Chamber Blog ~ May 2014

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce is pleased to offer university and college students across Canada the opportunity to win a $2,000 scholarship. Students will want to familiarize themselves with the Partnership for Resource Trade and produce a brief video on the merits of supporting its objectives. The videos must be creative, original, fun and no more than three to five minutes long. It should address one or more of the PRT’s three objectives and promote the support of the PRT. Participants are to email their videos to prt@chamber.ca where a Project Coordinator will post the video onto the Canadian Chamber’s YouTube channel. In addition to the $2,000 scholarship, the winning video will be featured in a PRT communications campaign.

An employer’s first job is to succeed in business. Without business success, there are no jobs and wages, no economic growth, no new tax revenue for governments.

Ottawa needs to keep this fact in mind as it plans another round of restrictions to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Everyone is aware of the political pressure the government is under, but what’s good politics may not be good policy.

The government should keep in mind the program’s purpose and how it relates to jobs and our economy. It was created to assist with employers’ labour market challenges. And notwithstanding the claim that there’s no skills problem in Canada, employers experience a very different reality.

Recap of International Trade Day

This year’s International Trade Day highlighted the success NAFTA has brought to the Canadian, American and Mexican economies and examined ways to leverage 20 years of close cooperation to strengthen North America’s position internationally. Discussions centred on improving the global competitiveness of North America by making our supply chains more efficient, unlocking access to new markets and addressing the barriers to the free flow of people and goods.

Perrin Beatty speaks to Amanda Lang of the Lang & O’Leary Exchange about our latest report on Canada’s international trade challenges.

Business could do more to drive economic development if the right financing mechanisms are made available. The President of the World Bank regularly points out that the private sector is responsible for 90% of job creation in developing countries.

But there are serious risks to doing business in frontier markets where this job creation is most needed. Canada’s insurance companies and pension funds—which are obvious sources of investment for desperately needed infrastructure projects—often have no choice but to sit on the sidelines. Likewise, our strong capabilities in key sectors such as agri-food, microfinance, mining and energy are not being leveraged to their full potential.

Today, we issued a report entitled Turning it Around: How to Restore Canada’s Trade Success. Our report argues that free trade agreements are not enough to reverse Canada’s dismal trade performance over the past decade. Canada must also bolster trade promotion services and diplomatic support for companies abroad.

This guest blog post is provided by Paul Frazer, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Special Advisor on Canada-U.S. Relations.

On May 1, Senators Landrieu (D-LA) and Hoeven (R-ND) introduced a binding piece of legislation that would force President Obama to approve TransCanada’s Presidential permit application to build the Keystone XL pipeline across the Canada-U.S. international boundary. As of this morning, 56 U.S. Senators have said they would vote to move forward in the legislative process on the bill – to end debate in a procedure known as invoking cloture. However, supporters of Keystone should know there are still obstacles to overcome and there is little chance the legislation actually will become law.

With the departure of Assembly of First Nations National Chief, Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, our First Nations peoples have lost a strong advocate for improving their education and workforce success. National Chief Atleo is a highly-principled individual who sees the link between education and improving the lives of First Nations peoples. The status quo for First Nations peoples is not acceptable to him and he moved this issue forward as none other before him.

As the world slowly emerges from recession, B20 Coalition members have identified five key areas where action is urgently required to bolster the recovery and create an enabling business environment. Our members, across the globe, have identified the following priorities for coordinated policy action: trade and investment, fiscal responsibility, energy, infrastructure and investment, and the digital economy. We also acknowledge the importance of investing in human capital, which runs as a thread through all these issues.

In this episode of the Voice of Canadian Business, host Katrina Marsh sits down with John Barrett, President of the Canadian Nuclear Association, and John Stewart, the CNA’s policy director, to talk about how Canadian nuclear technology fits into the global push for cleaner energy. Candu nuclear reactors not only have lower life-cycle emissions than solar panels or geothermal systems, but can also act as fuel ‘recyclers’ by repurposing waste made by other reactors.