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Results: 181 - 192 of 192
View Peter Fragiskatos Profile
Lib. (ON)
We have Maple Leaf Foods coming in to London. When it's finished it will be the world's largest chicken processing plant—maybe not the world's largest, but certainly in North America, with groundbreaking innovation made possible in part by a federal investment about a year and a half ago. We can build off that and do more, I hope.
André Leduc
View André Leduc Profile
André Leduc
2020-02-06 13:19
Mr. Chair and members of the finance committee, it's a privilege to be here today on behalf of Technation.
We're the national technology industry association. We represent over 300 employers, innovators and entrepreneurs, including homegrown small and medium-sized enterprises and multinational leaders in the technology space.
Our members work every day to foster a prosperous, responsible and secure digital economy for Canada. Our sector employs over one million Canadians. We are the driving force behind growing the Canadian economy into the future. In other words, the digital economy is the economy.
Our pre-budget brief consists of three themes, which will guide my comments today: a digital government, the digital economy and responsible technology.
Although the public sector—in other words, the federal, provincial, territorial and municipal governments—is a major purchaser of technological services, it is lagging behind in technology adoption.
That's in large part due to outdated procurement processes for IT products and services, which has long been acknowledged as a barrier that limits small and medium-sized enterprise participation, slows deployments of technologies in the public sector and limits the improved services that Canadians expect. In our submission we recommend that the federal government undertake pragmatic steps to innovate the procurement process, including developing a “commercial first” approach.
All parties agree on fighting climate change as an existential threat. Our sector is proud to be leading the way, with several of our Technation members already achieving net zero emissions for their companies. Our sector offers a unique opportunity for government to contribute to this work.
Federal government legacy data centres and the servers where government digital infrastructure is based are costly and inefficient. A large data centre can use enough energy in a single day to power 65,000 homes, with no more than 12% of that energy output typically used for actual computing. The remaining energy runs backup servers and maintains climate control. The Government of Canada owns and uses hundreds of data centres. Recently, the president of Shared Services Canada, Paul Glover, admitted that the public service doesn't actually know how many data centres they are running.
Technation advocates that as part of the work of the government to modernize, budget 2020 must invest in the transitioning from these inefficient and costly data centres to cloud computing. Taking this action will reduce energy use while improving service delivery to Canadians, and for our members, this would be a no-brainer.
Technation believes that the government must commit to transitioning 80% of its operations to the cloud by 2025. In addition, the government must also commit to providing all public sector services online over the next five years. Those objectives are reasonable, achievable and necessary for modernizing the Government of Canada, for providing digital services to Canadians and for keeping in step with technology.
ln 2018, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, said, “Technological advances represent opportunities to be seized, not a force to be resisted”. ln May of last year, he commended the information technology sector, along with other service industries, for being the driving force behind Canada's economic growth.
We also know that Canada is at the cutting edge of the research and development of new technologies, with our education at the university and college levels among the best in the world. Let's take the example of artificial intelligence: we now have about 4,000 artificial intelligence businesses operating across Canada.
However, the majority of those businesses are not prospering. In simple terms, to remedy the incapacity of technology firms to develop in Canada, the 2020 budget must go along with a simple idea: we don't have an innovation problem in Canada, but rather a problem in terms of adopting our innovations.
Our submission recommends that budget 2020 review the SR and ED tax credit to incentivize start-ups to grow and scale. It also recommends that Canada invest in its skilled workforce, including reskilling and upskilling the public sector zone.
Finally, we advocate for smart infrastructure, including investments in rural connectivity, the deployment of 5G networks and the liberation of data for use by artificial intelligence.
Further, we advocate that the government commit in budget 2020 to creating the data frameworks necessary to unlock our economic potential.
Jean Simard
View Jean Simard Profile
Jean Simard
2020-02-04 17:22
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for this opportunity, as part of these pre-budget consultations, to talk to you about the situation in which the primary aluminum production industry in Canada finds itself. I will also be talking to you about the measures we invite you to take in order to promote our industry's competitiveness in a market that is, as you will see, ever more competitive.
