Catherine Swift, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB),was asked by Ontario's Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs to appear Monday at pre-budget hearings as an expert witness.
“The Ontario government continues to send mixed messages to the province's job creators,” Ms. Swift said in a release that outlined key recommendations. “While the plan to reduce personal and corporate taxes is a step in the right direction, you have, for example, the Minister of Labour intent on driving small businesses into the ground.”
Here is a draft hansard copy of the transcript. (The official version is expected to be available this week.):
The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Laura Albanese): We now call the Canadian Federation of Independent Business to come forward. Good morning.
Ms. Catherine Swift: Once we get our technology organized, I'll introduce ourselves.
The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Laura Albanese): Yes.
Ms. Catherine Swift: I'm Catherine Swift, president and CEO, Canadian Federation of Independent Business, and I'm accompanied by my colleague Satinder Chera, who is our vice-president for Ontario.
We have a little package I believe you've received. There are a number of documents in it. As you'll see, we tried not to overload you too much. I'll be referring to them in the course of our overview presentation, in which a slide deck is also included.
Just a couple of brief comments about CFIB: Next year, we're going to be celebrating our 40th anniversary. We're currently the largest individual membership business organization in Canada. We have over 105,000 members across Canada and, of course, a good chunk—about 42,000—here in Ontario. We basically represent every sector of the economy. The commonality among our members is they're all Canadian-owned companies and they're all privately held companies. Part of our interesting history is that RIM used to be a member before they went public. But we do represent the small and medium-sized business sector of the economy.
All of our policy positions are based on input from our members. It's not what I or Satinder or anyone else cooked up that morning. We're 100% financed by our members, which is very rare among business associations; most of them accept money from large corporations or governments.
Just moving ahead to the demographics of the Ontario small business community, naturally most firms in the province are very small, as you can see by this pie chart. That's pretty reflective of the country as a whole, so Ontario is fairly typical that way. What is interesting is, during our recent recession we actually saw employment in the small and medium-sized business community stable or increasing. Certainly some sectors got hammered—we have a lot of members in the manufacturing sector—but others picked up the slack. What you see with small and medium-sized businesses is they're an amazingly stable part of our economy. So policies that help them tend to help with job creation and stability overall. Virtually all of the job reductions that happened over the recession came from large corporations.
Our Business Barometer is a survey we do monthly now; we originally did it annually, then quarterly, and then just in June last year we started doing it monthly. It's turned out to be an immensely useful tool to gauge what the economy is doing. Here, as you can see—the last one was the end of last year; we'll be releasing the January numbers in the next few days. We saw improvement, we saw recovery happening around the early part of last year. Although it's bopping around a little bit, as you can see, we see an improved—basically what this represents is the confidence level of business owners. Again, as you can see from the chart there, it tracks GDP very well. So we find policy-makers and finance ministers, governments and private sector economists are using this as a very good gauge of the economy overall.
When we look by province, you can see that the Ontario number is virtually identical—it's off by a couple of tenths of a percentage—to the national numbers. Of course, Ontario is about 40% of the national economy, so that's not too shocking. It's kind of the middle of the pack in that sense.
When we look at cost concerns of the small business sector, you can see that tax and regulation are clearly number one, and those are things that are very much within governments' control. Some things, of course, we don't have as much control over, but those we have a lot of control over.
