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Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)

Mar/31/22 10:30:30 a.m.
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Uqaqtittiji, I understand that is the Inuktitut word for “Speaker” on this National Indigenous Languages Day. I wanted to go back to some remarks of the member. During his speech he talked about the Conservatives' previous motion to lift the GST at the pumps, and he would know, from listening to debate on that day, that New Democrats were prepared to entertain the idea of some temporary tax relief for Canadians. We moved an amendment to say that, instead of providing that relief at the pumps, we ought to provide it on home heating. I presented some arguments as to why we thought that was a good idea. It was an opportunity to build a broader consensus here in the House on their motion. Conservatives declined, but I did not hear in that debate the reasons why. I wonder if the member might like to offer the reasons they declined to consider tax relief on home heating that day.

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Context: House Hansard - 50 - Mar/31/22

Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)

Mar/31/22 11:23:37 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his speech. I enjoyed his analysis of the incoherence of the Conservatives' motion today. How can we talk about balance without talking about revenues? We know that tax havens exist and that billions of dollars are being diverted from the public coffers thanks to these tools of the wealthy. We also know that rich people in Canada are accumulating more and more of the wealth generated by Canadians and by Canadian workers. Does my colleague have anything to say about that?

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Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)

Mar/31/22 11:42:41 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to today's motion because it provides an opportunity to understand a little better some of the thinking of our Conservative colleagues in the House. It lays out quite nicely some of the deficiencies in their thinking about the current economic problems that we are facing in Canada. It is also an opportunity to highlight some of the ways in which New Democrats think differently about these things and the different kinds of solutions that we would propose to the problems of our day. I thought I might proceed just by walking through the motion, as it were, beginning with its first premise, paragraph (i), which says: excessive government spending has increased the deficit, the national debt, and fuelled inflation to its highest level in 31 years.... There is clearly a sense in which it is trivially true that government spending increases the deficit. It is hard to have a public deficit if the government is not spending money, so that is true. It is always important to ask what the government is getting for that expenditure or, perhaps more specifically and importantly, what the public and what Canadians are getting for that expenditure, because there are different kinds of expenditures. There are expenditures that are simply passing expenditures, and then there is expenditure that represents investment. Of course, one of the important aspects of investment is return. When we talk about public spending, there are different ways that we can get return on investment. We can get return on investment on the public books themselves. Sometimes we see that when governments invest in things that increase government revenue, the government actually ends up getting more money coming back. That is reflected on its books. When we talk about public investment, there is an important difference from investment in the private sector. We see this far less, because it is a different mandate. Having a mandate to increase private profit is very different from having a public interest mandate. Sometimes when we invest from the public purse, the return on investment is experienced not on the government books but by the public. Sometimes it is in their household books, and sometimes it is in the benefit of employment and other things that obviously affect household budgets. For instance, when New Democrats talk about public expenditure on something such as pharmacare, that is not because we love larger government programs for their own sake or because we think that this spending will not benefit Canadians or that there will not be a return on investment. It is quite the contrary. We support, and have fought a long time for, and are looking forward to making further progress on, a national pharmacare plan because we understand that it is going to have a direct impact on the household budgets of Canadians, so many of whom we have heard from. In fact, I have heard Conservatives raise the issue of Canadians who are struggling to afford their medication, having to cut pills, and having to raid other budgets, such as their food budgets and their rent budgets, in order to get the life-saving medication that they need. That is why New Democrats support public investment in something that will lower the cost of prescription drugs. That makes sense to us. That is a philosophical difference, because it says that we should be sharing the cost of trying to provide the things that our families and communities all need. It says that it is wrong for a small cross-section, the top 1% or 10% depending on how we measure it or look at it, to get to walk away with an increasingly larger piece of the pie while so many in Canada continue to struggle. When we say let us get it off the government books, it does not go away. The federal government could give itself a pat on the back, as Conservatives did in the Harper years, for having smaller deficits, but those deficits do not go away. They get transferred to the household budgets of Canadians who continue to struggle with the cost of prescription drugs. They continue to struggle in the context of a housing market that has gotten out of control, and they continue to struggle with the cost of dental care, for which very few Canadians have ever had any meaningful help. We are optimistic about children from low-income families and their parents being able to afford to get help with those real problems that can have a lasting impact on their lives. There are real financial costs of them being able to get access to that service. Is it true that government spending contributes to deficits? Of course, in fact there are no deficits without government