44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 5, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Kings—Hants for his talk about the CCUS. I have the only working carbon capture and storage facility, on a coal-fired power plant that produces energy for Saskatchewan. I am so glad to hear he has been to Saskatchewan, and I would invite him and arrange for him to have a tour of the CCUS facility, so he actually understands what it truly means to capture that CO2 and put it in the ground.
My question is a very simple one. Is it the industry we want to kill, or is it the emissions?
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Mr. Speaker, I think I was very clear in my remarks that there will be a role for Canadian oil and gas in the days ahead. I have mentioned the fact that the global markets are changing and that countries around the world are focused on a transition to a lower-carbon economy. We need to be serious about reducing emissions associated with the production of fossil fuels. That is going to be driven by innovation, similar to what the member has suggested with some of the CCUS innovation that is happening in his province of Saskatchewan. I think the ERP actually represents an important opportunity for Canadian industry to recognize that we have to reduce emissions.
CEOs with energy companies in Canada understand that. We as parliamentarians need to understand this is part of an important transition to fight climate change, but also to be on a competitive footing in the days ahead in global markets.
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Mr. Speaker, I have a question around the Canada disability benefit.
We are approaching a year since the benefit was initially introduced in this House, and the disability community was expecting to see it in budget 2022.
Why is the Canada disability benefit not in budget 2022?
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Mr. Speaker, I know this has been part of the discussion throughout the budget process that is under way here. I will say that I think this government has stepped up to try to provide important social supports across the board.
Members have to recognize that this is budget 2022, but we were elected in 2021 for a four-year mandate. Notwithstanding the fact that I know many members in this House, including this one, understand the importance of supporting individuals with disabilities, this was just the first budget of a four-year cycle, and I suspect we will be working as a government to address some of the challenges and opportunities that the member has highlighted.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Kings—Hants for his speech. He is a member that I have a great amount of respect for.
That being said, when the member mentioned a tip of the cap to carbon capture and storage, we need to be honest: If we want even a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C and ensuring a livable planet, we need to do our fair share. That means, as scientists have told us, that we need to leave 86% of Canada's proven fossil fuel reserves unextracted. To do so means investing in workers.
I wonder if the member would be open to commenting on the importance of the implications of taking that same $7.1 billion, in a new subsidy, and instead investing that in workers and a just transition for them.
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Mr. Speaker, let me just say that I have great respect for the member opposite as well. I take the view that we look at the transition in an energy context in a low-carbon economy. This is not easy. We are talking about Canada: As rich and as powerful a country as we are, we are still going to need that energy in the days ahead.
We may differ in terms of our approach, but I really believe that we need to be focused on emissions reduction. We need to be investing in the technologies that are going to help make Canadian industry competitive for the product that is still going to be needed in the days ahead, notwithstanding the significant transition that we will be taking.
As it relates to a just transition, I am not a big fan of the word, as our Minister of Labour has talked about. I really think that it is important to focus on giving the skills and tools to develop a workforce for the future. We have 900,000 jobs in this country, and there are workers, regardless of whether or not they are in the oil and gas sector, who have skills that will be used across it. I think it is all about skills development, because those folks are still going to be important for whatever type of energy future we have in the days ahead.
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- May/5/22 11:47:18 a.m.
- Watch
Before we continue, I want to remind everybody, as I do a couple of times throughout the day, to keep questions and answers as short as they possibly can to make sure that all members and all parties have an opportunity to ask a question and get a response as well. The more we do that, the more we get in.
Continuing debate, the hon. member for Surrey Centre.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to be here today to speak on the topic of Bill C-19, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 7, 2022 and other measures.
Over the past two years, we have faced unprecedented challenges. There is no part of our lives that was not impacted in some way by the coronavirus pandemic. Challenges were both personal and collective in nature. “Budget 2022: A Plan to Grow Our Economy and Make Life More Affordable” contains significant investments in key areas that would help Canadians continue to recover from the detrimental impacts of the pandemic.
Despite the challenges we have faced, Canada has emerged stronger. Because of our government's response to the pandemic, we are able to maintain the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio relative to our G7 international peers, with one of the fastest recoveries. We have the strongest job recovery in the G7, having recuperated 112% and maybe even 115% of the jobs that were lost since the peak of the pandemic, and our unemployment rate is down to 5.5%. This nearly matches Canada's best unemployment rate in 50 years, which we saw in 2019 when the unemployment rate was 5.4%.
