{"id":22866,"date":"2019-02-01T11:48:33","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T16:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=22866"},"modified":"2019-02-01T11:48:33","modified_gmt":"2019-02-01T16:48:33","slug":"finance-minister-meets-with-business-leaders-at-chamber-breakfast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/finance-minister-meets-with-business-leaders-at-chamber-breakfast\/","title":{"rendered":"Finance Minister meets with business leaders at Chamber Breakfast"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Canada will have a Federal Election this year and Finance Minister Bill Morneau stated his case for the Liberal Government at a breakfast hosted last Tuesday by the Aurora Chamber of Commerce.
\nInterviewed before an audience by Stewart McLaren of Almac and McLaren Doors on stage at the Royal Venetian Mansion, Mr. Morneau fielded questions on a wide variety of topics, including trade and competitiveness.
\n\u201cIt is worth stepping back and thinking about the last time Canadians needed to make a choice on a new government [in] 2015,\u201d said Mr. Morneau. \u201cWe had at that time had two quarters of negative growth, which is the definition of a recession. We had 7.1 per cent unemployment in this country. There were some real challenges.\u201d
\nThe Liberal Party, he said, offered a solution when the \u201ceconomy was challenged\u201d and that was being \u201coptimistic about the future of Canada, we should be investing in tomorrow, and making sure people had a sense of opportunity for themselves and their families.\u201d
\nThis translated into choosing investments over austerity and, he argued, resulted in dividends, but the last couple of years have presented some new challenges for the country, particularly when it comes to international trade with Canada\u2019s largest trading partner, the United States.
\n\u201cWe have seen some tumultuous things internationally with trade between the US and China causing a lot of anxiety, of course, and particularly difficult diplomatically right now,\u201d said Mr. Morneau. \u201cPeople are feeling anxious. They are looking around the world and they are recognizing that it is moving faster than it ever has. The Prime Minister had an interesting quote and he said, the economy is moving faster than it ever has before, but it is slower than it ever will be in the future. It gives a sense of how rapidly things are changing in our world.
\n\u201cI know in this room there are business owners who are worried about the cost of doing business, whether or not they will be able to face up to those challenges. We know people are worried about their ability to retire; they are worried about places like the GTA [and] affordable housing. We have many things that are causing that high anxiety.\u201d
\nKey to addressing those issues is having a plan, something he said the Liberals are in best position to provide. Canadians want a \u201cReal and concrete plan\u201d to deal with changes that are having a direct impact on our economy, our world, and our daily lives, and \u201ca plan is a first step.\u201d
\n\u201cYou wouldn\u2019t expect any business owner in this room to try [and go to a loan officer] without a plan for how they are going to grow their business,\u201d he said. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t go in for surgery without expecting that surgeon had a careful and concrete plan to make sure they will bring you out of that surgery successfully, and it is no less for us who are trying to make sure that our economy works in the long term.\u201d
\nTo this end, Mr. Morneau took direct aim at Premier Doug Ford who started the week with a speech saying that carbon pricing would be an economic failure. Mr. Morneau countered with criticism that the Ontario Government\u2019s cutting of benefits for \u201cthose people that are most challenged in our society\u201d is \u201ccertainly not a plan.\u201d
\nMaking statements like Mr. Ford\u2019s, he said, were \u201cpotentially destabilizing\u201d with the potential of \u201ccausing real harm to Canadians, real harm to their jobs and their potential jobs in the future.
\n\u201cFederally, when the Conservative opposition says they have a plan for Climate Change, in my estimation it is incumbent upon them to tell us what that plan is,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to be able to debate and understand whether it is actually going to have the long-term impact we know we need to have. If there is a plan and they are not telling people, presumably they are assuming that people don\u2019t have the capacity to understand. I would say that, together, we need to recognize that facing up to these challenges is critically important.\u201d
\nLooking ahead, Mr. Morneau said the Liberal Government has made significant changes in reducing taxes for middle class Canadians, reducing the tax bracket for individuals making between $45,000 and $90,000 by seven per cent, retooling the Canada Child Benefit to better benefit families in greater need, and focusing on improving transit with Regional governments.
\n\u201cWe know there is a continuing sense of anxiety,\u201d he said. \u201cWe know that there is still more to do, but let\u2019s look at what\u2019s happening: over the last three-and-a-half-years, Canadians have created 800,000 new jobs, but there is still more to do. We know that after the last few years, we have seen our unemployment rate go down from that high 7.1 down to 5.6 per cent. We currently have the lowest rate of unemployment we have seen since the mid-1970s, but we know there\u2019s still more to do. We know that our plan, the plan of being optimistic, about investing in Canadians and doing it in a way that is balanced and measured is the right way to go. That\u2019s the plan we\u2019ve created, it\u2019s working for Canada.\u201d
\nIndividuals attending the breakfast, however, wanted more and emcee Mr. McLaren and individuals peppered the Minister with questions, many of which had to do with trade and the cost of doing business.
\nThe new trade deal between Canada, the United States and Mexico was under the microscope, particularly when it came to lingering tariffs levied by the U.S. government on steel and aluminum.
\nMr. Morneau said the Government was working \u201con a very regular basis\u201d to address the tariff situation.
\nBusiness owners also approached him with concerns about the perceived negative impacts climate change policies might have on businesses, and possible alternatives.
\nOne such alternative proposed to the Minister was the creation of a system of credits to incentivize businesses to reduce packaging and divert materials away from landfill.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re not trying to say that the only thing we should do is put a price on pollution,\u201d said the Finance Minister. \u201cWe\u2019re facing a real challenge and that challenge had got many, many aspects to it. Pricing pollution is the thing that is an essential way to get at this issue so we have a long-term impact, [but] I will take that idea away.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canada will have a Federal Election this year and Finance Minister Bill Morneau stated his case for the Liberal Government at a breakfast hosted last Tuesday by the Aurora Chamber of Commerce.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22832,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/2019-01-31-01.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-5WO","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 00:44:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}