spending. However, is that spending addressing other real deficits in the household incomes of Canadians? I have just argued that in the case of pharmacare and dental care, and I could go on but I will not because I want to get to the other parts of the motion. Depending on the expenditure, that has an impact by reducing the household deficits of many Canadians while increasing their access to services. That is a deficit that exists. It is just that low-income Canadians are facing that deficit on their own. It is not measured and publicly reported somewhere. By having a public program, we could increase access to those services that are so important for Canadians' lives, and that means we are actually going to be measuring and recording that deficit somewhere. Gladly for me and for New Democrats, it means somewhere we are sharing that cost collectively, including with the people who have the most ability to pay for those things. Unfortunately many Canadians are just not in a position to pay for those things, fewer and fewer Canadians, as inflation increases. The other issue with this first clause is that it pretends, wrongly, that government spending is the only driver of inflation. I think it is pretty obvious to anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see that this is not the case. Certainly we heard at the finance committee that some are of the opinion that quantitative easing in the context of the pandemic has increased the access to capital and that has allowed, particularly investors, to drive up the cost of housing. There are actually ways to address this that do not involve any more public expenditure. For instance, having a higher down payment requirement for investors, as opposed to people who are trying to buy their own family home, is a way the government could cool the investment climate in the Canadian housing market without spending a dime. Having a differential rate on CMHC mortgage insurance for people who are buying investment properties as opposed to principal residences is another way to do that without spending a dime. In fact it would cause more revenue to come in. To the extent that the investment culture continued and to the extent that it did not, it would relieve demand in the housing market, which presumably should have a cooling effect on prices. However, some pretend that quantitative easing is the only reason there has been incredible inflation in the housing market, which incidentally is not even really represented in the CPI figures, and that has been the subject of some debate at the finance committee. In fact, as housing prices cool in response to higher interest rates, it is likely that we will see inflation go up in the short term, because that is actually recorded. These are questions about how accountants and economists record inflation, and I think are less directly connected to what Canadians are actually experiencing. Even if the nominal inflation rate goes up, if housing prices are coming down, Canadians are going to benefit even in the context where apparently inflation is going up. It makes no sense to talk about inflation in the current context without recognizing the production stoppages that have occurred as a result of the pandemic. There is still a lot of recovering happening, because we have a just-in-time economy. It is not like there were massive piles of inventory. Production capacity is pretty well attuned, in many industries, to demand. Trying to make up for lost time is a difficult thing. That is going to take time. In the meantime, we have seen climate-induced natural disasters wreak havoc on the infrastructure required to deliver goods in a timely way in that just-in-time economy I was just talking about, and that drives up costs as well. There are a number of other causes of inflation that are well outside the control of government. That is why we think it is so important that the government act on the things it can act on and make a difference where it can. The second bullet recognizes that there is a carbon tax increase coming. There is no question. It talks about escalator taxes, specifically referring to the escalator on the excise tax. It talks about Canada pension plan premiums as a tax. Again, there is a kind of trivial sense in which that is true. As it happens, accountants, for convenience, have chosen to record Canada pension plan costs in their payroll tax ledger. That is fair enough. I am glad that is convenient for accountants, but we should not allow ourselves to be duped by a reasonable professional standard that allows them to talk about the cost per person on their payroll into thinking that the Canada pension plan is really a tax, because it is not. It is part of the wage package Canadians expect when they go in to work. They do not just look at their hourly wage. They look at their benefit package, if they are fortunate enough to be employed at a workplace that has one, and that is certainly something we want for more Canadians. We also recognize that when we have universal programs, whether they are pharmacare or dental care, they help provide a competitive advantage to Canadian companies over their international competitors, because these are things that help them to attract workers, in the context of a labour shortage, without having to pay the costs of those plans. They might pay them through their taxes. If we have a fair tax system, they will pay for it. They will pay for it through their taxes, but the simplicity of being able to offer employees good benefits makes locating in Canada a more competitive and attractive option for international firms. We know this to be true because that has been true of medicare over the years, and that is something many companies look favourably upon when they are considering where to locate their companies, but the Canada pension plan is not a tax. It is part of the wage package for which employees show up to work every day. I have heard Conservatives get up in the House and talk about how difficult inflation is on seniors because their pensions are not keeping up with expenses. One of the ways we can do that is by building in a better pension for Canadian workers, and the only universal fully portable plan we have is the Canada pension plan. In fact, over 70% of Canadian workers right now do not have a workplace pension, which means the CPP is the only pension they have, apart from their own individual investments. We can be sure, when we talk about Canadians who are only $200 a month away from bankruptcy every month, they are not