44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 26, 2022 10:00AM
- Apr/26/22 10:22:03 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. I am pleased to follow my colleague for Kings—Hants. I just noticed we are wearing pretty much identical ties today, so I am glad he got my text message this morning.
I am quite pleased to speak about this budget and what it means for Canadians, in particular my constituents here in Ottawa Centre.
I think it is really important, before we start any conversation about what is contained in this budget, to recognize the fact that we are still living through a global pandemic. We know that life has been quite difficult over the last two years as a result of this pandemic. I and many citizens did not see such a major change in our lives coming in the form of a public health emergency.
As the pandemic continued to impact our lives, it was so dramatic that governments not just in Canada, but around the globe had to take immediate action to protect their citizens from getting infected, and in more extreme circumstances dying, from this virus that invaded our lives.
Because of that, governments in Canada, the provinces and territories, and around the world took steps to help us be safe by initially shutting down the entire society we live in. It was quite unprecedented. My colleague for Kings—Hants talked about the early days of March 2020, and how dramatic things were. I know memories fade, but I think we are going to remember that for a very long period of time we were told to stay at home, not to go to our jobs, not to take public transit, and to isolate from our own families. Everybody may remember the bubbles we were asked to create so that we could help protect each other.
As a result, the entire economy had to be shut down. We can talk about an artificial recession, because the economy before that, as we will recall, was working and accelerating at full throttle. The unemployment rate was extremely low and the GDP was high, but we had to shut everything down simply to protect all of us.
The government did not stop there. It had to then ensure that all of us could survive as we lost our jobs. Many Canadians lost their jobs. The unemployment rate went up to about 13% or 14% because we asked people to stay at home in order to be safe. The government invested billions of dollars in its people.
An unprecedented amount of spending was done: This often gets forgotten. It was done so that Canadians, the people who live in our constituencies, could feed themselves and look after their families, not to mention to help our businesses so they could survive through that pandemic-induced recession, as well. It is absolutely clear that it was costly. There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. It required hundreds of billions of dollars to do, but it was the right kind of investment, which I believe all members of the House supported because we were supporting Canadians, Canadian families and Canadian businesses.
Now, we are in a recovery mode. We have much better control over this pandemic. Vaccination has been a lifesaver for Canadians. Canadians should be very proud of how they have stepped up to get fully vaccinated. Over 80% of Canadians are double vaccinated, and close to 60% have now also received their booster shots.
Again, our government had to spend billions of dollars to procure those vaccines so that we could protect Canadians. The result is that people are employed again and our economy is growing again. Our employment rate is higher than it was before the pandemic started. The unemployment rate is roughly around 5%, which is better than it was before. The bigger challenge is that we cannot find enough people to work in our businesses. All those supports helped us get through the pandemic and ensured that Canadians could get back to where they were and do even better, and that is exactly what we are seeing.
This budget is in that context. It asks what kind of economy we are going to rebuild as a result of this pandemic. We are doing a few things in this budget. First, we are ending the pandemic supports. We knew there was a time limit to all those supports. They were there to help people and businesses get through the pandemic. We are now sunsetting most of those pandemic supports. They have now ended, which of course reduces government spending significantly. What we are now doing is really investing in post-pandemic economic recovery.
I am going to spend some time on how we are doing that while also bringing our debt and deficit under control. We see that the budget is working on all three of those aspects, because we recognize that we have to be fiscally prudent and make sure that all the borrowing we had to do, and the investment we had to make in Canadians, is now coming to an end. As this happens, we will also look at ensuring that we bring our debt and deficit under control as well.
In terms of investing in post-pandemic economic recovery, there are a few very important things we are doing in order to ensure that. I am speaking from experience as the member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre. I have seen how all the supports, whether employment income supports or rent support for small businesses, helped my constituents in Ottawa Centre. I talked to small business owners and individuals about how they were able to manage through the pandemic and how they were now going back into the workforce.
Now, we are looking at issues around affordability. The most important thing, of course, is affordable housing: making sure we build more affordable housing, and making sure that affordability of ownership is available. In my community over the past couple of weeks, I visited affordable housing at Carlington Community Health Centre in my riding. Just downtown, on the corner of Rochester and Gladstone, 140 new homes are being built and families are moving in. It is one of the largest passive house developments being built with the support of the Canadian government so that individuals and families can have homes.
We are going to be investing in dental care as a result of this budget. Some people may say that this is something that happened as a result of a deal between the Liberals and the NDP, and that is a good thing. This is exactly how Canadians always ask us to work together and work on those good ideas. I am glad that, in collaboration with the New Democratic Party, we are going to be creating a dental care plan for low to mid-income Canadians.
For me and for my constituents, our transition to a low-carbon economy is extremely important. In fact, I would hope for a zero-carbon economy. We are seeing, through the emissions reduction plan, some real actions being taken to ensure that we are investing in public transit. Right here in my city of Ottawa, we are building the LRT, which is electrified, and we are getting electric buses to ensure that people are not driving cars. We are moving towards a low-carbon transition.
