Finance committee  Thank you for the opportunity to be here today to provide comment on the budget on behalf of Canada's $75-billion restaurant industry. Restaurants Canada is a national association, representing a growing community of 30,000 businesses in every segment of food service, including

Finance committee  People are using their cards more. It used to be that you pretty much paid cash when you went to the grocery store, or when you went to a quick service restaurant. Now you use your credit card for all kinds of expenditures that you didn't used to.

Finance committee  Our members' experience is it's not increasing how much they spend on the card.

Finance committee  I can agree with that statement and I can also say that our members are also being faced with much higher costs in other areas as well. Higher food costs, higher energy costs, and particularly higher labour costs. I don't know what kind of job creation we'd be able to provide, gi

Finance committee  Absolutely.

Finance committee  Alcohol would probably be the best example of that. We also have problems with supply management, and the differences between production allocation for chicken for instance is a big problem for us. If there's anything we would like to see addressed in interprovincial trade barrie

Finance committee  Absolutely. One of the things about our industry is that we have skinny margins, so that's why I focused on payroll taxes. They're a tax before profit, but both the small business tax and the corporate tax make a difference in terms of investment in equipment. We have 1.1 milli

Finance committee  I did provide mine in advance, by the way.

Finance committee  Yes, there's no reason for the 60-40 split. If you look at the EI benefits, many of them are social benefits. The employer has no control over those social benefits. They become a larger and larger percentage of the EI benefits over time. At one point, the government paid 20%,

Finance committee  Well, our key concern is.... Because we are such a labour-intensive business and because it's such a significant cost for our members, we're looking at ways to make it not so taxing for our members to hire more young people. We're the number one first-time job provider of any ind

Finance committee  We actually have proposed an alternative to both those proposals. Building on the new hires program that your government has proposed...we like the youth hires program that your government had in place a number of years ago. The current tax credit program does benefit some of o

Finance committee  It would depend on whether you matched the year's basic exemption in the Canada Pension Plan at $3,500, or if you started more modestly at $2,000, which is the level of the tax credit right now. So it would be somewhere around $1.2 billion.

Finance committee  I do think the code of conduct has been very useful and helpful in terms of helping to maintain our very low-cost debit card system here in Canada. We were threatened with Visa and MasterCard debit cards that would start to...that would be a percentage-based fee, even though the

Finance committee  Well, as everybody knows, we have a very mixed labour market here in Canada. We have red-hot Alberta, where our members are actually having to reduce hours of operation. They're having to close down parts of their business. The burnout rate of the owners, operators, and staff onc

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm also delighted to be back in Ottawa again. I'm here representing the $68 billion, 1.1 million employee restaurant industry. We have lots of ideas on how Canada's taxation and regulatory regimes could be improved, but given the five-minute limit, I'm goi