44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 2, 2022 11:00AM
- May/2/22 2:30:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the minister is right: Canadians do deserve an employment insurance system that is there for them and that works. In fact, they should have had that in place before the Liberals ended pandemic benefits that allowed them to stay home with their children when they were sick, and that allowed them to stay home from work when they were sick to not put their colleagues in danger.
Instead, what we have is a situation where the government is allowing these benefits to end without having put the 10 paid sick days in place and without having put the employment insurance reforms in place.
Will the government either present these reforms immediately or extend the benefits until it reforms EI and puts the 10 paid sick days in place?
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- May/2/22 5:53:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise and to have the occasion to address this motion.
I have always taken an interest, and do today, in parliamentary procedure. Whenever we are talking about the rules of debate, I think that members rightly have an interest on what exactly is going on and what those details are and there is a legitimate tension. That is why in parliaments these kinds of debates tend to happen frequently between a government that needs to get its business done, not just for its own sake, but presumably for the sake of the nation and the people who elected them, and those in opposition who have a job to do in terms of scrutinizing the government's work in trying to make it better where they can and oppose it when they can. I have often said that.
I think there are reasons for supporting the rights of the opposition within Parliament that have to do with the rights of parliamentarians. However, there are also reasons for supporting the rights of the opposition within Parliament that have to do with the time it takes for word to get out about what government intends to do, to have a civil society response and to organize around initiatives by the government that they may not like. I think one of our responsibilities as parliamentarians always is to look at the need for things to get done in the nation's capital, in Parliament and in government, as well as the obligations that we have to foster a healthy culture of opposition.
These are certainly the issues that are at stake. I think sometimes in this place it is hard to get at the particular circumstances, because we often tend to address these issues with a hyperbolic tone. Sometimes that is warranted. I have seen occasions in this House where I felt that it was warranted and have participated in that spirit. I think that is especially true when we have majority governments that are not forced to negotiate with other parties in Parliament in order to advance their agenda.
When we see members of all the same party getting up and dictating the rules of debate and there has been no meaningful interplay between parties in the House, that is one thing. I do think it is another thing when the government has to negotiate with another party in order to get its business done. What we are seeing is a government that has undertaken a number of initiatives in order to get support from the NDP to move a budget forward, for instance. That is okay. That is actually how this place is supposed to work, and I think that is how it works when it is working at its best. Then the question is this. In order to be able to get some of those things done, how do we conduct the business of the chamber?
I want to use Bill C-8 as an example of a case of opposition that does bleed into obstructionism.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Daniel Blaikie: Madam Speaker, I am trying to both speak and listen to the conversation that is happening at the same time.
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- May/2/22 5:57:01 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, when we look at Bill C-8, what I will say is that it is disappointing in some regards, and I am on the record in terms of the ways in which I think it is disappointing. Despite it being disappointing, however, there are some things. For instance, there is the foreign homebuyers tax, but it has a lot of loopholes. I can say it is a step in the right direction, but it is certainly not going to solve the housing crisis that we see in Canada. We actually need to take some action on domestic investors who are helping pump up prices in the housing market. Unless we do that, a lot of the other things the government has been contemplating simply are not going to be effective. I certainly have my criticisms of the bill. I am happy to talk about those and I have talked about those in other places.
What I would say is that we have not seen a burgeoning kind of civil movement against Bill C-8. I do not think anyone is particularly animated about it outside of this place, but we would not know that by looking at the proportion of time that this place has spent on that bill. We have people calling for real climate action who are really upset at a government that has not done enough and is not doing enough and is not even planning to do enough in order to fight the climate crisis.
We are hearing from people about health funding and the state of health care in Canada and the need for more money to be transferred from the federal government to the provinces for health funding. We are also hearing about the absurdly high cost of prescription drugs and the ways in which a national pharmacare plan could help with that. We have heard from people who have never, in their family, been able to access dental services. They want to be able to access dental services and are excited at the prospect of finally having a mechanism to be able to go to the dentist and have that visit paid for.