I see my time is coming to an end, but there is so much to talk about that speaks to this post-pandemic recovery that would not only help people but would also build a more resilient economy that is transitioning to an environment that is fossil-fuel-free. It would allow people to survive and thrive, and allow Canada to be an economic force around the world.
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- Apr/26/22 11:37:54 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to join the debate on budget 2022. I think it is the fifth budget I have been able to debate since arriving at this place.
This seems to be another case with the Liberal government of “if at first you don't succeed, try and try again”, duplicating past budgets with lots of spending and lots of added debt, but with a poor outcome. I think in the case of the government, though, the saying should be “in case you don't succeed, spend and spend again”.
I want to touch on three major items in today's budget. The first is housing. It is no surprise that I want to talk about housing, and it is covered a tiny bit in the budget.
We know there is a housing crisis of prices in Canada right now, an affordability crisis, and I want to read a couple of quotes from the housing minister. In February, just a couple of months ago, he said, “We have ensured that we have housed 1.1 million Canadians since the beginning of this government.... We have built over 480,000 units of housing through the...the national housing strategy.” Two months later, just last month, he said they spent $72 billion and have housed two million people. In two months, he claimed in the House, we have gone from 1.1 million Canadians housed to two million. That is 900,000 additional Canadians housed in just two months. Unfortunately, it is not true.
Here are the facts, and this is from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. This is not me making up this information, nor pundits. This is actually from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Across the country we know the average house price has doubled since 2015. The Parliamentary Budget Officer stated that funding for housing programs intended to help low-income households has, under the government, actually decreased 15% in purchasing power.
The government will stand and tell us to look how much money it has spent. It has spent all these billions, but we know that there is an inflation problem. We also know there is a housing affordability problem, with prices going up. The Parliamentary Budget Officer himself has said that the money put in by the government, based in real dollars, is down 15%. He further stated that since 2015, there has been a 42% reduction under CMHC's low-income housing units for houses that have been supported. Again, just in April, the housing minister said two million Canadians have been housed, up 900,000, miraculously, from two months earlier. However, here we have the Parliamentary Budget Officer noting a 42% decrease.
The PBO further states that CMHC's shift to capital contributions over affordability assistance, like rent assistance, means that little short-term relief is actually delivered to Canadians. Further, he says that while these capital contributions are spread out over time, even when looking at the long term, the actual result in lowering rents for Canadians is very little and maybe not worth the investment. The PBO also states that there are as many Canadians living in vulnerable housing now as there were in 2015, after $30 billion to $72 billion. It is hard to say how much because the housing minister changes the numbers each time he stands to speak. It is $30 billion in one moment and then $72 billion. Say it is on the low side, at $30 billion in spending. What do we have for it? We have as many Canadians in vulnerable housing as we did in 2015. Homelessness in Edmonton has actually doubled in the last couple of years under the government.
I want to get to the second part: growth and the economy. What has $1.4 trillion in debt, hundreds and hundreds of billions in added debt, by the government gotten us? The finance minister stands in this House, just as she did yesterday, and states that we have the highest GDP growth according to the IMF. Well, according to the IMF, with numbers that come directly from the IMF website, in 2021, the year the minister claimed we were number one, we were actually fifth in the G7 for growth. We are second in 2022. In 2023, the IMF predicts we are going to below the advanced economy average for growth. Think about that. In 2021, we were fifth in the G7. That is after a 67% increase in the price of oil. Here we have our economy surging because of the price of oil and we are still fifth. In 2022, we are seeing another 12% increase in the price of oil, yet we are still not at the top in the G7.
There is an OECD report out called “The Long Game”. It says that Canada is going to have the worst-performing advanced economy from 2030 to 2060. When I was reading through this report and saw we are going to be the worst from 2030 to 2060, I thought maybe we will be okay from 2022 to 2030. Then I read the next page and it said that oh, by the way, from 2020 to 2030 Canada is going to have the worst-performing economy in the OECD as well. This is the OECD; this is not me. These are real numbers from the OECD. In that same report, the OECD talks about productivity. Canada is going to have one of the worst productivity improvements in the OECD.
Part of the name of the budget is “A Plan to Grow Our Economy”. This gets back to my comment about the government: “If at first you don't succeed, try and try again”. The Liberals have been trying for years and years and spending more and more, and what do we get? We get what the OECD says is going to be the worst-performing economy in the OECD. Turkey, Greece and second world countries are all going to have higher economic growth than Canada.
I will go on to the environment. Here is a quote from our environment minister from January 31: “I would like to remind him that over the past few years, our government has implemented more than 100 measures and invested $100 billion in the fight against climate change.” What are these 100 measures brought in by the government and this $100 billion, as the environment minister claims? According to Stats Canada and the Library of Parliament, GHG emissions have actually risen every year under the government. Therefore, $100 billion of taxpayer money is spent and there are 100 new regulations and programs, but we get higher GHG emissions. I wonder where we would be if the government had done nothing. I think we would be a lot better off.
