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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 62

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 2, 2022 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 62 - May/2/22
Ms. Lori Idlout (Nunavut, NDP)
  • May/2/22 10:40:05 p.m.
  • Watch
  • Re: Bill C-8 
Qujannamiik, Uqaqtittiji. I was struck by the member for Abbotsford mentioning the banks stepping up by increasing interest rates. I want to ask him about the banks having increased their profits, nearly $58 billion in 2021. The Royal Bank alone made $16 billion. It just seems to me that they are not necessarily stepping up when they are continuing to see great increases in their profits. I want to ask why the Conservatives are protecting the interests of the rich rather than trying to make sure we are doing better for the working people in Canada.
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Context: House Hansard - 62 - May/2/22
Mr. Daniel Blaikie
  • May/2/22 11:42:51 p.m.
  • Watch
  • 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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