44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 8, 2022 10:00AM
- Feb/8/22 12:14:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thought I might start off in today's debate by making a couple of disclosures.
First, my paternal grandfather comes from Saskatchewan: Biggar, to be exact. He ended up in Transcona, which is also a rail town, because at that time, in order to serve an apprenticeship with CN, one had to do time in Biggar and then in Transcona. That is how my father's family found its way to Transcona: by working on the railway for CN, of course, not CP. CN continues to be a very important company in Transcona. It does not employ anywhere near as many people as it used to, but it still employs a lot of people, and its training centre is in Transcona just about a stone's throw away from my home, where I am speaking from today.
We deal with a lot of challenging issues in Parliament. One of the things we can take from the tenor of today's debate and the confluence of arguments is that this is a pretty straightforward question. It does not make sense to exempt a large and profitable corporation from paying the taxes its competitors pay by virtue of something that happens to be in the Constitution from a very long time ago.
As people have remarked, it is legitimate to wonder what changed. Why, all of a sudden, has CP adopted a very different posture, and why does it want over $300 million in taxes it paid to Saskatchewan back from the province? It had been paying its taxes without issue for about 100 years, despite having access to this exemption under the Constitution. It is clear that CP operates in a competitive market, and its competitors do not get this kind of exemption. Therefore, if we want to have a fair and competitive industry, players have to be playing by the same rules at the very least. That is why I am very happy to support this change and to protect folks in Saskatchewan from having to reimburse taxes that I think were rightly paid by CP.
What is interesting about this feature of the Constitution that we are trying to change today is that it hearkens back to a time when government was a lot more open and honest about the extent to which it was willing to patronize large companies. However, that kind of thing is happening today. I would argue that we should be just as concerned about the kind of flagrant disregard that governments in Ottawa, whether Liberal or Conservative, have had for big companies paying their fair share. We should be just as concerned with the examples of that today as we are regarding historical examples, because they certainly persist.
Here we have something that at least is clear-cut. It is in the Constitution, so it is easy to see. What is a lot harder to see are the details of the transactions that go on, under various agreements, that establish tax havens so that wealthy corporations and individuals are able to move their money out of Canada without paying taxes. That is a lot harder to have an informed debate about. We do have folks who have done a lot of work on this, but it takes a lot of digging. It is not spelled out in the Constitution, and we do not have a company going to court to celebrate what it thinks is its right to get out of paying its fair share.
Instead, we have a lot of shady dealings. They are under legal agreements, to be sure, but they are shady nonetheless. We do not have appropriate access to information about how much money is leaving the country and the extent to which large, profitable corporations are getting away without paying their fair share.
As far as I am concerned, what is happening with CP is just one small, stark example, on the scale of what is going on, of what is happening every day in the Canadian economy. Based on the best information available, and it is not a very transparent process, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that Canadians are losing out on $25 billion every year through the use of tax havens by Canada's wealthiest individuals and corporations.
We are talking about a tax bill that has accrued over the last 20 years or so that is on the order of about $300 million.
For those who are getting up today to highlight the unfairness of CP demanding back $300 million from Saskatchewan taxpayers, which it rightly paid and should not get back, I would hope that we can take our outrage and our shock at that and transform it into some meaningful action on something that might actually make a dent in the finances of the nation. There is certainly a need to be able to pay for things that are going to support people through the remainder of this pandemic, but also that will help make investments as we try to face the climate challenge.
Of course, there are people who say that the government should not spending any money on encouraging renewable energy or other things like this, because the government has no place in deciding these things, but CP is an interesting case study with regard to that.
Despite all the wrongs that were part of building that railway, whether it was the treatment of indigenous people and running roughshod over their land, or the Chinese people who were brought here to work on the railway and who were killed and treated horribly, there is no question that building the railway was a central component of making Canada the country it is today. There is a lot that we could talk about regarding what was wrong with it. That is a legacy we can talk about and debate another time.