I want to get back to another claim by the finance minister. Besides saying we have the fastest-growing economy in the G7, she talks about our GDP growth being the highest in the G7. What she leaves out is that this is not what we call real GDP growth, which is the real growth when we take inflation out of the GDP. When we take out our out-of-control inflation, we actually drop quite a bit in the G7. We are not the top, as the Liberals claim. Adjusted for inflation, OECD numbers say we are the fifth in the G7 for economic growth.
We heard today claims about the debt-to-GDP ratio. We notice the Liberals always say “net debt-to-GDP” or they just say “debt-to-GDP”. They do not talk about the gross debt-to-GDP. Do members know why that is? When we take the real debt or the gross debt, we are not the best in the G7, we are not the second and we are not the third. We are actually the fourth. When we look at the developed nations of the OECD, we are the ninth worst out of 38 for debt-to-GDP.
What is the difference between what the Liberals are claiming and the truth and reality? In net debt, they include the half a trillion dollars in assets of the CPP and the Quebec pension plan. They do not count the liabilities and all the money put aside by our parents, ourselves and our grandparents. They do not include that liability, but they include the money they have set aside. The government is therefore not counting every penny set aside for someone tomorrow, next year or in 10 years when it makes the claim of how great our financial situation is. Other OECD nations do not record the net amount like we do, so it is a false statement. It is unfortunate that the government continues to mislead Canadians on how bad things are with our debt, which actually has to be eventually repaid one day, one would hope.
Obviously, we are in a problem here in our nation. We have an aging population, no growth coming and an out-of-control deficit. Canada needs better, and that is why I will not be supporting budget 2022.
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- Apr/26/22 11:52:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, budgets are important. They are the core of a parliament. It is a real honour to be able to rise here today and speak to budget 2022. For many of us, this is the first substantive piece of legislation that we as new parliamentarians are tasked with scrutinizing. The importance of this job that Canadians have trusted us to undertake cannot be understated.
Every single day, many people from Hastings—Lennox and Addington are calling and emailing my office with grave concerns about how they can make ends meet. Just last week, our office received hundreds of feedback forms indicating that the cost of living and affordability was their number one concern. The cost of groceries, gas, home heating and everything has increased. It is my obligation and my role as their member of Parliament to bring them a voice in this House.
On general spending measures, the Liberal government suggests that the announcements in the budget will help weather inflation and make housing more affordable. In my opinion, the continuation of this Liberal approach is destined to drive us right back into a crisis of an order of magnitude larger than that of the early 1980s, based on constantly adding new permanent spending programs on borrowed money.
As noted in an article I read recently, only a small portion of our national debt is refinanced each year, so we will not get stung all at once. However, year by year, servicing costs will rise and the ability to afford our essential programs will dwindle, unless taxes rise substantially to cover the rising costs of both debt serving and increased program costs.
The core function of our Parliament has been, and remains, to oversee the expenditure of public monies.
Parliamentarians, and parliaments themselves, fought long and hard to pry this authority from the hands of imperial executives and governors, decades ago. Their actions lend themselves to our uniquely Canadian brand of responsible government.
In his important work, The Public Purse, which is used as source material in our most recent practice and procedure manual, Norman Ward describes the struggle of our nascent pre-Confederation legislatures, as it related to oversight, thus:
In principle, therefore, the first goal usually sought by an assembly was to make the executive at least partially dependent on the assembly for its income; the second was to make it wholly so; the third, and most sophisticated, was to insist on some sort of detailed public accounting, on a systematic basis, of expenditures after they were made.
In 1838, Lord Durham was sent by the mother of parliaments to investigate the cause of the previous year's rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. One of the litany of causes was, as he describes, related to the relationships between the assemblies and the executives.
In his hugely influential report, Lord Durham wrote:
The Assembly, after it had obtained entire control over the public revenues, still found itself deprived of all voice in the choice or even designation of the persons in whose administration of affairs it could feel confidence.
He went on to state:
It is difficult to conceive what could have been their theory or government who imagined, that in any colony of England a body invested with the name and character of a representative assembly could be deprived of any of those powers which, in the opinion of Englishmen, are inherent in a popular legislature.
This speaks to two principles of parliamentary control of finances: first, that the executive should have no income that is not granted to it or otherwise sanctioned by Parliament; and second, that the executive should make no expenditures except those approved by Parliament, in ways approved by Parliament.
I am not suggesting that this legislature does not possess the capacity to scrutinize. I know it does, but I believe in recent years we have not been wielding that authority properly and effectively, especially as it relates to Mr. Ward’s third point regarding what ultimately became our main estimates. As a result, Canadians are now paying the price.
We need only look at this very budget document for proof positive of what rushed legislation does, most particularly in the case of budgets. Hidden away in annex 3 of the budget, the fourth from last page reads as follows:
In Budget 2022, the government proposes to amend the Old Age Security Act to clarify that the one-time payment made in August 2021 to seniors age 75 and older will be exempted from the income test for the Guaranteed Income Supplement and Allowances. This amendment corrects a reference error resulting from the passage of the Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1.
This begs the question: What was the error?