The targeted investments in budget 2022 are designed to support people, economic growth and a clean future for everyone as we continue to navigate pandemic recovery. Through these targeted measures, this budget would help make it easier for Canadians to buy a home and move forward on dental care, help Canadian businesses scale up and grow, ensure that wealthy corporations pay their fair share, invest in a clean future, and help Canada become a world leader in producing electric vehicles.
I would like to take this opportunity to highlight just a few of the many important investments outlined in this budget that are particularly impactful for my riding of Surrey Centre. These include important investments in housing, immigration, health and dental care. Regarding housing, we know that access to safe and affordable housing remains an incredible challenge for far too many. This is an issue that constituents raise with me often. Access to safe and affordable housing is one of the biggest concerns faced by many residents in the lower mainland. This region has some of the highest housing prices in the country, and as our population continues to grow, we need more homes to meet the demand.
Surrey Centre has been a recipient of significant investments through the rapid housing initiative over the past few years, including $16.4 million under the major city stream to support the creation of affordable housing units for the new Atira Women's Resource Society facility. I had the opportunity to tour the Atira site currently under construction with the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister a couple of weeks ago. This modular housing apartment will provide approximately 44 new affordable units. Owned and operated by Atira Women's Resource Society, this supportive housing complex will serve women experiencing, and at risk of, homelessness, including indigenous women, trans and two-spirited women, and women who are struggling with substance abuse, mental health and spiritual wellness. The $16.4 million funding also assisted Atira to create more units, including next door, where now dozens of units are there to help women in need.
Our government has also invested in the Foxglove supportive housing complex in my riding, which I had the opportunity to visit with the Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion recently. This complex includes a total of 130 units: 66 are supportive housing, 34 are for complex care and 30 are shelter beds.
Housing is a complex issue, and I am pleased to see that budget 2022 contains significant investments to address the many layers of challenges with housing that we face and would help expand access to housing in our communities.
This would include doubling the construction of new homes over the next 10 years. Budget 2022 provides $4 billion over five years to CMHC to launch a new housing accelerator fund. This fund aims to remove barriers and help municipalities build housing more quickly. It would target the creation of 100,000 net new housing units in the next five years.
Budget 2022 also contains investments to help Canadians buy their first homes, including by introducing the tax-free first home savings account and doubling the first-time homebuyers' tax credit, and introducing a multi-generational home renovation tax credit that provides up to $7,500 in support for constructing a secondary suite in a home for an additional loved one. This would help keep seniors at home longer, and give them better, safer, more comfortable places to say.
The tax-free first home savings account would help thousands of Canadians save, tax free, up to $40,000 to buy their first home. This is on top of their RRSP options, thereby giving Canadian families up to $15,000 or $20,000 in tax savings.
As members may know, immigration is an issue very near and dear to my heart. I have one of the busiest constituency offices in the country and receive hundreds of immigration files each month. Budget 2022 proposes investments to make our immigration system more efficient. Applicants currently face long waits and delays with processing times. Our government has already begun to address these issues and I am pleased to share with everyone that we are continuing to do more.
Budget 2022 proposes $187 million over five years, and $37 million ongoing, for IRCC to improve its capacity to respond to a growing volume of inquiries and to invest in the technology and tools required to better support people using those services. The budget also proposes $386 million over five years, and $86 million ongoing, for IRCC, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and CBSA to facilitate the timely and efficient entry of a growing number of visitors, workers and students.
I also recently introduced a private member's motion, Motion No. 44, to expand pathways to permanent residency for temporary foreign workers. Budget 2022 contains a number of proposed investments relative to Motion No. 44 to improve the temporary foreign worker program.
Throughout the pandemic, employers have found it challenging to find workers. As demand grows for the TFW program, we need to make changes to meet the needs of the system and ensure that TFWs are protected and have health, safety and quality of life while they work and contribute to our communities. These proposed measures include millions of dollars in funding for increasing protections for workers, reducing administrative burdens for trusted repeat employers and ensuring employers can quickly bring in workers to fill short-term labour market gaps.
Health care, pharmacare and dental: Our health care system is vital to the functioning of this country. Our government made significant investments, more than $69 billion, to lead a coordinated federal, provincial and territorial response to fight COVID-19 and protect the health and safety of Canadians, with more funding to be rolled out in the future. This additional funding includes a $2-billion top-up, plus $45 billion to the Canada health transfer to the provinces and territories.
