Finance committee  I think it's a great start. However, it ignores office workers and feminized workers, so I wouldn't call it the gold standard. I think it could be improved by considering workers who don't do heavily male-dominated work. There is a lot of feminized work and there should also be w

Finance committee  In general, I would like to see them rely less on market incentives to try to nudge behaviour. That doesn't really work very well. Specifically, I would love to see the parental benefits change. It's very simple. It doesn't cost that much and it would make a huge gender differenc

Finance committee  Absolutely.

Finance committee  Absolutely. Workers in Canada cost less to businesses than they do in the United States. Paying for health insurance in the United States for workers is growing more and more expensive. Having that public system in place, making sure that it's working properly and expanding it—de

Finance committee  I think that's an amazing question, and governments should take that question into consideration more often when they're taking action. Speaking of productivity, the cost of not transitioning the labour force—not planning for that, not having an industrial strategy in place and

Finance committee  There are different ideas about what can spur economic growth, but you can have wage-led growth. If you're investing in workers and paying them a good wage, they spend that money in their local economies. Those jobs become more productive because the workers are paid better, so t

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Yes, this is an issue that the labour movement has been working on for years. There was actually an NDP private member's bill, I think in 2013, that was meant to address this issue. All that needs to happen—it's a fairly straightforward change—is to allow people to use those ho

Finance committee  Yes, I absolutely think that it's an issue. Actually, at the Broadbent summit tomorrow, I'm moderating a panel on productivity and different views around how we can improve productivity. Absolutely, there's been a lack of investment by Canadian businesses in both equipment an

Finance committee  Thank you for the opportunity to present CUPE's views on Bill C-59. The Canadian Union of Public Employees is Canada's largest union, with over 750,000 members. CUPE members take great pride in delivering quality services in communities across Canada as they work in a broad cros

Finance committee  This is a fantastic example. CUPE has members right now—I was speaking to some in northern Ontario last week—who are working at facilities where full-time, 16-hour, get-lots-of-overtime agency nurses are working beside them. The agency workers don't necessarily have the history i

Finance committee  Thank you very much. The Canadian Union of Public Employees is Canada's largest union. It has over 700,000 members. CUPE members take great pride in delivering quality services in communities across Canada as they work in a broad cross-section of the economy, including health ca

Finance committee  Thank you, Kaylie. Yes, CUPE represents workers who deal with this as well. CUPE represents a bunch of food services workers, and it's a problem in provincial jurisdictions as well, so we're really happy to see the federal government start to provide leadership on this sector.

Finance committee  Many people who have coverage have it through their employer, so if they lost their job during the pandemic, then they have also lost their drug coverage. It would have been a very timely move to actually push forward on implementing pharmacare. The Liberals have been dragging th

Finance committee  I think it's critically important, and it's really important to look at the whole system, as we say, instead of having small token pieces. The token tax on aircraft singles out a tiny sliver of what we're talking about in terms of wealth, as one of the presenters here today said,