In sections 266 and 268 of the Budget Implementation Act, 2021, the section that had intended to make the one-time, $500 payment to struggling seniors aged 75 and up non-taxable, the Liberals quoted the wrong section of the act. Instead of quoting section 275, the section that actually created the payment, they cited section 276, which is completely unrelated to seniors and instead deals with the Public Service Employment Act. As a result, right now, under law, as desperate seniors are filing their taxes, that $500 is considered income, and not just at tax time but come the July recalculation period for benefits. In other words, the government has created and legislated yet another potential benefit clawback.
It is only prudent to highlight that last time, the budget was time allocated, meaning that the government, with the NDP's support, limited the amount of debate that we could have on the budget. That was debate where we might have found this error and saved seniors the stress of another possible clawback.
I would note that it was the same group of seniors, those aged 75 plus, who had the wrong T4 information sent to them due to a misprint. How convenient that the same, exact group of people who were subject to an age-restricted benefit that everyone, including, I imagine, the CRA and the ESDC, thought was non-taxable, received misprinted T4s. Now we find out that the benefit is, under word of law, actually taxable. That is why my colleague for Miramichi—Grand Lake and I called on this government to extend the filing date for seniors.
With regard to seniors, they have very little to celebrate in this year's budget. Of a projected $56.6 billion in new spending through to 2027, a paltry $20 million has been earmarked for supporting our seniors. To put that into perspective, that is 0.04% of spending announced in the next five years. There is nothing to help struggling formal and informal caregivers, nothing to help long-term care facilities and nothing to help alleviate the increasing cost of living they all face. Low-income seniors need help today, and they cannot afford to wait.
To get back to my original point, our job here is to scrutinize. What we do here is the basis for responsible government. When we cannot do our jobs, Canadians suffer. On my file alone, we have seen it with the GIS clawback, we have seen it with the T4 delays, and now we are seeing it with the one-time payment, which are all things that could have been avoided if we actually took the time to do our job right. I will give credit to the hon. Minister of Seniors, who has acted on things when they were brought to her attention, but the point is that it should never have gotten to this point.
Lastly, I want to touch on the absolute absurdity that is our main estimates process in relation to the budgetary process and the need to align Treasury Board with Finance in the preparation of those documents. However, my time is running short, so I will leave members with one more recent quote from the 2019 report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, entitled, “Improving Transparency and Parliamentary Oversight of the Government’s Spending Plans”. The report quotes Scott Brison as saying, “The ability to exercise oversight over government spending is the most important role that...parliamentarians can play in representing Canadians.”
I urge everyone here to heed the words of our former Liberal president of the Treasury Board and let parliamentarians do our jobs thoroughly and effectively, because Canadians cannot afford for us to do otherwise.
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- Apr/26/22 1:25:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today. I want to first thank and acknowledge my colleague from West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country for that fantastic speech he gave this morning, but also for all the work he does inside of our government, lobbying on so many issues that affect his riding and other Canadians.
I listened to a lot of debate around this budget in the last few days, and I know that some days, when we get up and everything is doom and gloom and all we see is negativity, it is really hard to see the positive impact that is happening for so many in their lives across this country. However, I live in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and I can tell members that in my riding of Labrador we will be supporting this budget wholeheartedly, and I want to tell members the reasons.
It is because not only are we recognizing that there are sectors in this country that deserve to be lifted up and singled out in terms of investments, but we are also responding to critical needs of people who have been ignored for far too long in this country. I am an MP from a northern region of Canada. I represent a strong indigenous population of Inu and Inuit people. I have many rural and remote communities across my riding, and I can honestly tell members that we have never seen investments in our northern communities before in our history like we are seeing today.
When we look at Newfoundland and Labrador in general, we have the federal government that renewed the Atlantic accord agreement with Newfoundland and Labrador at a time in its history when it needed the financial revenues and the assistance. The investment of $2.5 billion under the Atlantic accord is allowing that province to share in the royalties it has over the years and continues to foster, develop, produce and remit to the Government of Canada. We made investments in rate mitigation of $5.2 billion. That, again, was an agreement we made with the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
As a shareholder, Canada has drawn down taxes and benefits from our province for many years through the oil and gas industry. No other government, including those of the members opposite, ever agreed to do what was fair in giving back some of that revenue to the province at a time when it needed it the most. Ours is the first government to do that.
The members opposite talk about our not supporting industry or jobs. We have invested more in economic and resource development than any other government before us. We have bought pipelines; we have set up critical mineral developments; we have invested in infrastructure to support major resource development projects in Canada; and when the people of Alberta needed assistance through COVID, when the oil and gas industry was reaching the bottom of the barrel, who stepped up? It was our government, because we recognized that workers should always come first and that families should always come first.
Members stand up and they criticize the money that was spent in COVID. They criticize the fact that 40% of businesses that employ people in Canada received a wage subsidy. Do members think these workers should not have received that and that they should have been sent home with no income? They would have lost their homes; they would have lost their cars; their kids would have had to leave universities and colleges. Is that what they are suggesting? That is not what we believe.
Do members know that in my own province of Newfoundland and Labrador, 49,000 jobs were maintained as a result of the wage subsidy? That is 49,000 income earners who were able to pay their mortgages on their homes through COVID because of the response of our government. That is something I will never apologize for.
