Industry committee  Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. CFIB is a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization that represents 95,000 small and medium-sized businesses across Canada. We are also a research-based organization. We take our direction from our members through surveys. We cond

Human Resources committee  Thank you.

Human Resources committee  It really depends on the benefit. That is very true for the regional relief and recovery fund. That one, for whatever reason, has been taking months to actually get feedback. Others are much quicker. We have found that it really depends on the program. CRA's actually been pretty

Human Resources committee  As I said earlier, the biggest one would be finding ways to have more forgiveness of some of the debt; for example, having a portion of CEBA, the Canada emergency business account, be refundable or expanding it even further, because we're still in this and it's not getting any be

Human Resources committee  We probably get 100 calls a day on that. It's incredibly stressful right now because, as you said, property taxes still have to get paid. Many of them have to pay their GST and they need that for their cash flow at the same time. There are a lot of businesses, as I said, still st

Human Resources committee  It's an interesting question, because we often look at that from a seasonal employer perspective. We've heard often from seasonal employers that they really want to hold on to those people and not have them get other in-between jobs, because they've been trained and they're well

Human Resources committee  I would say it has been vastly improving over the course of the pandemic. At the very beginning, some of the first ideas that came out were nowhere near sufficient. Thankfully, after lots of feedback and advocacy work—not just from us but from many others as well—the government p

Human Resources committee  There is a lot to look at when it comes to modernizing the employment insurance system, which is something I think our members are not opposed to doing. The issue right now is that for many of these changes that may be looked at or are being proposed, it's unclear exactly what th

Human Resources committee  It is certainly something we have looked at and that we've even asked our members about. Again, they're sort of split on that, partly because if the government takes 20% back, like it once did, that's still going to come out of your taxes or in some other form. It's just a sort o

Human Resources committee  As I mentioned, the one thing our members found difficult was that you could get a maximum of $500 per week through the CRB or the simplified EI system, and for some of them that has presented a real challenge as they have tried to attract people back to work, especially business

Human Resources committee  Employment insurance is an insurance program, so it's based on whoever pays into it being able to benefit from it. We understand the need for CRB being set up during the pandemic, because obviously there are not just individuals who may not have paid enough into the EI system—tho

Human Resources committee  That was certainly, I think, an improvement over the CERB. People could earn a certain amount of money and still get the CRB at the same time. That was definitely something we applauded at the time. I think that flexibility was an improvement in the transition to a CRB system.

Human Resources committee  As I mentioned, smaller businesses in particular are much more labour-intensive than larger businesses, so they're much more sensitive to changes in payroll taxes like EI and CPP. There is a lot of concern about what will happen to EI once the freeze is removed. Again, people ar

Human Resources committee  It has definitely been an incredibly difficult year. Given that we are an organization that has done survey research for decades already, we were well positioned when the pandemic began to get to our membership quickly to really determine what the impact was and what was happenin

Human Resources committee  The fact is that small businesses represent almost of half of Canada's GDP. If it goes to the highest level that we are predicting—we're trying to be a bit more conservative in our estimates—and if those 220,000 that right now are worrying about closing actually close, that could