These are the issues we are hearing about. However, in this place, despite none of those issues really being addressed in Bill C-8, we have spent already over 28 hours on debate on the bill. When we compare that to other bills and other business, that is a lot of time on a particular bill that does not seem to be at the centre of what Canadians are worried about and what they are thinking about. I do not get a lot of mail on Bill C-8. I get mail on many issues, but not on Bill C-8.
I do think there is a legitimate question as to why it is that certain opposition parties are spending that much time on that particular bill and that we cannot seem to find a way to move it along. Even those who do not particularly like it would say, and I would certainly say, that the issue is it just does not have the right solutions for the problems, but it is not that any of those solutions are particularly offensive.
It is true that time allocation is a tool that can be used and has been used. Many parties in this place have supported time allocation at one time or another.
People have asked why we are talking about extended sittings in May as opposed to June, as is the custom. Part of that is because we do not have a majority government that can just use time allocation on its own. We have a government that has to work with an opposition party that has said that if other opposition parties want more time to debate things, we endorse that. Therefore, let us create more opportunities to speak to bills while recognizing that we still have an obligation to pass bills in this place or, at the very least, to vote on them. Maybe they will not pass, but by literally calling the question, we will only get the answer to the question if members in this place allow us to proceed to the vote. Therefore, yes, we are supporting a motion that involves more midnight sittings than ever.
It also has a mechanism where we do not necessarily have to sit until midnight, partly to try to introduce some discretion to recognize that we normally go to midnight only in June. However, because we do not have a majority government that is just going to time allocate and time allocate, we are going to try to create more time for debate in the hopes that opposition politicians who say they want more time to debate government bills are being sincere and that it is a desire that could be satisfied. We may know in advance that the desire cannot be satisfied because opposition parties are committed in principle simply to talking out bills and creating dysfunction so that they can accuse the government of being incompetent when it comes to its legislative agenda. There may be some independent reasons for making that accusation that I am very sympathetic with, but it conflates the issue when we see opposition parties systematically trying to obstruct government business and it gets harder to tell where the blame lies.
Here we are trying to propose a path forward that allows for more opportunity for debate and discussion. That is exactly in the spirit of taking other opposition members at their word in saying that what they want is more time to debate these things, but we need to get to some decisions.
The situation of teachers in respect of Bill C-8 is an excellent example as to why in this place we cannot just talk and talk, but we do need to decide matters. There are teachers who have filed their tax returns and are being told that the reason those tax returns are not being processed is that there is a pending change to their tax entitlements in Bill C-8. It is a bill the CRA expected would have been decided upon one way or the other well in advance of the tax year, because Bill C-8 is the bill to implement the announcements that came in the fall economic statement some time ago, as implied by its name.
As such, here we are. We have not begun debate on the budget implementation act, which is the budget that was tabled about four weeks ago. We have done over 28 hours of debate on the act to implement the fall economic statement. We have teachers who are waiting on the CRA, which is waiting on this place to make a decision so that it knows what teachers are actually entitled to. If Bill C-8 passes, then those teachers who have spent money to buy supplies for the children in their class would get more back on their taxes than they otherwise would. We need to reach a decision.
This actually is a motion unlike other motions we have seen for June, when we have had majority governments that have unilaterally extended midnight sittings in June only and otherwise used the hammer of time allocation on its own. There is an attempt at compromise here. I think it would be more helpful to get some good-faith input from opposition parties about how we find that right balance between advancing government business and doing the proper job of an opposition party.
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- May/2/22 6:04:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, one of the things that really impressed me when I had the opportunity to tour the Scottish Parliament was that they said they could speak any language that they want in the Scottish Parliament. It does not have to be a language of Scotland. They can speak any language from anywhere in the world in the Parliament of Scotland. Part of the reason they are able to do that is they decide as a parliament months in advance what bill they are going to be debating and on what day. They get together and the parties talk about how many people from their respective caucuses want to address a bill, and then they develop a schedule that allows members to speak to the things they want to speak to and it allows for decisions to happen.