It is easy to be a naysayer. It is a lot more difficult to devise a plan that responds to the real needs of Canadians. That is where the challenge is. We talk about health care. There is no issue more important to the constituents I represent in this Parliament than health care, whether it be care for mental health and supports for suicide prevention, or addiction services, surgeries, physician access or nursing access. All of these things are critical. They are important, not only for the constituents I represent in the House of Commons, but for all Canadians.
Sometimes it is not a bad thing that the Government of Canada steps up when it is needed to step up. That is what we are doing. There is a backlog of surgeries in this country. I talked to a doctor in Quebec only last week, who told me that he cannot even get scheduled emergency room time. That is how much the ERs are blocked. That is how deep their backlog is.
I talked to doctors in Newfoundland and Labrador, and the situation is no different. It exists across the country. When members stand and say they will not support this budget, they are saying they will not support the Government of Canada investing in surgeries and bringing the wait-list down for Canadians who need access to health care.
There is another thing we are doing. I am not the only member of a rural riding in the House of Commons, and I am not the only member of a northern riding in the House of Commons. I can say that the recruitment of doctors and nurses in rural and northern Canada has become a crisis. The only way to get a doctor or nurse is on a locum. It is temporary. There is no consistency in service. What we are doing as a government is providing an incentive for doctors and nurses to come and live in northern and rural communities across Canada, an incentive that will allow people to have good medical services no matter where they live.
The consistency of having a regular doctor or regular nurse could mean having diagnoses and treatments that will save people's lives early on. We can never forget that. Is that something we should be apologizing for as a government, that we are going to invest in a health care system that allows for that to happen?
I heard members today say it is not the federal government's responsibility and the provinces could be doing it. These are the same provinces that are asking us for more health care money. They are asking us to increase spending. They are telling us they cannot afford to continue down the path they are going down.
Therefore, we are stepping up, and we are stepping up in those areas, just like we are doing on dental care and just like we have done for many northern Inuit communities on a suicide strategy, to deal with what is becoming and has been a major crisis for many northern communities in Canada.
There is no other government in our history that has stepped up on reconciliation. We are the first. Not only have we built a relationship that respects and honours the rights of indigenous people in this country, but we have worked with them in partnership to build better homes, to build better infrastructure, to build a stronger economy and to build a future that they can grow and prosper in and one that they can control. Can anyone honestly say that is not the right direction for Canada? I can guarantee everyone that what we bring to indigenous Canada, they bring to the rest of us 10 times over.
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- Apr/26/22 1:35:01 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I congratulate my colleague on her speech. It is a pleasure to sit with my colleague on the natural resources committee.
It is no coincidence that the price of a house has doubled in Canada, because the government has doubled the debt as well in the years the Liberals have been in government. It is a parallel, and it is not a plan for the future.
Prime Minister Harper was the first to apologize to first nations for the indignities that had taken place, so there is room for all governments to be involved. The current government is not the first one to do any of these things.
Liberals talk about the money they are putting into housing. We are still tremendously short of housing in Canada, yet inflation has doubled and the price of a house has gone to $840,000 from $420,000. How can they sustain this and say that the spending they have done is not causing inflation, when the Parliamentary Budget Officer himself has indicated that only a third of their spending has gone toward the pandemic?
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- Apr/26/22 1:36:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, not only do I sit on the natural resources committee with my colleague, but for a few years we were Arctic parliamentarians together and he has certainly been a tremendous support for communities across the Arctic as well.
I want to say a couple of things. First of all, members cannot get up one moment and in one sentence criticize the fact that the Government of Canada is investing in Canadians and then in the same breath say it is spending too much money on Canadians. It is one way or the other. As a government, we have invested in housing. We have invested in housing for urban centres, for rural centres, for indigenous people and for low-income families. We have invested in housing for women and for women fleeing violence. We have invested in housing for the homeless and for many groups and developers who want to provide co-development housing. We have invested to make it more accessible and affordable for homeowners to buy.
My question for the member is this. What suggestions do you have that we have not done to make the programs stronger and more affordable for Canadians?
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- Apr/26/22 1:41:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise today and join in the debate on the 2022 budget. I would like to congratulate the government for having a string of two years in a row where it tabled a budget. It kind of broke that historical trend for a while.
In many ways, this is a historic budget, and one that may well be remembered for generations to come. It will be remembered as a budget that failed to rein in reckless spending and restore fiscal responsibility, a budget that has put the financial well-being and access to government services for future generations at risk, and a budget that doubled down on failed policies in the pursuit of ideology.
It will also be remembered as the New Democratic Party's first federal budget, which is no small feat for a party that officially won only 25 seats with less than 18% of the vote just six months ago. It is a government nobody voted for and was not even debated in the last election.
It has never been clearer that we have an NDP Prime Minister who just happened to be born into the Liberal Party. Instead of going his own way as a New Democrat, he decided it would be easier to turn the once fiscally reasonable Liberal Party of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Jean Chrétien into a mirror image of the NDP, complete with a coalition-style partnership, to avoid scrutiny and accountability. That reality is reflected in this budget, and it is future generations who are going to bear the burden of it.
