With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1514012
19 B C B U S I N E S S . C A F E B R U A R Y 2 0 24 QUICK HITS PET PEEVE Mayonnaise HOBBY Knitting RECENT PODCAST/ TV BINGE Philosophize This podcast and The Morning Show MOST MEMORABLE CONCERT Corey Hart at age 17 and 48— both times, baby IF I HAD A SUPERPOWER, IT WOULD BE I'm a historian, so time travel FAVOURITE PLACE IN B.C. Home LAST BOOK I READ Currently reading Astra Taylor's Age of Insecurity— reflections on the moment we are in and how we can respond to it nesses have been struggling more than ever. This is the time when government needs to turn its attention to recognizing the important role small businesses need to play. My son and daughter both work in local small businesses. You mentioned the Employer Health Tax—your party proposed increasing the exemption threshold from $500,000 to $1.5 million for businesses paying the EHT, something the BC Chamber of Commerce supported. What other things can be done to help small businesses? The EHT threshold is really putting that downward pressure on businesses to not hire. Another one I've been doing some reading around is the proposed $3-bil- lion subsidy to LNG Canada that the B.C. government is lobbying the federal gov- ernment for subsidizing the transmission lines. We're talking billions of dollars going to subsidies for massive multinational com- panies like Shell and PetroChina. And yet, in B.C., small businesses pay a higher BC Hydro rate—the commercial rate is higher than the residential rate. That's a way to relieve the pressure from small business— recognize that businesses under a cer- tain threshold get a break on their hydro. As opposed to businesses in the billion- dollar profit range that are getting breaks on hydro rates. It's an upside-down world. You've also championed the four-day workweek and getting rid of NDAs, both of which would affect the business community quite a bit. What's happening with those issues? The NDA bill is still sitting on the order table. We don't expect the government to adopt our bill, but I am hoping that they bring their own legislation on this. It would be great to see them do that, because this is an issue that shouldn't be seen as political so much as a human rights issue. And what about the four-day workweek? That seems like it might be controversial in nature? It is. However, we are the party of evi- dence. When you look at the pilots around the globe that are happening, what's interesting is that there's a consistency in the results. We're consistently seeing that revenues from businesses that adopt a four-day workweek either stay the same or go up. In the last report from the North American pilot, revenues went up and so did employee retention and satisfaction. In a lot of cases, costs can go down. The biggest hurdle to recognizing that we can reshape the workweek is really our imagi- nation. I think that with these consistent results coming back from four-day work- week pilots, we're continuing to push for the B.C. government to put in place incen- tives to businesses that want to embark on a pilot here in B.C. What we proposed back in the spring was a tax-break incentive to businesses willing to put this in place. And in exchange for the tax break, they'd provide the data on specific aspects of the pilot. It'll be part of our 2024 platform. Speaking of which, what would a positive outcome from this year's election look like for your party? What do you hope for? There was a recent piece in the Globe and Mail about how Green voters across Canada should be disappointed by the fact that they're so underrepresented. Eighteen percent of the vote in B.C. only results in three or four of the seats in the legislature. A positive result would be that we have a representation in the legislature that more closely matches the percent of support we have in B.C. And I think a lot of people in B.C. recognize that there were benefits during the three-and-a-half