Session: 39:1
Date: 6-Dec-2007

EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS AMENDMENT ACT (WAGE SECURITY), 2007

Ms. Laurie Scott: It's a pleasure to speak this morning in this 39th Parliament of Ontario and to congratulate the new member from Hamilton East-Stoney Creek on his recent election and on presenting the first private member's bill to be discussed in this session. Good for you; congratulations and welcome.

Bill 6, An Act to amend the Employment Standards Act, 2000 to provide for an Employee Wage Security Program: I think the timing of this discussion on this type of program is interesting, seeing as how in this House already this week we've talked extensively about the economy and the numbers of manufacturing business sectors that are struggling in these tough economic times. The leader of our opposition party, the member from Leeds-Grenville, spoke of over 150,000 job losses in the manufacturing sector alone that we've had in this province. It's a critical time in our province right now.

Earlier this week, on Monday morning in a terrible snowstorm, I held a round table for business leaders, chambers of commerce, local business development associations and representatives from the city of Kawartha Lakes, and they are hurting. Some retail stores have a third of the business they should have. This time of the year, especially, they're laying off staff, not hiring staff. There are many factors involved in that-certainly, the high cost of the Canadian dollar is one of them-but when you see that they're letting staff go at this time of year, you know how much of a struggle it is for small businesses to try to keep themselves afloat, with high energy costs, taxes and, as I mentioned, the Canadian dollar.

In the manufacturing sector in Lindsay alone, unfortunately, I've had two closures within this year: Fleetwood manufacturing, which manufactured RV trailers, hundreds of jobs lost; and in the last six weeks what used to be Bonar Plastics and now Promens, it was called, announced the closing of their doors and another loss of 80 jobs. When you talk about the size of the community of the city of Kawartha Lakes, around 75,000 people, that's a lot of job layoffs. That's a huge economic impact for our area.

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I'm phoning the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities. There's a contact there in human resources to work with the companies. We've opened a couple of offices in which the employees can come in and get some human resource guidance training and on what's available to them.

It's just a tremendous challenge that I don't think this government can ignore anymore. The times here are not going to get better. We've heard prediction upon prediction from many financial institutions about the not-good projections that are to come. So it's time for this government to take heed that they need to take this seriously and do what they can to help our employees and to help our employers as well.

Small business, the entrepreneurs and the manufacturing companies are already responsible for so many, many things. First of all, they supply the jobs in the first place and they pay wages, employment insurance, vacation, holiday pay and sick pay. You can go on and on with the extensive list they have of what they're paying for. There are many, many good employers out there who are fighting for their employees and fighting to keep their companies going so they can provide the jobs for their employees.

So when this legislation suggests to me that the businesses and manufacturers aren't already doing enough, that concerns me, because they are working and trying to survive, providing jobs, and making the best of the economic situation that has been put before them. They're already overburdened. When this is a new tax on business and job creation-I think the new member from Thornhill hit it on the head when he said, "We don't want to go down that path as a principle of our party." New taxes are coming in: another burden on employers.

We have to be very, very careful that we don't crush any more employers-more employers go out; less jobs are there. We want to provide a climate for these employers to grow, prosper and provide jobs. This bill concerns us in that this will just put another burden on our employers and will drive more of them out of our province.

We should be focusing our efforts on trying to reduce the red-tape burden on small businesses. We think this bill we have before us this morning will only add to that burden.

There's no question that Ontario's economy is hurting. I would be remiss not to mention the agricultural sector and the burdens that they've been facing for many of the past several years, but especially right now with the hog and pork industry and the tremendous, critical time that they're facing.

I praise the member from Hamilton East-Stoney Creek on his first private member's bill, but we certainly have a lot of concerns on this side of the Legislature in regard to the content of this bill.

I want to thank you for the time allowed this morning by this debate.