It was necessary to engage in extraordinary spending in the early days of the pandemic in order to ensure that Canadians had the support they needed to make it through the incredibly difficult times brought on by the pandemic and the various public health measures brought in across the country by all levels of government to address it. Unfortunately, the government treated—
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- Apr/26/22 1:43:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from the NDP for reminding us of the napkin budget brought in a few years ago. That was with the Liberals as well.
Unfortunately, the government treated this rationale as an opportunity to spend wildly and recklessly on policies that did nothing to support Canadians through the pandemic or that would help create sustainable economic growth in the future to help pay for their spending.
This budget continues this practice, with a deficit of $52.8 billion and no plan to reach a balanced budget. At the end of the 2014-15 fiscal year, the federal debt was just over $612 billion with a budgetary surplus of $1.9 billion.
Now, the federal debt is almost $1.2 trillion, and is anticipated to reach $1.3 trillion in the next couple of years. The cost to service our debt this year alone will be $26.9 billion. Inflation has reached a 31-year high, and we have just seen the largest rate hike in decades by the Bank of Canada: a full half a percentage point, bringing the overnight rate to 1% in order to deal with government spending-driven inflation. We know that the Bank of Canada will continue to aggressively raise interest rates, making this spending even less sustainable. In fact, one of the reasons why the Bank of Canada had to increase it so aggressively was because of this unsustainable spending, something the NDP-Liberals would realize if they were not all following the Prime Minister’s example and not thinking at all about monetary policy.
We are all aware of the devastating impact that inflation is having across Canada. Too many people who have been just getting by for the past couple of years, or even longer in some cases, now find themselves in a situation where they no longer can get by. Groceries, fuel and pretty much everything else we can think of is getting more expensive. Housing costs have skyrocketed, with the price of the average house doubling since the Prime Minister came into office and increasing 30% in the last year alone.
Young Canadians, who have seen their dream of home ownership evaporate under the government, were hoping for some sort of inspired measure in this budget: something that showed the NDP-Liberal coalition understood the issue and was actually trying to fix it. Instead of hope, the government doubled down on more of the same failed policies that have not helped young people get homes in the past six years. Nothing in the budget will help get homes built this year. In fact, the solution that the coalition government has put forward seems to be a plan to increase the size of the bureaucracy, not the supply of houses.
The budget almost acknowledges that the government is not even trying to help young people get into their own homes. Instead of a serious plan to cut red tape, cut costs and build homes, the government decided that a multi-generational home renovation tax credit was the way to go. Families are the cornerstone of our society, and supporting our loved ones as they age or when they are facing hard times is admirable. I am sure we would do it for our families, and most Canadians would want to do the same if they were able to do so. However, considering the housing crisis, this tax credit, which gives up to $7,500 for renovations to make a secondary suite, is not a nice social policy to help support strong families. It is an admission of failure by the NDP-Liberals.
It is an admission that they are going to give up on helping to get young people out of their parents’ basements and put them into their own homes. The government is telling young people that instead of trying to fix the mess it created and helping to get them into homes, it is going to help families fix up basement suites so that they feel like their own places.
Young Canadians want the pride of home ownership and the ability to build some equity, and they want to have the autonomy that comes with living on their own or with their partner or spouse. They do not want the government to help put a shower in the half-bath in mom and dad's basement and call it a day. Without a meaningful plan to increase supply, bring prices to a reasonable level and help new people enter the housing market, that is exactly how this tax credit is going to be interpreted by Canadians, and who could possibly blame them?
Another thing that was in this budget is the expected increase in the amount of equalization payments. Members will recall that in 2018, Bill “no more”, I mean Bill Morneau, quietly locked in the equalization formula until 2024 with virtually no consultation.
The Liberal government members of the day did not really care that Alberta and other western provinces were going through hard times; they just saw my whole province as a piggy bank that they were willing to shake every last dime out of while they could. After all these years of Liberals taking from that piggy bank without putting anything back in, there is not much left to give, but that will not stop the NDP-Liberal coalition from trying, and if that means smashing the bank open, they are going to be quite all right with that.
The feeling that the government does not understand Alberta or that it is actively trying to dismantle its economy and way of life is not new. Some held out hope that, with the finance minister being at least born in Alberta and the associate finance minister representing an Edmonton riding, there could have been some sort of consideration given to our province, but that certainly was not the case with this budget.
The attack on the energy sector continues, with the NDP-Liberal government doubling down on the plan to phase out the oil and gas sector. With this budget, the government will no longer allow the use of flow-through shares for the oil and gas industries, so smaller firms that rely on this important tool will find it that much harder. The government has asked them to reduce their emissions and navigate an ever more complicated regulatory system, and at the same time the Liberal-NDP government is working to ensure that oil and gas companies do not have the resources that they will need to accomplish either of those goals.
The budget did include, however, a tax credit for carbon capture and storage, but unfortunately it is deeply flawed. The budget suggests that there is a credit for carbon capture, utilization and storage, which means that the recovered oil can also be utilized, but in the case of the energy sector in my province, that is simply not true. The tax credit specifically rules out enhanced oil recovery, where the carbon that is being sequestered can be pumped back into the well to be permanently sequestered and in the process help extract oil that is at the bottom, which otherwise can no longer be accessed. This technology creates the lowest-emission oil possible and allows for wells to be fully utilized, resulting in jobs and royalties, and the CO2 is still sequestered.