We are so far away from a culture where we can sit down in good faith with parties that disagree on things and come up with a professional way of doing business on the floor of the House of Commons that we are going to continue to be in these kinds of debates again and again. What we need to see is a little more goodwill on all sides, so that we can develop an appropriate and professional culture of decision-making in this place.
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- May/2/22 6:06:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think the member will know that particular provision would allow a minister to call for a vote to have an adjournment. We are in a minority Parliament, and that allows every member to weigh in on whether the House ought to adjourn, so I think the fact is that it would precipitate a vote. We do this at committee. Sometimes people call for adjournment of a committee and we proceed immediately to a vote on whether that will happen. In a minority context, on committee, I have seen proposals by the government to adjourn refused by the opposition parties together. I can imagine that happening in an instance where the government makes an egregious move to adjourn Parliament early. That is why the vote is a really important component of the motion.
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- May/2/22 6:07:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I remember back in December when the Bloc Québécois decided to support Bill C-2 and fast-track it to committee. It negotiated with the government. We could have said that the Bloc had sold its soul, but we understood that even if we did not agree with its position on Bill C‑2, the Bloc had negotiated for something it felt was important.
We did the same. We negotiated for our priorities. We were unable to have all of our priorities adopted by the government because it is a negotiation, not something that we could do unilaterally. I therefore do not see how the expression “sell one's soul” applies in our case, given that the Bloc is prepared to do the same thing when the opportunity presents itself.
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- May/2/22 6:48:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, earlier in his remarks, the hon. member made reference to the power of prorogation when talking about the adjournment provision in this motion.
I was reminded of the procedure and House affairs committee in the last Parliament where we did a study of the Prime Minister's latest prorogation. I wanted the committee to recommend that the Prime Minister should not be allowed to prorogue the House without a vote in the House of Commons, the same kind of vote that is actually in the adjournment provision of this motion.
That recommendation did not appear because Liberals and Conservatives alike want to preserve that power of prorogation. For all the song and dance and foot stomping they do in this place, at the end of the day when the Conservatives had a real opportunity to just recommend constraining the power of the Prime Minister, they chose not to.
I find it hard to believe the outrage of the member here today.
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- May/2/22 7:18:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, from time to time at committee, particularly when travelling but sometimes here in Ottawa, the committee will waive its quorum requirement and provide that no substantive motions can be moved or debated, in order to hear from witnesses. The committee sees value in hearing points of view and getting them on the record, but recognizes that it may not be an appropriate time to address issues that come out of left field, so to speak. That is kind of similar to what is being proposed for evening sittings in the House of Commons when we have these extended meetings.
I just wonder if the member has some experience with a committee that has conducted its business this way and if democracy ended when the committee decided to conduct its business that way.
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- May/2/22 10:54:14 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, some of the income tax provisions, as I understand it, in Bill C-8 include creating a refundable tax credit for SMEs to improve air quality in their places of work, expanding the travel component of the northern residents deduction, enhancing the refundable tax credit for teachers, creating a refundable tax credit for agricultural businesses so that farmers are able to get more money back under climate action incentives, and creating a tax on underused housing that the member had featured prominently in his remarks.
Have I missed anything from the list? These are all things that he wants the committee to re-examine, if I understood his proposal correctly.
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- May/2/22 11:27:55 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, I am going to request unanimous consent to split my time with the member for Courtenay—Alberni.
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- May/2/22 11:28:26 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise at third reading to contribute to the debate on Bill C-8.
Two of the themes I have heard so far this evening that are emerging from the debate have to do, first, with inflation and, second, and relatedly, with the incredible increases in housing prices that Canadians have been facing that have made it very difficult for Canadians to afford a home. As we are hearing more often, it is causing many younger Canadian adults to give up altogether on the dream of ever owning their own home to be sure, and in many cases even just to find a home to rent. More and more people are having to stay with mom and dad a lot longer than they planned, if they have the good fortune of having parents who have a home that can accommodate them.