However, it did not happen solely through the ingenuity of private entrepreneurship. In fact, there was a fair bit of government investment. We are dealing with the legacy of that government involvement today. I think it shows the extent to which the big things do not happen without public involvement. They do not happen without the involvement of government. We can look at Alberta and the government of Peter Lougheed, and the amount that government invested in developing the technology that would ultimately produce the oil sands technology that has been part of driving Alberta's economy for decades now. There was massive public investment in that.
There is certainly a lesson to learn from this, and that is that public investment is required for the big things that help move our country forward. Canadians should not expect that some few people get to benefit from that investment and make off with the money. That is too often the case, as CP is reminding us by insisting on what it takes to be its right to not pay its fair share, even though there were all sorts of different kinds of public subsidies, whether preferential tax treatment or direct investment.
That is not the way these things should work. If we want to build Canada, and if we want to confront the big challenges of our time, that has only ever happened with massive public investment.
The question should not be whether the public investment happens or not. The question should be who is benefiting from that investment and how do we, as legislators and governments elected by Canadians, ensure that Canadians are the ones ultimately benefiting from that.
While there are people who make some money along the way, we have to make sure that does not get out of hand. In a country where 1% of the population now owns 25% of the wealth, we are in a position where that is getting out of hand again. This is an interesting reminder from the 19th century, which was a case study in just how bad things are when a very small number of people controls all of the wealth and resources. It is something we should be mindful of.
We should turn ourselves to the task of combatting the big infrastructure challenge of our time, which is climate change, with our eyes wide open, appreciating that in the past, when there have been big infrastructure challenges, government has had an important role to play. We should learn a lesson from this, which is that we need vigilance not to keep the public sector out of developing the future of the country, but to ensure that a few people along the way do not make mad money while others suffer in order to create that progress.
Let us deal with this today but learn the larger lesson and ensure the wealthy are paying their fair share, and ensure Canadians are benefiting to the extent that they should from investments and infrastructure that we have to make.
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- Feb/8/22 12:24:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member, and I am quite familiar with that phrase out of Biggar. In fact, it was on a T-shirt that I wore quite a bit growing up. I am quite familiar with what the member is talking about.
It may come as no surprise to the member that New Democrats are not the best people to solicit help from, when we talk about getting things through the other place. There are some historical reasons for that. I do know some senators, and I am certainly happy to talk to them, but I think it is outrageous that we need the approval of a group of completely unelected legislators who are accountable to no one in order to get something like this done.
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- Feb/8/22 12:26:37 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member, of course, raises his own example. The example I had in mind was the wage subsidy. It has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars just recently, without any meaningful accountability, to companies that we have seen raise their dividend payments and reward their shareholders in all sorts of ways, and that have not been asked to pay a single dime back. I think that was a terrible example of how to manage public funds.
The NDP called for controls at the inception of that program, and we pointed to other jurisdictions that were doing it better. To me, the wage subsidy program is the best example of the government not having learned its lesson.
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- Feb/8/22 12:28:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think governments have created a very permissive environment that has encouraged corporations to pursue their own interests. We see that in the corporate tax rate being slashed from 28% to 15%.
I do not think that there was ever a golden era when corporations were putting the public good ahead of their private interests, but there was a time when governments required more of them in order to occupy the positions that they occupy in terms of the power and influence that they enjoy. They were required to give more back. If they were not willing to do it in the way that they behaved, at the very least they were required to do it financially, by paying their fair share of taxes. We have really seen that decline, because we have seen governments stop requiring it of them. I think that, until governments grow a spine and start standing up to big companies and making them pay their fair share, this will continue.
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- Feb/8/22 3:13:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, just last week, Statistics Canada reported a job loss of 200,000 jobs during the omicron wave. That is 200,000 Canadian families who are struggling with a benefit system the Liberals created that is inadequate to the task. It does not pay $500 a week, people are waiting far too long to get access if they qualify, and even the special measures that the Liberals brought in just days after passing the bill are set to expire in the next few days.
What is the government's plan, and will it work with us to increase the benefit to $500 a week and make sure that all those Canadians out there who are experiencing job loss, still as a result of the pandemic, actually have access to help instead of—
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