Enhanced oil recovery sequestration is already taking place. There is already a process, a regulatory regime, and there are businesses operating in this space. In my riding, enhanced energy has used this method to sequester CO2 and recover the cleanest oil in North America. A year ago, they announced that they had reached the monumental milestone of sequestering one million tonnes of CO2, an equivalent of taking 350,000 cars off the road.
If anyone is puzzled by the fact that the government is against this technology, so is absolutely everybody in Alberta. If the NDP and the Liberals want to see emissions reduced, they need to put their ideology aside, support the oil and gas sector and support CCUS.
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- Apr/26/22 1:52:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am pretty sure, when we look at the budget, that the dental care plan is for people under the age of 12, and the member who asked me the question just asked it for seniors, so I do not even think she understands her own budget.
The reality is that not a single province was asking for dental care transfers from the federal government. What that actually is is a promise made to the NDP for continued support of a corrupt, tired government that does not have any idea how to get its spending under control.
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- Apr/26/22 1:58:28 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am at a loss at the lack of knowledge that my hon. colleague has when it comes to the oil and gas sector.
This is clean sweet crude that is in carbon capture, utilization and storage technology. This is going into reservoirs that have long since been abandoned, after the water flood and everything else that has happened, to recover oil, because liquefied carbon dioxide actually unbinds that oil from the porous structures deep in the ground and releases that easy energy that we already have from all those years ago. This is the cleanest oil that we have.
The carbon dioxide that is going down into the well stays down there. The only carbon that is coming up is from the oil that it has recovered through enhanced oil recovery. That money actually reduces the cost of the sequestration, because it is, in and of itself, providing for the cost of the sequestration. What the Liberals are doing with this budget is simply spending more money only on sequestration. There is no return on the investment at all, so it actually costs everybody more money, money that we could be investing in research and development for other clean technologies.
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- Apr/26/22 2:52:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Governor of the Bank of Canada admitted that inflation is much higher than expected. When asked to explain how to protect Canada's finances, he said, “don't spend too much”.
We know that the Prime Minister does not think about monetary policy, but Conservatives do and Canadians do, and Canadians are the ones paying the price for the Prime Minister's monetary illiteracy: higher grocery bills, gas bills and interest rates. Will the Prime Minister recognize that his reckless borrowing and spending is making things worse for Canadians?
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- Apr/26/22 2:53:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is ironic that this question comes from a Conservative colleague when, in their electoral platform, the Conservatives committed to spending $168 billion.
The IMF has just confirmed that our economy is going to see the highest growth among G7 countries, both this year and next year. Canadians have created over 3.5 million jobs. These are well-paying jobs that will help Canadians meet the cost of living that we see increasing all over the world due to the war in Ukraine. We have been excellent stewards of the economy, and the Conservatives know it.
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- Apr/26/22 2:56:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, with the rising cost of food, rent and gas, which are all basic necessities for Canadians, inflation sits at 6.7%, and this government is completely failing to manage its spending. Even worse, it is increasing the taxes that it created.
Meanwhile, in France, the inflation rate is 4.7%. Why? It is because the government decided to freeze price rises.
Why did the government increase the Liberal tax on carbon when it could have given Canadians a break?
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- Apr/26/22 3:43:04 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it can in certain circumstances, but I do not think the member would like to argue that the massive amount of spending that took place during the depths of the pandemic was crowding out private investment. It is quite the contrary. It was helping to maintain private investment and was shifting the debt burden from individual Canadians to the government.
If one looks at the recent budget, it allocates only about $31.2 billion in new spending over the next five years. That is about $6 billion a year. That is less than what is being invested in the REM project in Montreal.
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Madam Speaker, I rise in the House today to discuss the first NDP-Liberal budget in Canada.
What a year it has been. As COVID‑19 continues to devastate the Canadian economy and our supply chains, many people in this country will struggle for many years to recover from the losses suffered over the past two tough years.
People are wondering what this budget does for Canadians. Well, it proposes higher interest rates, higher taxes, and more and more spending. At a time when Canadians could use a break, the bad news keeps piling up.
Liberal MPs will likely use the same talking points as usual when debating this subject, but they will probably not ask any questions about the following topics that I was very much hoping would be included in budget 2022.
First, I would like to discuss the rural-urban divide that seems to be growing in this country. My riding of Beauce is located in rural Quebec. It is a entrepreneurial and agricultural hub. Unfortunately, the latest budgets from the current government only make us feel further and further away from seeing any meaningful change in our region.
Why does the government continue to ignore rural Canada?
I was hoping to see some funding for public transit or additional funding for community infrastructure in this budget, but once again, we have been forgotten. Municipalities in my riding are trying to implement public transit, but they need financial support. This is something that needs to be addressed, but until the federal government is prepared to put money on the table this will remain a distant dream.
