Finance committee  When we look to the reasons for inflation, outside of external supply shocks like the price of oil, often we point fingers at workers, saying that workers require wages to be too high, but there's another possibility, which is that corporations are increasing profits along the su

Finance committee  In the short term, one of the approaches could be an excess profits tax. I know this is something that's already under consideration for the banking industry. It could also be considered for the oil and gas industry that will see, I'm sure, record high profits because of high oil

Finance committee  To start with your last question first, inflation and rental prices are, in many cases, directly governed by provincial governments, so what they say goes, in terms of the increases that are allowed in those markets.... In that sense, caps already exist in those areas insofar as

Finance committee  I think you're referring to a report I did that looked at changes in provincial deficits in the first two years of the pandemic. Certainly, for this last year—the 2021-22 fiscal year that's wrapping up in a couple of days—the projected provincial deficits, initially, were $70 bi

Finance committee  Often, the government's argument, for the provinces, is that the cupboard is bare, so there's nothing for long-term care and so on. That is not the case any longer. The cupboard is stuffed with cash. A lot of it is federal cash, incidentally. I think this puts the provinces in

Industry committee  I'd like to thank the committee for the invitation to speak today on its study of small and medium-sized businesses. The last two years have been a difficult time for small businesses in Canada. Our businesses across this country received unprecedented government support through

Industry committee  The study looked at all the recessions and recoveries that occurred in Canada at any point in the last 50 years, of which there were six. After each one, it gauged how much benefit workers versus corporate profits had attained following that recession and recovery. In some cases

Industry committee  Well, low-income wage growth in the Canadian context, or in the American context, for that matter, is largely driven by minimum wage policy. That's often what drives up low wages in Canada. With respect to that, most provincial minimum wages are at this point indexed to inflation

Industry committee  It's higher wages for workers. This is a labour market. Sometimes employers are the ones on the winning side and sometimes workers are the ones on the winning side. Right now workers are the ones on the winning side. The unemployment rate is low. That provides more bargaining pow

Industry committee  That's exactly right. If they compete for workers, then this is a way we would see workers' wages rise and corporate profits fall. The higher expense for labour requires lower profits and more money towards the labour line, as it were, on the income statement, and—

Industry committee  I think that's exactly what this study says. We're in a unique circumstance whereby corporate profits have very much benefited from inflation, whereas workers' wages are far behind inflation in this initial inflationary drive that we've seen in the last year and a half. Compani

Industry committee  Certainly, access to the wage subsidy program itself could have easily been restricted, such that large enterprises in particular could not gain access to it. We wouldn't have had the kinds of news stories that we had throughout the pandemic, when we found big profitable companie

Industry committee  Well, what's interesting is that if you take a look at previous recessions after which corporate profits came out ahead of workers' wages in terms of the breakdown of GDP, you find the most similar episode in 1981, with the 1981 recession. What is similar between the present rece

Industry committee  We should see a healthy level of turnover in businesses. It is not the government's responsibility to ensure that businesses never go bankrupt; I think it is the government's responsibility to ensure that those bankruptcies are orderly, so that folks can go on and start other bus

Industry committee  There is in the food and accommodation sector. Some work that I did in the fall looked at the number of workers who either were employed in the food and accommodation sector or were unemployed but most recently worked in the food and accommodation sector. I defined this as the si