Industry committee  I don't have a specific idea of what the threshold should be. I definitely agree that they need to be much higher. I like the idea of them being proportional to the income or the profits that corporations have worldwide. One thing that I've heard a few times today is that this c

Industry committee  Thanks, Vass, and thank you very much for the question. There have been some consultations on these, and the law has been tested and found to be insufficient to study wage-fixing, so that needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed now. Can we consult further after this change i

Industry committee  Yes, it absolutely does. It lowers the floor of competition for all sorts of organizations that are always trying to do the right thing in concert with their employees, with their unions, with environmental law, and the list goes on. If we allow this egregious behaviour to happen

Industry committee  I think that's a very important point. We need to make sure that any penalties that are in place deter the behaviour that we are trying to prevent. If we don't have those penalties in place, we see things exactly like what happened in the grocery industry with wage-fixing and can

Industry committee  That's a good question. Let's see. I think we've seen this committee study this issue. We saw the commissioner and their response and their reasoning behind not studying the issue. We know that we have a wage-fixing problem. Previously when we were here, our president stated t

Industry committee  Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kaylie Tiessen. I'm an economist and a policy analyst in the research department at Unifor. I'm here to discuss the long-awaited initial changes to Canada's competition policy that are inside the budget implementation bill. This is the third

Finance committee  That is another big question. Number one, I don't think we should separate our moral obligation from our economic obligation. Our moral obligation to people comes first. The economy is supposed to serve people, so that's number one. Then, when it comes to this transition that

Finance committee  It's incredibly important. We know that one of the really important tools in an economy to raise working conditions for people is unionization. Any laws that undercut that mean we're seeing this sort of race to the bottom instead of a virtuous cycle where we're building job quali

Finance committee  We are supportive of the change that is being made, recognizing there needs to be extensive consultation in the regulatory process to make sure the list of job categories that it includes doesn't leave anyone out. We have members who do all sorts of jobs at the airport who experi

Finance committee  I wish I had talked to our training design experts this morning, before this question. Here's what I will say, and I can put you in touch with our training folks to get a more detailed explanation. We're seeing that there's a major transition happening in our economy. There are

Finance committee  It's incredibly important to make sure that corporations are held accountable for the public money they receive. We have been to this committee before, I believe, as well as to others, to talk about the conditions there should be on money that's given to corporations in order t

Finance committee  That's a big question. How many seconds do I have?

Finance committee  Okay. To the second part of your question, could we have afforded not to, the answer is, no, we could not have afforded not to. Supporting people, supporting employment, supporting businesses to get through this crisis, one that we haven't faced in 100 years or potentially ever,

Industry committee  Resources are number one, and it's great that that has been accomplished. The second is to reverse that 2009 change and reinsert the word “purchase” so that something like wage-fixing can be investigated and is considered to be illegal. Another one is to develop those guidelines

Industry committee  That's something I can do a lot more research on, absolutely. The one that is front and centre for us at Unifor is looking at this pandemic pay cut where all three of the grocery giants cut pandemic pay on the same day and the Competition Bureau came back and said it couldn't inv