Opposition Motion – Employment Insurance

That, in the opinion of the House, the Employment Insurance (EI) plan announced by the government on September 11, 2014, and which will begin on January 1, 2015, will not create jobs and growth but will instead provide a financial incentive for employers to lay off workers; and therefore, the House urges the government to re-direct those resources by providing employers an EI premium exemption on newly-created jobs in 2015 and 2016.

Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, I remember clearly one of the Conservative administration’s big efforts on job creation. In fact, the then minister of finance referred to the Canadian corporate sector as the job creators and made the leap of believing that if we were to cut corporate taxes to far lower than any other country in the OECD, in fact to half the corporate tax rate of the United States, the job creators, the large corporations, would plow that money back into job creation.

We then had the former governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, call it dead money; $600 billion piled up in the coffers of these corporations. It is not working for Canadians. It is not creating jobs. A staggering 32% of GDP is not creating jobs.

I wonder if the Conservative administration is now rethinking the idea that shovelling money toward corporate Canada will automatically result in jobs? It has not. They are sitting on it. It is dead money. Is it not time to get it to stand up and walk?

Mr. Andrew Saxton: Mr. Speaker, I would like to explain to my hon. colleague some of the benefits that have happened for Canada and the Canadian economy as a result of lower taxes for small businesses. For example, let us take Tim Hortons. Tim Hortons moved its head office back to Canada from the United States after years of being away, specifically because the taxes in Canada are lower than those in the United States.

Let us hear what others are saying. Bloomberg, for example, says that Canada is the second-best place in the world to do business, second only to Hong Kong. Why is that? It is because of our low-tax regime for small businesses.