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

Finance committee  Sure. I think at this point we really need to put some incentives on the table for businesses to grow and expand once again. The small business threshold of $500,000 has been in place now for many years. Of course, it's not indexed to inflation. Raising that would be of some hel

Finance committee  Yes, it is, but I will add that the federal government has used a variety of things, such as accelerated depreciation and accelerated CCA, and several ways to try to stimulate more business investment. Some of them have worked imperfectly, but there have been attempts made to do

Finance committee  As I said before, there is virtually no money going back to small businesses from the carbon tax. They are just net payers of the tax. Of course, they are not just paying it on a small footprint, but paying it on all of the many ways that small firms might use carbon. None of the

Finance committee  Yes, 100%. The carbon tax is a profit-insensitive tax. It's put on critical business inputs for small firms. Again, there are mixed views as to whether there should be a carbon tax or not, but even those who love the idea of carbon taxation are telling us that the way the curren

Finance committee  Sure. Look, small firms have mixed views on carbon taxes in general. Some support them in some provinces. In fact, more small businesses support than oppose them. I would say that on average, though, if we're looking at our membership as a whole, there is opposition to a carbon

Finance committee  On the Canada pension plan, I will tell you that the previous tax increases have hurt us hard, and there was no stopping that during the pandemic itself. On EI, the federal government, to its credit, froze EI premiums for 2020 and 2021. They've now taken that freeze off, so rates

Finance committee  Thank you so much, Chair. It's nice to see all the committee members on the screen today. I'm sorry that I'm not there with you in Ottawa, but I'm happy to be in Toronto today. Look, I don't need to remind you of the crazy year that Canada's small and medium-sized businesses hav

Finance committee  It's the same for me, and that is to just keep saying it over and over again. Look, everyone's attention is on vaccines and ending some of the restrictions that have started across the country, as it should be, but just as there are horror stories from a health perspective, ther

Finance committee  There are huge swaths of the business community—not just those new businesses, but others too—that when they hear the Prime Minister and others say, “We've got your back, small business owners,” it really burns them because they are not getting any of the support that they need.