What I want to offer that I do not think has been said enough when we talk about inflation is to point to a couple of studies that have come out in the last several weeks by Canadians for Tax Fairness and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which have said that up to a quarter of the inflationary pressure that Canadians are currently experiencing can be attributed to price markups by companies for their products that go above and beyond their increased costs. Companies in the grocery business, the oil and gas business now as prices spike, banks obviously, insurance companies and big box stores have seen incredible increases or a growth in profit that is higher and faster than the growth of their costs. That is not to say businesses are not facing increased costs, but some of the largest businesses appear to be using that as an opportunity to gouge Canadians, whether it is at the pumps, the store or wherever they sell their wares. This is contributing as much as 25% of the increase in costs that Canadians are currently experiencing.
We could listen to the Conservatives talk about the problem of inflation all day. They would have us believe that it is only government spending that has contributed to inflationary pressures. They do not want to talk about international supply chains. We do not hear them talk about that. We just hear them talk about the government borrowing during the pandemic. They could be talking about the extraordinary increase in profits that far exceed the increase in costs that many of the largest companies in Canada are experiencing, but they do not. They only want to talk about where they see government as the problem.
The problem for Canadians, when they are looking for people to elect to provide some real solutions, is if they elect people who can only appreciate one kind of problem, it is like a tradesperson who only knows how to operate one kind of tool. The fact is tradespeople need to know how to use all of the tools in the tool box because they are confronted with novel problems and not all problems are the same and not all solutions are the same.
Cutting government spending sometimes is the solution to certain kinds of problems, but it is not the solution to all problems. Indeed, fixing some of the problems that we are facing right now requires government investment, but when we talk about the extraordinary price increases and profit increases that we have seen in certain industries that are really hurting Canadians in the pocketbook, the answer is to take those folks on. The answer is some regulation and legislation that will hold them to an appropriate standard and make sure Canadians are not getting fleeced by the private sector. As I said, there is some real evidence that that is going on, and it is not a big enough part of the conversation. If it is 25% of the problem for the budgets of Canadians, it certainly does not make up 25% of the conversation here, not even close, let alone 25% of the solutions that are being proffered by the government.
How do we know this is in part the case? We can look at not only some of the company profits I was talking about, but we can also look at some longer-term trends and the way they have accelerated during the pandemic. We have seen it with Canadian billionaires. There are not a lot of them, but man, do they ever have a lot of money, and man, have they ever managed to grow their net worth astronomically over the last two years of the pandemic. That is some serious evidence.
If we go back just to last fall, the Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report that said that 1% of all Canadians have 25% of the wealth produced in the country, while 40% of Canadians are trying to get by sharing only 1% of that wealth. That was not always the case in Canada.
These are some of the important themes that are based in economic data that the government and the official opposition have to start taking seriously because we are missing the mark in the conversation about inflation by only talking about the extent to which government spending has contributed to that. In fact, we are in a time when, if we listen to most economists, we are in an inflationary period that is driven far more by supply constraint issues than we are in an inflationary period driven by excessive demand or money in the market.
It is true that, in some cases, there is an overheated market and housing, which is the second theme that I want to touch on. It is that par excellence. We have seen that. We have seen extraordinary price increases in the market. There are folks in the Conservative Party who have talked a lot about this here in the House. They would have us believe that this is simply attributable to some of the liquidity that the government injected into the market at the outset of the pandemic. They will talk about the Bank of Canada printing money. They want Canadians to believe that this is the whole story, that this is the only reason we have seen massive price increases in the market.
In fact, housing prices have been doubling about every five years or so for the last 20 years at least. I will speak to that, just because that is about as long as I have been paying attention to the housing market. This is not a new trend. It is a trend that has been accelerated, but it speaks to something that has been going on for quite a long time.
The particular financial measures that the government happened to adopt, most of which, incidentally, was money that was shared directly with Canadian households through the wage subsidy program and through the CERB program. There was a direct transfer of wealth from the government to individual households on an unprecedented level. If we look at the percentage of government spending that went to those direct transfers of wealth to individual households, while the pandemic was happening and while people were out of work, it is quite impressive.
