Finance committee  Thank you, Chair. Good morning, committee members. Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before you today. I'm here on behalf of the Canadian Labour Congress. The CLC is Canada's largest labour central. It's the voice on national issues for 3.3 million working peo

Finance committee  There was a specific question from the member about pension coverage in small and medium-sized enterprises. According to Statistics Canada, about 2% of micro and small businesses offer registered pension plans.

Finance committee  When the chief actuary assessed the cost of the initial child-rearing dropout in the CPP, the cost was found to be very modest. It was 0.1% by 2000 and 0.3% by 2025, or something like that. You can find that actuarial report from just after 1977, when the first dropout was added.

Finance committee  Department of Finance has done extensive modelling. The whole fallacy of calling CPP contributions a tax is that it ignores the benefit side that comes from higher contributions. Benefits will increase. Incomes will increase and consumption expenditures will increase, and that ha

Finance committee  Inflation is price movements. We're talking about the real expansion of the economy.

Finance committee  No, it's not a tax. That's a fundamental fallacy.

Finance committee  Thanks for the question. Yes, indeed, most defined benefit plans are integrated with the CPP. That means the benefit, the workplace pension benefit, is adjusted to take into account the CPP. It's the same with the contribution rate. There's nothing in Bill C-26 that tells workp

Finance committee  You're absolutely correct. There are a lot of, predominantly women, public sector or third-sector workers who have nominally defined benefit plans, but the pension benefit is very low. They need a bump in their retirement incomes, and the CPP will provide that. They may decide

Finance committee  Committee and Chair, good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to appear in front of you today. I bring you greetings from CLC president Hassan Yussuff, who wanted to attend but was unable to. The CLC, as you may know, is Canada's largest labour central. It's the voice on n

Industry committee  It's terrible agreement, and I can tell you why.

Industry committee  It's urgently needed. In comparison to the scale of new investment in plant formation in the United States and Mexico relative to Canada, it's crystal clear that we're at risk of not being able to renew the kinds of investments that we have made historically. This is going to hav

Industry committee  We're critical of it, frankly, especially for the lower-skilled and lower-wage streams. We don't feel there's a case for that. With respect to the higher-skilled streams, we believe that if Canada could do something about its terrible training record and find a solution that wou

Industry committee  No, not as close linkages that we would like. Specifically, what I proposed was focused strategic venues that would bring all of the relevant stakeholders together in a particular industry, including labour, employers, industry groups, business associations, colleges, and various

Industry committee  Yes, northern European countries have this co-determination, or co-operation, or coordination and collaboration to a much higher degree than Canada does at the workplace level, at the enterprise level, and at the sector level. Absolutely I would propose looking to northern Europe

Industry committee  Mr. Chair, may I quickly speak up to defend the good name of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which is a very honourable and admirable union that's an affiliate of the CLC.