With the exceptions of a few blips, our industry has been experiencing historically low prices for ten years now. Yet our costs are steadily increasing and our business environment is deteriorating because of the geopolitical risk, right here in America, from trade conflicts and tariff wars, which destabilize our traditional markets.
Meanwhile, our plants are aging and require new investments in order to reach the level needed to meet the challenges of the next 25 years and to remain at the head of the pack in an industrial world based on 4G, meaning advanced production using big data, robotics and automation. We therefore see the need for major, not to say massive, investment.
Let us be clear, however. This is not a matter of expansion phases or major projects requiring capital investment. It is a matter of once more modernizing the existing capacity in order to meet the challenges of the next 25 years.
The 2018 reform of the American tax system considerably changed the investment climate in the United States. In addition, some automotive plants moved to Mexico to take advantage of the access to cheaper metal. This sometimes became illegitimate because of the measures taken by one or both of the other signatories of the CUSMA.
Despite the renewed free-trade accord, which we continue to support, our business environment remains very unstable. It is also subject to political decisions made elsewhere, decisions that considerably affect the dynamics of the market for our goods.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that, while we get the same price for our metal today as we did 30 years ago, we pay 2020 costs. Our profit margins are therefore 44% lower than they were 30 years ago.
Our industry also has to face increasing competition from sovereign capacity, almost 70% of the world's capacity. This is held by states or sovereign funds in countries like China, the United Arab Emirates, or India, which is technologically advanced and very competitive, even in the American market. You can see this in the figures we have included in the presentation to help with the understanding.
Chinese production is heavily subsidized, as demonstrated in a report by the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The report came out in January 2019 and contains a study on the aluminum market. The production continues to have a detrimental effect on our markets because of the export of processed products that are highly subsidized. One Chinese company alone, SPIC, has received $35 billion (US) in subsidies from the government of China.
Our industry has invested billions of dollars in plant modernization over the last 20 years, which has enabled us to increase our capacity and reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases, or GHG. We have doubled our capacity and reduced our GHG emissions by 34% in absolute terms. That is by far the greatest contribution to reduced greenhouse gas emissions in Canada's history.
Our industry must now move to 4G production, with automation, robotics and big data. That move must accelerate over time in order to maintain the global competitiveness of our plants. This at a time when our competitors enjoy a business environment that is highly supported by sovereign funds and permissive regulation, which adds capacity at a greatly reduced cost.
Against that background, we submit to you the following recommendations.
First, in order to improve our competitiveness, and in conjunction with the provinces of Quebec and British Columbia, the tax measure known as the accelerated capital cost allowance on capital expenses must be updated, in order to redress the unfair treatment and allow the aluminum industry to take advantage of it. Unlike the steel industry, our sector has no access to category 53, which was established in the budget statement of 2018.
The parameters of the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) program must be reviewed in order to address the need to modernize our plants and maintain our competitiveness in the future. The administrative burden in navigating existing incentive programs must be eliminated in order to lighten the load of processing files and reduce delays in payment or reimbursement.
With the goal of maintaining and protecting our access to the CUSMA market, government purchasing, in government-funded projects, must attach value to low carbon-footprint solutions using materials produced right here in Canada. That goes not only for aluminum, but also for other materials. The government was quick to fly the flag by indicating that it was going to finance major infrastructure projects from coast to coast in Canada. I repeat that, for infrastructure projects to be green, we should above all use low carbon-footprint materials produced here in Canada.
There is also a need to modernize the services supporting the Canada Border Services Agency’s oversight mechanism for imports. We congratulate the government for establishing, as of last September 1, an oversight system for aluminum imports similar to the one for steel. The computer systems and the supporting infrastructure need investment in order to operate with the new parameters that have been established. Investments must be made in order to strengthen the system.
We must also make sure that Mexico implements a domestic oversight system for aluminum imports that is as robust as the one we have in Canada. Together with the governments of the United States and Mexico, we must establish a process to harmonize the mechanisms that monitor aluminum shipments in CUSMA territory. In order for the three signatories to reach an agreement on a designated trading area, we have to give ourselves the means to jointly define the metal shipments that we want to monitor, using the same parameters.
