trade reduction. That's a huge file for small businesses, so there's some good news there. There'

Finance committee  Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. I apologize in advance to the committee, last weekend I had a bout of laryngitis—I'm sure many parliamentarians would be happy to hear as I was quieter than normal—so I'm about 50%. I'm happy to be doing this from home. I wanted

Finance committee  I'm so glad you asked this question, Monsieur Ste-Marie. It's a really important one. Just in the last week, about 50,000 small business owners across Canada have begun receiving emails from their bank saying that they didn't actually qualify for the loan they received two years

Finance committee  Both rates are going up this year. Both were frozen last year. For EI, employees are going to see an increase of five cents per hundred dollars in premiums. For employers, who pay 1.4 times that of employees, that means seven cents per hundred dollars in payroll. In dollar term

Finance committee  Yes. There are several recommendations. The first is that we've recommended that EI rates be frozen for 2023, as the government wisely did for 2021 and 2022. Second, we would love to see those rates equalized over time so that employers and employees would pay the same rate, or

Finance committee  It would, absolutely. This is why this has been a long-standing recommendation of CFIB. The time to do it would have been when EI rates were starting to drop. You would have accelerated the size of the reduction for businesses or small businesses and then allowed the employee rat

Finance committee  Pardon me. I should note that the $750 is a cumulative increase over the rounds of the CPP enhancements, the CPP premium increases, that we've seen over the last number of years. Taking that amount of money is an annual withdrawal from someone's take-home income and now is fully