Cell connectivity in rural Canada is another issue that matters to rural Canadians and that was not mentioned once in the budget. How hard is it for the government to recognize that this is not only a matter of fairness but also of public safety?
Many municipalities in my riding do not have reliable cell coverage. This not only increases the probability of public safety disasters but also causes lost productivity for our businesses.
The government needs to sit down with the CRTC and the large telecom companies and find a way to finally provide affordable service to rural Canadians. There has to be a way to set a baseline for minimum coverage and a fair and equitable scale of payment for these services.
In my riding, cell phone bills are among the highest in the country even though we get some of the spottiest service. We must tackle this problem and improve high-speed Internet service at the same time, because they are both equally important in our regions.
Another issue I would like to tackle, which is probably the biggest problem in my riding, is the labour shortage. Beauce has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Canada and is constantly struggling to attract workers. In our case, the only option for many years has been to use the temporary foreign worker program. Unfortunately for us and for many other Canadian business owners, this system is broken. In recent months, the government has made some promises and some supposed changes to the program, but nothing has changed on the ground.
Let us be frank. Our country has a lot of red tape. There is paperwork upon paperwork to be done. Departments that should work together blame one another for the delays. They also blame the provinces.
The immigration department really needs to wake up. These files should be processed much more quickly. It is simple. Many businesses wait months and months to get workers. They spend thousands of dollars in government and administrative fees only to be told that the workers may never arrive or that their arrival will be considerably delayed because of problems that the government itself has created.
Many proposals with respect to agricultural and seasonal workers were brought forward at the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, of which I am a member, and elsewhere, but the situation has improved only slightly since we tabled our report.
We are also seeing numerous issues with non-agricultural workers, yet there does not seem to be any urgency on the part of this government to bring them in when they are needed.
I believe that one of the most effective ways to speed up this process would be to get rid of the labour market assessment for areas of the country where the unemployment rate is below 5%. As I have said many times, both here and in committee, this is a solution that would be fairly easy to implement. I will continue to hammer this point home until the government understands that this is a serious problem that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible.
A total of 60% of the businesses in my riding are looking for workers. At the same time, they are accelerating automation and robotics because they also need to stay competitive in the marketplace. The problem is that their margins are already very thin, and it is very difficult to invest in new technology right now.
I believe the government needs to implement better programs and incentives to help these companies modernize their production. However, until the government keeps its promises on high-speed Internet and steps up its fight to improve cell coverage, advancing robotics will remain difficult in rural ridings like mine.
The last thing I want to talk about is how this government has tragically failed our agriculture and agri-food sector. There is no money in the budget to improve and secure our country's food supply. I have always said that the agricultural sector is an economic driver just waiting to be optimized. Instead of helping Canadian farmers, the government continues to create programs that plunge them further into debt. Canadians are struggling to put food on the table, yet we are importing more and more of our food products.
The government also decided to impose a 35% tariff on fertilizer from Russia without a clear understanding of whether orders placed before the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine will be exempt from the tariff or not. Spring seeding is upon us, and farmers cannot bear the burden of these tariffs alone. Obviously consumers will have to pay the additional cost.
What is more, this government continues to refuse to bring into force Bill C‑208, which was passed in the previous Parliament. This bill provides for the fair transfer of a family farm or small business to a family member, rather than charging the seller unreasonable taxes that they would not have to pay if they sold the business to a third party.
This government will do everything it can to collect as much tax as possible, even at the expense of losing our family farms and SMEs, which are so important to the development of our regions. The creation of a round table for discussing this bill, which has already passed and received royal assent, will still not force the hand of these greedy Liberals.
How can a government unilaterally decide not to bring legislation into force, when the majority of parliamentarians voted in favour of it? That is not how democracy works.
In closing, this is another budget and another complete failure by this government.
I am here once again debating with my colleagues, but I cannot help but wonder when this Prime Minister will descend from his throne and finally listen to the opposition's proposals. I can only imagine that his MPs from rural ridings feel the same way.
We are all here to do a job, to represent our constituents. The government has to focus on the divide between rural and urban regions. The time where there were two classes of citizens is over.
We must unite and make Canada the economic superpower it should be. I will continue to provide a glimmer of hope for the Beauce community. I simply hope that this government will listen to me for once.
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- Apr/26/22 4:32:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, there is a lot I disagree with in my hon. friend's speech. I found, in particular, her denunciation of Airbnbs to be a little bit odd. They are a great, affordable opportunity, especially for families to travel, and they have more flexibility than hotels.
I want to focus on the issue of carbon capture and storage, because the NDP, speaking previously, said that carbon capture and storage was unproven technology. I have news for the House. There is carbon capture and storage happening as we speak in my riding, in a project called Quest.
I was at an open house last week for a project called Polaris that is entirely private-sector-funded. It benefits from credits, but it does not involve any direct spending by the government. Industry is making these investments now in carbon capture and storage, and there are carbon capture and storage projects that are up and running. They are working and they are capturing carbon.
It is bizarre that some members say that we do not know if it works. It is happening.
Could the member acknowledge the benefits of carbon capture and storage and the positive impact that it has had?
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