Finally, we have to implement tracking systems for metal in Canada. Seeing what comes in is one thing, but following what we produce to make sure that it is what actually goes out, is something else. So that step must be added to the process.
Thank you.
Daniel Perron
View Daniel Perron Profile
Daniel Perron
2020-02-04 11:06
Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the finance committee.
My name is Daniel Perron. I am a member of the board of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, division fire prevention chief for the regional municipality of Marguerite-D'Youville and retired chief of the Ville de Sainte-Julie in the suburbs of Montreal. I am joined here today by Dr. Tina Saryeddine, the CAFC's executive director.
My colleagues and I appreciate this opportunity.
In our August pre-budget brief, we offered four recommendations. I will touch on each of these, but first let me tell you about the people and organizations that make up the CAFC.
There are about 3,500 fire departments in our country—metro, large, small, medium, urban and rural, career and volunteer—and within them are about 155,000 firefighters. About 85% of both departments and firefighters are volunteer or paid on call.
When we talk about fire departments, flames might come to mind, but fire departments are “all-hazard”. Many have responsibility accorded from their municipality for emergency management, whether it's by formal mandate or informally, because of the expertise held within the fire department.
About 20% to 30% of a typical fire department's caseload is fire suppression, 30% to 50% is emergency medical response and 20% to 30% is all-hazard response. Why is this?
With roots in fire suppression, we've worked as a country to reduce the number of fires through public education and prevention. The skills needed for fire suppression and the culture of training within fire departments are transferable to all hazards, and the numbers and complexity of and demand for all-hazard responses are increasing. Remember, an effective response to fire, flood, dangerous goods or other adverse events mitigates further environmental and economic damages.
I recall my own department's experience during the 1988 Saguenay earthquake, the largest earthquake registered in Canada. It registered 6.0 on the Richter scale, the largest earthquake in Canada in the last 50 years.
Here is where I'd like to illustrate one of our asks. Today, the country's heavy urban search and rescue teams would most likely be called upon to assist in earthquakes. They are a source of national pride, consisting of multiple professions from fire to police, search and rescue, paramedics and medicine, nursing, IT and others, able to operate 10 days autonomously off the grid.
Four of Canada's six HUSAR teams are housed in fire departments. The federal and provincial governments provide significant funding to them. However, unlike in the United States, where all HUSAR teams are coordinated through the federal emergency management administration, FEMA, our coordination nationally still has gaps.
While Canada has agreements and has experts who, as one HUSAR leader said, operate easily on a “call us and we'll come” basis, we have no centralized emergency management agency to coordinate at the interfaces between policy and operations and between different levels of government, the fire departments and the public.
Our model, which consists of various acts, agreements and experts, has many virtues. It ensures that those closest to the emergency are responding unencumbered. However, consider FEMA's stated mission of helping people before, during and after disasters, making the linkage between mitigation, response and future planning.
The U.S. Fire Administration, under FEMA, also performs five functions: public safety information, including official messaging to the media; data; operations support; research; and, grant administration. These are intimately coordinated with the fire departments.
We need all of these in Canada. Through various initiatives at all levels of government, we have them. However, we don't yet have a whole-of-government approach. It could begin with a small investment. Consider that more than 14 federal departments have policy functions relevant to fire departments and are doing commendable work.
A national fire adviser secretariat linking all fire departments, the municipalities, and different levels and parts of government would further improve mitigation, response and resilience.
CAFC members can assist in scoping this out with a large cross-section of the country's fire chiefs and all of the provincial, territorial and national affiliate fire organizations at its national advisory council. Aside from this, we are also asking the federal government to consider a modified and improved form of the joint emergency preparedness program that was intended to provide aid to emergency response capacity in small and rural departments. The program had difficulties because of its execution, which can be improved. Remember, micro investments matter.