able to put a lot into any kind of personal savings vehicle to have their personal plan for retirement. This means the CPP is what they will be left with. That is why it is important to have higher CPP premiums in order to build a public pension plan that can actually allow people to retire with dignity and to bear some of the additional costs that happen over time. As we see prices increase, it has been a problem that pensions have not kept pace with the cost of inflation, and the way to do that is by building a stronger public pension plan. If we mislead Canadians by calling that a simple tax increase, then I think we are leading them down the garden path and we are perpetuating a problem of pension income that has already been the case for far too long. Yes, there are some tax increases. I would also say there are some things being called tax increases in this motion that are not, in fact, tax increases, and it does a disservice to Canadians to pretend that these things are tax increases, when they are clearly not. The Conservatives say that the government refuses to provide relief to Canadians by temporarily reducing the goods and services tax on gasoline and diesel. That is true; it is not happening. For our part, I would remind the House that last week New Democrats proposed an amendment to the Conservative motion. We said we are willing to consider broad-based temporary tax relief as one way to try to help Canadians through a difficult time, but we proposed that this tax relief come on home heating instead of gas at the pump, and there were a number of reasons for that. There are more people who heat their homes than drive. There are people who heat their homes with things other than gasoline, so providing tax relief in that way would be a way of providing tax relief that is not prejudiced in favour of the oil and gas sector, but would recognize a more diverse suite of energy proposals. We also argued that, in many cases when it comes to utilities for home heating, there is regulation on price increases, which means it is harder for companies to simply make up the difference that is caused by the lower tax by raising prices to capture that fiscal room for themselves to increase their profits instead of passing it on to consumers. We thought those were at least three very good reasons to provide that broad-based temporary tax relief on home heating instead of gas at the pump, and all we have gotten from the Conservatives so far on that was a simple no. Canadians may not know that on opposition day motions, the person who presents the motion has to agree to an amendment in order for it to be debated and voted on. Earlier today, I asked the member who brought this motion forward, the member of Parliament for Abbotsford, if he could explain to the House why Conservatives were not prepared to entertain temporary tax relief on home heating instead of gas at the pump. While he did say a lot of things in response, he did not mention home heating at all, so we continue to wait on that answer. I would say the motion misrepresents the will of the House. There is an opportunity to compromise on the question of temporary broad-based tax relief, but when we proposed a solution to that and a way forward in an attempt to co-operate and find consensus, the Conservatives declined that opportunity and should not have been surprised that their motion, therefore, did not pass. What is the final call to action of this motion? It is that “the House call on the government to present a federal budget rooted in fiscal responsibility, with no new taxes, a path to balance, and a meaningful fiscal anchor.” Here is the incoherence in the motion. It talks about a path to balance. It talks about fiscal responsibility, and it explicitly excludes the entire revenue side of balancing the books. Rare is the conversation around corporate boardroom tables where they say their books are in bad shape, they need to figure this one out for the sake of their investors and they want to be able to pay out higher dividends and a better return on shares, but they are not going to talk about how the company can raise new revenue or increase its revenue and they just want to get back to balance without any question of revenue. That makes no sense. In the public context, it makes no sense because, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer reported just in December, 1% of Canadians now own and control 25% of the wealth that is generated in Canada. They are walking away with it without paying any taxes on it through tax haven agreements. Previously, the PBO estimated this is costing Canadian taxpayers $25 billion a year. The fact that the Conservatives would talk about balancing the budget and deliberately exclude looking at that as a way to try to bring things back to balance, instead of simply cutting things that Canadians are depending upon, mystifies me. It is one of the important differences between Conservatives and New Democrats, because we think tax havens should absolutely be part of the conversation. New Democrats have also run on having a wealth tax on fortunes over $10 million. There is not a lot of people with fortunes of $10 million or more in Canada. In terms of asking them to pay a little bit more, particularly in light of having seen Canada's billionaires expand their wealth exponentially during the pandemic, it is ridiculous to me that idea would be ruled out of order and not a possibility without further debate or discussion. We have seen a number of large companies in certain industries, which were profitable before the pandemic, become even more profitable during the pandemic. It is why New Democrats continue to insist on the idea of having an excess profit tax, where we look at their average profits over the years in advance of the pandemic, we look at their average profits postpandemic and on the amount that their pandemic profits exceed their prepandemic average, we have a higher incremental rate of tax to make sure they are paying their fair share and not profiteering on the pandemic. That is a reasonable way to fund the services that Canadians need and to fund some of the things that Conservatives themselves, depending on the day, will call for to provide relief to Canadian households that are in economic distress, but this motion says, no, none of that. Conservatives are not interested in hearing those ideas or talking about the revenue side of balancing the budget. We, in the NDP, think that is preposterous and it is why we will not be supporting the motion today.