Budget 2022 proposes initiatives to attract more health care workers to rural communities and to support access to mental health resources with $140 million for the Wellness Together Canada portal, as well as $100 million for the substance use and addiction program to address the opioid crisis.
Finally, I would like to highlight the $5.3 billion over five years to provide dental care for Canadians with family incomes of less than $90,000 annually. It starts in 2022, with those under 12 years old, and expands to cover people under age 18, seniors and persons living with a disability in 2023, with full implementation by 2025.
There are far too many other important issues that budget 2022 proposes investments in for me to cover in the 10 minutes I have today. On that note, I will end with the hope that we can work collaboratively to pass this bill and begin the important work of getting these programs to Canadians as soon as possible to make life more affordable from coast to coast to coast.
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Mr. Speaker, the concern I have is that every initiative across this level of government right now that is focused on increasing housing supply has no details on how increasing housing supply is actually going to lower prices or make housing affordable for Canadians. This line of thinking and these concerns have been raised by economists and many other schools of thought over the past several weeks. I share that concern.
If taxpayers are paying to increase housing supply, what guarantee is there, based on the government's program, that the supply will become more affordable for Canadians?
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Calgary Nose Hill. I have worked with her for several years on various committees.
When it comes to housing, the biggest challenge we have in this country is supply. The second part is getting into the housing market the first time. I have seen our government build a national housing strategy and invest over $70 billion into it. We are now seeing the fruits of those labours. Particularly in my riding, I have seen 330 new affordable rental housing units being built across from my office. I have seen three announcements for rapid housing initiatives. I have also now seen ways that young people can save tax-free after this bill passes so they can buy their first homes.
These are on top of the $4-billion home accelerator fund that will help municipalities that are committed, because this is a multi-level approach. Those that are committed will get a carrot instead of a stick in order to build more houses and double the housing output this country needs to grow.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague mentioned a housing program that was in the budget. The budget does actually include a few interesting investments in housing.
The program that gives municipalities $4 billion to accelerate the construction of 100,000 housing units is actually very frightening for Quebec. The last time we went through this, when the national housing strategy was launched in 2017, it took three years of negotiations before a single penny was actually spent on it. There is no way around it. If the federal government decides to negotiate with the municipalities, it will have to go through Quebec City, because the feds do not deal directly with the municipalities. Quebec City and Ottawa will have to reach an agreement. It took three years last time. During that period, money was flowing to Toronto and Vancouver, and no money was being spent in Quebec.
Instead of planning to do this with the municipalities, would it not have been simpler to send the money directly to Quebec City, so that those who know what the needs are can reach an agreement with the municipalities?
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Mr. Speaker, it is funny to hear that coming from the Bloc members, who usually want everything to go to the provinces, but when negotiating with the provinces, as they just said in their own question, it takes three years to implement those deals, as opposed to when it goes directly to the municipalities. If we ask any municipalities, they want funding directly to themselves. They do not want to be brokered through a province that has its own political motives.
This is a great initiative. Cities will make a plan and send it to the federal government, and the federal government will approve it. If they have results, they will get the money; if they do not perform, they will not get it.
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Mr. Speaker, one of the questions I have around the implementation act is about the fact that, again and again, we hear the government promise to address the issue of clean drinking water on first nations reserves, and we continue to see that pushed further and further away. I see it is mentioned very briefly in this implementation act, but I have also heard the Minister of Indigenous Services talk about capacity, saying that once first nations have the capacity, we will get them their clean drinking water.
Does the member agree with the NDP that clean drinking water is an essential human right, that every person in Canada should have it and that the urgency of this issue needs to be addressed today, if not sooner, rather than five years away?
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Mr. Speaker, I think it is a fundamental human right to have clean drinking water, and this side of the House definitely agrees with that. I can assure the member that every drinking water advisory that was there in 2015 has been resolved, particularly in our province of British Columbia, but there are new drinking water advisories that are coming to the front, and for those we are working tirelessly day and night. I know that no one works harder than our Minister of Indigenous Services to make sure that everyone has clean drinking water immediately on those sites.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time today with the member for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon.
I want to focus my remarks today on the acceptability of the government's budget and the budget implementation bill in two key areas. Number one is affordability as the larger issue, but specifically housing affordability as well as energy affordability. Number two is addressing climate change.
In the first half, I want to talk about housing supply, which is a hard truth that I really do not think anyone in here wants to talk about. No government has been successful in addressing the supply-side issue in Canada. The number of houses that the government is purporting to be able to build and all the money that has been put into building houses by the government have actually seen housing prices increase by 30% in a very short period of time. It is sort of a perverse environment, where we are seeing housing prices increase and become more affordable. I am sitting here looking at some of the pages in the House of Commons and wondering how they are going to be able to buy a house. How are they going to be able to afford this?