These were not people who were then taking CERB money and buying multiple properties. Let us not kid ourselves. Two thousand dollars a month is not very much. There is nobody with an income of $2,000 a month who is going to the bank and saying that they wanted to buy the house down the street and having their bank sign off on that. Give me a break.
It is just absurd that people here would be out, say, on leadership campaign tours pretending that, somehow, the billions of dollars of government money that went to people who had lost their job during an unprecedented health crisis and were not making more than $2,000 a month are pouring gasoline on the fire of housing speculation and house prices.
What is a lot more likely is that these people, these 1% of people who have 25% of the wealth, for all sorts of reasons, including Liberal and Conservative governments, successive governments in this century, lowering the corporate tax rate from 28% in the year 2000 down to 15% today, were looking around and wondering, how are they going to make more money with their money, because that is what they do. They have whole companies, banks and advisors. There are whole industries predicated upon people with tons of money figuring out how to make tons more.
The fact of the matter is that anyone who has the job of figuring out how to make more money on money has been looking at the Canadian real estate market, not just in the last two years but in the last 20 years, and drooling all over the place, because it has been an excellent place to grow one's money for no effort.
Unless the government is going to get serious about taxing back some of that extraordinary wealth so that it can be invested by democratically elected governments in priorities like indigenous housing, reducing our emissions, and making prescription drugs more affordable and dental care accessible, we are not going to solve the housing problem. This is because part of the problem is that too much private money is trying to multiply itself in the economy and that it is free to do that. We have seen that with those tax breaks.
With regard to the 1% of people in Canada who share 25% of the wealth, they do not know what to do with all their money, so they are bidding up the price of houses and owning that because they like the idea of further growing their wealth by renting out houses and apartments at extraordinary rates to Canadians, and that is a huge part of the story of what is driving the extraordinary growth in housing prices, which is putting housing out of the reach of too many Canadians.
Here we are. If we just listened to the official opposition, all we would hear about is the role of government, and we would be missing the mark. That is why, if we listen to what they are saying, they do not have any good solutions.
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- May/2/22 11:39:53 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, surely the member knows, as he said as much and I agree with him, that this is a government that has had a lot of issues keeping its promises.
I want to assure him that the negotiations that happened between the NDP and the government were not done from a place of naïveté. We are here to work. We are here to fight for the things that we told the people who elected us we would fight for. We are sincere in wanting to get those things. We are in the second minority Parliament that has largely the same character, in terms of seat distribution between the parties. We think a lot of Canadians wanted to see more political stability after the unnecessary election of last fall, and we were willing to negotiate with the government.
Part of the way we are trying to ensure that the government does follow through on those central commitments was to release the terms of the agreement and be very public about how it is meant to work. There are obvious milestones, which happen at budget time and in respect of implementing legislation, and dates for certain initiatives within that agreement that anyone is welcome to see online. We think that is part of how to create a culture of accountability. There is a bit of an experiment in democracy here, in terms of trying to hold a government that has not been very good at following through on its own commitments, to following through on these particular ones, because we think they are important.
We invite Canadians to pay close attention, to read those documents, to watch how we behave in the House of Commons and around the Hill, and to offer their critique of how they think it is going, what they think is working and what they think is not. That is how we are going to get things done here for people.
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- May/2/22 11:42:51 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, this is something I am hoping we are going to have an opportunity to get into at the finance committee in our study of inflation. I have been advocating to try to get some representatives from the grocery industry there.
I think it is a notoriously opaque industry, and in this time, when we step back and see the extraordinary growth of profit that exceeds the increase in cost, as it must, because otherwise we would not see an increase in profit, it is time to shine a little more light on industries like grocery. I would add telecommunications, for instance, where Canadians are known to pay extraordinarily high prices compared to other places in the world. We tend to have an oligopoly structure to some of these key industries. We should be applying more public scrutiny to those industries.
One of the quicker fixes that we have proposed as a party, and we saw the Liberals adopt it with respect to banks and insurance companies, is to have what we have called an excess profit tax or a pandemic profit tax, where we tax the extraordinary profits in the pandemic period at a higher rate.
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