TorontoDefender

ALT Committee transcript excerpts: Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada The Chair (Mr. Stephen Crawford): We’ll now move on to our next speaking group, the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada. If you could please come up and introduce yourselves for the record—your names. You can please start right away. Mr. Peter Gossmann: Good afternoon. I’m Peter Gossmann. I’m from the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada and I’m a business owner in Richmond Hill. Ms. Jocelyn Bamford: My name is Jocelyn Bamford. I am the founder of the Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers and Businesses of Canada. We have a family business in Scarborough, Ontario, called Automatic Coating Ltd.

ALT Sick days—we call them “sick days.” They weren’t sick days; they were vacation days, because it didn’t require you to prove that you were sick. This year, many of the members in our coalition experienced that by the end of February or mid-March, everyone had taken those days, most of them just after the Super Bowl.

ALT The amount of companies in our market space—when we have employees who are sick, and they’re truly sick, we give them the time off. We had an employee whose wife was dying of cancer. We worked it out amongst ourselves. He came in for a couple of hours, he went home and looked after her, and he came back in a couple of hours. We had that, and that was for over a year. He was paid full-time because he was a great employee. That’s our biggest struggle: to keep and maintain good employees.

ALT January 16, 2020, tweet from Doug Ford: I had a great evening at the @CCMBC123 Coalition of Concerned Manufacturers & Businesses Game Changer of the Year Awards celebrating entrepreneurs and job creators. Our plan to make Ontario open for business is working – almost 300,000 net new jobs since we took office. [there are pictures of him posing with people]