Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the question. Yes, over the past several years, collectively we've made important changes to the mortgage insurance system, which I think in general have been quite good, as well as important structural changes in the way we will deliver an

Finance committee  Thank you again. There is no data, and there won't be any for quite some time. In Quebec, the measure was introduced in the last budget, along with the ways and means. In Saskatchewan, the proposal for an innovation box was presented in the budget as a proposal, with the details

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable member, for the question. I don't know what made you think I would be interested in talking about beer, but.... Yes, it's a great case, a great case study, and a great constitutional test. The provincial control over the distribution of alcoh

Finance committee  Mr. Chairman, the honourable member is threatening to draw out my libertarian side. I agree with much of the premise and with many of Marco's comments. There are arguments for and against the expansion of the Canada Pension Plan and the liberalization of EI, but these expansions

Finance committee  I agree with much of what Mr. Sullivan said, especially with respect to increases in allowable immigration or immigration targets into Canada. We have a regional, geographic, and demographic mismatch with skills, and this is especially striking in the Atlantic region. Different t

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to members of the committee for the invitation, and welcome to Halifax. When appearing before previous iterations of this committee, I would have been ready to talk about the need for measures to ensure a stable and efficient housing financ

International Trade committee  If I may, I will address ISDS first. If you were Mr. Stanfield's family and you had bought a plant, invested, and expanded in facilities in the southeast U.S., and the state made a massive change in laws and regulations that seemed clearly to undermine your investment, you woul

International Trade committee  There's a contradistinction there. If we're not in TPP, the losses have a dollar value but not a huge dollar value, which is the flip side of saying that within TPP there are gains but they're not huge dollar gains. As to the auto sector, I agree fully. If the TPP goes forward a

International Trade committee  Thank you for the question. The question is about the impact on Nova Scotia in the absence of TPP. It's a really interesting question. In dollar terms, our Atlantic exports from the region, Nova Scotia exports, are overwhelmingly dominated by energy products, by petroleum prod

International Trade committee  I'm not sure I would look for a lot. If we had our druthers and our preferences.... It's sort of difficult to picture, because you'd have to bring a lot of people around the table to do it again and give up things or provide access that they didn't before. The time period over

International Trade committee  I will. I think it's a good place to do so. The current game is in the U.S. political system. We have among the current presidential candidates no sincere champions of the deal post-January 2017. There is a narrow window between the election and January when the President of the

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning. I'm delighted to be here in front of the members. I'm Finn Poschmann, president of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, a charitable think tank with the wonderfully simple mandate of promoting the economic well-being of the Atlantic re

Finance committee  That's a tough one. It really depends. Yes, where you have denser areas, it's going to be easier to make a business case for Internet service. In rural areas, the business case is harder to make, but I don't jump to the assumption that publicly funded high-speed or high-bandwid

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. I think the short answer is to contemplate investment in terms of private returns and public returns. We're used to private investments from which we look for a particular return on equity or a return on investment. In the case of public infrastructu

Finance committee  Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I just spent a little over 17 years working in downtown Toronto, so I am a fan of things that improve urban congestion. I think my point was that it doesn't help everybody everywhere. We really do have to prioritize where scarce dollars are spent. I use