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Context: House Hansard - 50 - Mar/31/22

Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)

Mar/31/22 12:10:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to note that the NDP House leader may wish to weigh in on this at some future point.

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Context: House Hansard - 50 - Mar/31/22

Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)

Mar/31/22 12:12:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would start by noting that Canada is not alone in having made massive expenditures during the pandemic period. We are alongside our G20 colleagues in having made incredible expenditures, so it is not something that is out of the ordinary with respect to responding to the pandemic. A lot of that spending went into direct transfers to individual households to help weather the economic consequences of the pandemic. Finally, I would reiterate a few of the points from the end of my speech, which were very much about revenue. I mentioned having a wealth tax on fortunes of $10 million and over as a way to generate revenue, as well as closing the tax havens, which would bring in $25 billion in tax revenue from the most wealthy. It is not the people who are struggling with the cost of inflation, but those who are best able to cope with it, who are getting away with a further $25 billion in wealth every year because of our tax haven arrangements. These are things we can do to address the revenue side. It is simply not true that New Democrats are not interested in the question of where the money comes from. We simply do not agree with the Conservatives that the wealthiest among us should continue to get a free ride while everyone else struggles.

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Mr. Daniel Blaikie

Mar/31/22 12:15:22 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for returning to one of the points I made in my speech, which is the idea of public investment and the ways in which the public can get a return on investment from public spending. Child care is a very good example. It is well documented that investments in child care can help grow the economy, and one of the by-products of growing the economy is an increase in government revenue. This was an argument we made vociferously in this place from 2015 onward. At the time, the Liberals ridiculed us, saying this was not something they could do, that it did not make sense because it was a provincial jurisdiction, that the provinces would never agree to it and they would not be interested in the money. We of course knew that leadership and money coming from the federal government would allow the provinces to get more ambitious in the child care services they provide, which would have a beneficial effect on the economy. We are glad the Liberals finally came around on child care. That is why we continue to push on a number of measures. We brought them around on dental care after they voted against it only nine months ago. We are looking forward to similar returns on investment for the Canadian public by putting this program in place as well.

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Mr. Daniel Blaikie

Mar/31/22 12:17:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it was not just the provinces but the people that they served who suffered immensely when the Chrétien-Martin government of the 1990s made the deepest cuts that we have seen to the health and social transfers. New Democrats are concerned to restore a meaningful role for the federal government in funding health services. In some cases, that means doing it ambitiously by providing programs in collaboration with the provinces that will bring new services to Canadians through public funding, but it also means making up for the simple absence of federal funding with some unconditional funding for the provinces as well. We think there is an appropriate mix of those things that can contribute to improving health care and other services in Canada. The way to do that is to make sure that the wealthiest are paying their fair share. There is a trajectory over the last 30 or more years in Canada of the people at the top paying less and less in taxes. In fact, there was a Liberal platform commitment to impose a minimum tax on the wealthiest because their effective rate of taxation is often lower than it is for the poorest Canadians who are paying taxes in Canada. There is something incredibly perverse about that. It is something government action can fix, and there will be a salutary effect on the books here in Ottawa if we do it.

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Mr. Daniel Blaikie

Mar/31/22 12:20:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands makes an excellent point. In fact, I think in my lifetime alone, I have seen long weekends have a bigger impact on the price of gasoline than the carbon tax. We know that oil and gas companies are prepared to raise the price at the pump for just about any reason, and sometimes for no reason at all. It is the wrong focus if we are going to talk about meaningful tax relief for Canadians in this difficult time. It is why we proposed providing some relief on home heating costs instead, because often those prices are regulated and companies actually have to provide a justification for a rate increase and can be denied those rate increases if there is not an adequate reason. It was very much along those lines that we proposed the amendment that the Conservatives refused last week.

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Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)

Mar/31/22 3:12:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a point of order in relation to a term that I think may have been used in question period and certainly featured prominently in debate earlier this morning. It caused me to reflect on the nature of unparliamentary language, as described in House of Commons Procedure and Practice, which reminds us that the most important factor is whether the remarks create disorder in the chamber. As you know, confusion often leads to disorder. Before getting into the term itself, I just want to quote a few relevant authorities for your benefit. The first comes from the bylaws of the Board of Internal Economy, which state that a recognized party is defined as “a party that has a recognized membership of 12 or more persons in the House of Commons.” I would refer you also to the House of Commons website, under the subheading “Party Standings in the House of Commons”, where it lists four parties that meet that definition: the Liberals, the Conservatives, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP. In order to find a reference to the term “neo-liberal party”, you have to go to the Oxford English Dictionary. It defines a neo-liberal as, “relating to a type of liberalism that believes in a global free market, without government regulation, with businesses and industry controlled and run for profit by private owners”. There are two parties that meet that definition: the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. I am concerned that in the confusion that arises from the use of this term, we may end up causing disorder in the chamber. That is why I thought it was very important to clarify the record that the social democratic party here in the chamber is by no means a neo-liberal party. We may be getting a neo-liberal party to do things with our leverage that it may not otherwise do, but that by no means makes of us a neo-liberal party.

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