In addition, as a nation interested in innovation, we need to ensure capacity for emergency response involving innovations. Examples are electric cars and tall wood buildings. This is why we ask for a fire-driven research and innovation fund. It would allow us to match innovations with training on the emergency response side. It would also allow us to call the research priorities that will bring the evidence to bear on our experiential knowledge. Remember, federally funded research is driven mainly by researchers. Finally, we commend you and ask you to continue your regular efforts on mental health for first responders.
Thank you for hearing us today, and we look forward to your questions.
Catherine Cobden
View Catherine Cobden Profile
Catherine Cobden
2020-02-03 19:14
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for having me.
My name is Catherine Cobden, and as mentioned, I am the president of the Canadian Steel Producers Association. We thank you very much for the opportunity to provide input to you in terms of your pre-budget deliberations.
I'm here today representing our member companies, who are the producers of steel. They produce approximately 15 million tonnes of steel products, and they support approximately 123,000 direct and indirect jobs.
Canada's steel sector plays a strategically important role in the North American economy. We are advanced manufacturers of a 100% recyclable product, and we are also a critical supplier to other key Canadian sectors, such as the automotive sector, the energy sector, the construction sector and many other general manufacturing operations. Given the important role we play, it is imperative that we maintain a steel sector that is strong, competitive and addressing its climate emissions. Our input into your budget deliberations today will focus on three strategic goals: driving investments to create the low-carbon economy, leveraging climate policy to Canada's competitive advantage, and addressing ongoing global trade risk and uncertainty.
The Canadian steel industry has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 31% since 1990. This is a track record that we are immensely proud of as a very large emitter. To go further, however, in our reductions, we'll require breakthrough technologies and solutions that, unfortunately, simply do not exist today. The scale and investment that will need to be dedicated to our transformation require partnership with our government and others, and together we can get it done. The steel sector is prepared to find solutions, and we do have ongoing collaborations. We are looking at working with our suppliers, our customers and the clean-tech industry to find these solutions, but frankly, we have an urgent need to accelerate this development and to do more to support our decarbonization efforts.
As a very first step, we urge the government to ensure that the revenue generated by the federal pricing system is recycled back to large emitters like ourselves and that existing programming is deepened with funding directed specifically to the decarbonization of key sectors. This should be done immediately to help spur the development of the necessary breakthroughs for dramatic emissions improvements in the longer term.
We also recognize that Canada's climate leadership offers both an immediate opportunity, as well as some risk, for our sector. We know that our greenhouse gas emissions profile is significantly less than that of foreign steel being imported from places such as China and other faraway jurisdictions. This is a very important opportunity to ensure that the inherent values and benefits of carbon, of Canadian steel in Canadian projects, are recognized through the domestic procurement efforts right across the country. We also know that more renewable or non-emitting energy sources will play an important role in Canada's steel sector.
On the other hand, we stand at a disadvantage compared to other steel-producing nations that do not face carbon costs. This is the dilemma. While we want and commit to doing our part, we urge the government to investigate whether there are interim means to levelling the playing field to support our sector while we actively seek solutions to this pressing problem as others lag.
Now the North American steel market faces a relentless flow of unfairly traded steel imports due to a global overcapacity of steel to the tune of 440 million extra tonnes of steel. This is a significant amount. We continue to face challenging market conditions, as well, throughout North America. This reality creates a very difficult footing for our sector to advance our climate objectives, but advance them we must.
Canada has more work to do, however, to modernize our trade remedy system. For example, we call for improvements and increased resources for Canada's import permit system. This is necessary to increase the frequency and accuracy of import monitoring. Ideally, in our view, this would include the reinstatement of import permits for all shipments into Canada. It's a tall order, but it's required.
We are grateful for the Canada-U.S. understanding—and for the team Canada approach it took to make it happen—that was really established between the governments of Canada and the U.S. in May 2019. We're also excited about and supportive of the recently signed CUSMA.
We urge the government to continue to explore opportunities to work with the U.S. and Mexico on a North American perimeter to trade—that's what we're about—to strengthen the competitiveness of our North American region and to address global steel overcapacity that affects the entire North American region and to deal with unfairly traded steel imports that affect the North American region.
These collective efforts will strongly support the steel sector's ability to be competitive and to position us for the future of advancing our climate objectives.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the time.
Catherine Cobden
View Catherine Cobden Profile
Catherine Cobden
2020-02-03 19:35
Well, I've mentioned the trade remedies, and I'm going to say that they will continue to always be there, given the situation. Then I also talked about—and I hope you took note of it—our interest in generating solutions to reduce our carbon footprint. We are a large emitter, but we have the will and the interest to collaborate, to do more. The problem is, as you know, a lack of options.
If I had a Christmas wish, it would be that we have a lot more technologies available to drop our emissions fast because we know. The reason for doing that.... Government signals are one thing, but there are also signals in the marketplace with regard to this. There are also signals in civil society and from our bankers. This is an important issue for the industry to address at a business level.
Thank you.
Ms. Annie Koutrakis: Sean?
View Greg McLean Profile
CPC (AB)
My first question goes to Ms. Cobden.
I'm a former steel worker and very pleased to see that you've decreased CO2 emissions by 31% over 30 years. Let's call it 1% per year. I understand that in order to make a big jump ahead, we're going to have to get some innovative technologies to make that happen. One percent per year is a good base if we can continue along that way. Obviously, some industries will do better, but it's nice to see steel on that track.
You did talk a lot about the CO2 tax and how much you're in favour of transitioning the industry to this new CO2 paradigm, and yet you want all the tax to go back to the industry so that it can innovate. You want the CO2 tax applied against imports, including from trading partners that are covered under certain trade agreements at this point in time. It seems like the cost of this CO2 system is going to be more expensive and more difficult, more onerous to administer, than not having a CO2 tax at all on your industry.
Would it be fair for me to say that you're actually not in favour of this, given the fact that it takes so much gerrymandering to make it work in the long run?
Catherine Cobden
View Catherine Cobden Profile
Catherine Cobden
2020-02-03 19:51
Just to clarify my comments, we are going to see large emitters pay about $200 million per year into the industrial component of the program. There's been some discussion already on revenue recycling, that it should go to the province from which it came and all of that. That's fine. Our view is that it should be recycled back to the industries that can make the biggest change with the money in order to see our overall carbon emissions as a country go down. This is the essence of our situation.
I think you're right that 1% per year has been really good, and that's what will continue. I don't know how much more of that we're going to be able to do for the next 30 years, but we're going to continue to do it, and we'll get more improvement incrementally.
What we are really talking about for the new investment is transformation. How do we create those really new technologies of the future that recast how steel is made, not just in our country but globally? This is a real opportunity. No one else is doing it. We don't think this is something that can be done overnight. We think that we need a systemic, year-by-year approach to find those solutions and really make those things work. I have some experience in innovation. I know that good projects come and go—
View Peter Fragiskatos Profile
Lib. (ON)
I think Mark Carney's name has been referenced at the meeting as well.
In terms of the innovations this sector is looking at moving forward with, what are some of the most important ones that you or the sector has seen, writ large, over the past few years? How can we as a federal government help to spur that further?
Catherine Cobden
View Catherine Cobden Profile
Catherine Cobden
2020-02-03 19:56
Can I just clarify? Are you asking for innovation related to climate or—
Catherine Cobden
View Catherine Cobden Profile
Catherine Cobden
2020-02-03 19:56
Oh, you meant to climate specifically.
We have some very interesting beginnings of collaborations going on, whether it's to look at long-term transformation of the steel production process to get rid of the use of carbon entirely....
By the way, we're working with the coal industry on that. We really believe in working collaboratively to find these solutions. They're long-term solutions; they're not going to happen overnight. We have some interesting opportunity with the forest sector as well, where instead of inputting carbon in its fossil form, we use it in our process in its biological form, which has a carbon benefit, etc.
So there are some very intriguing starts, if I might say, but the point I want to make is that we need to accelerate this work. The steel sector can't do that on its own. The scale of the investment and the partnerships required are simply too large.
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