What this budget does not address, and what nobody is addressing in the House, is that having “taxpayer-subsidized savings schemes to boost down payments”, and I am quoting from an article in The Line written by Jen Gerson, “will double first-time buyers' tax credits and create more buyers' incentives”. All this does is address the demand side of things. It does not actually address pricing. What this does is just say that we are okay with the existing prices and the unaffordability of housing in Canada, and that we are just expecting that first-time homebuyers in Canada will somehow try to take on that level of debt to buy a home in Canada.
That is just not on the table for a lot of people. Not only is it not on the table for first-time homebuyers, but it is also not on the table for somebody who has been in a 10-year marriage and has just divorced. How is either of those people going to get back into the housing market at this point in time?
The reality is that nobody in this place wants to see housing prices go down, so what we are left chasing here is policies that try to get people into the housing market at what is probably an overvalued housing bubble that has been fuelled by very questionable policies on interest rates and whatnot in the past.
What we have in this budget, and I am sure everybody is going to hate my saying this, is incentives to keep juicing demand, as opposed to actually looking at the supply side and the affordability issue. For that reason, I have serious questions, given the severity of the housing affordability crisis in Canada, about the government budget's ability to do that. It is a huge problem. What are we saying to young Canadians right now? We are telling them not to worry because we are trying to make it easier for them to save up, when they are already not being paid in the same way their parents were and they are facing huge levels of inflation and high levels of housing prices that have been unseen. That is crazy. Why is no one talking about this?
This is highly problematic. I would just encourage members of all political stripes here. I wish we could have an actual conversation about ways to address some of the underlying problems with Canada's housing market. We have an entire generation of people who are aging, whose retirement is dependent upon paper gains in their real estate. They do not want to see their housing prices go down. That is their retirement. How are we addressing their retirement? We have told them, as a society, that this is a good thing. We have told them to depend on this, and now we are saying that housing is a problem.
Without addressing that issue, we are never going to fix this. This budget does not do that. We are just going to keep skating by while housing prices increase or until we have some sort of catastrophic failure, either of which is not good for the Canadian economy or for anybody in Canada who is trying to find a place to live.
The other issue I want to raise, which is near and dear to my heart as a member of Parliament in Calgary, particularly north central Calgary, is the inability of the government to match its so-called climate change solutions with incenting and providing low-cost, readily available low-carbon alternatives to high-carbon consumer products and practices. What I want to speak about specifically is the government's inability to both incent and provide alternatives, which it assumes are there with its policies, to the people I represent and how that impacts their lives and perversely makes achieving our climate change targets worse.
For example, in Calgary Centre North there are a large number of people who would love to take public transit to downtown Calgary, myself included. I prefer to take public transit. It lets me work more. I get stressed easily and do not like to drive when I do not have to. I would love to do that, but the reality is that for me to take a 20-minute bus ride from where I live in north central Calgary to downtown, it is 20 minutes at the best of times by bus, but sometimes it could be an hour or even two hours on a snow day. There is no light rail transit that goes from downtown Calgary to my part of the city, which has one of the highest levels of under-serviced potential transit ridership in western Canada, based on the ridership numbers I have seen. What that means for somebody like me is that I still have to gas up my car to get to meetings downtown. I am paying $100 or more for a tank of gas, but I am in a privileged position. What are people supposed to do if they are not making my income? They do not have the option of getting on a public transit line; they have to fill up their vehicle to go to work or get their kids to school.
Therefore, all the increase in carbon energy, which has been affected not just by the price on carbon but also by supply-side failures, means that people are paying more for carbon, not that they are using less of it. This is part of the problem with the inflationary pressure we are seeing in Canada.
The budget could have started to address some of these issues, for example in how the government is allocating transit funding, both from a capital development perspective and from an operating perspective. It is using a formula that is just not realistic, with respect to where the money is going. I believe it is 30% population-based and 70% based on existing transit ridership. What about parts of the country where there is no public transit? We would love to have public transit, but the government has not allocated transit funding there. That is the first problem, that we do not have the transit to use. It is not that we do not want to use it; it is that it is not there, so we are still filling up our tanks with gas.
The second problem is this. It is not just about funding allocation, but about how the federal government uses its convening role as a funding partner between the provincial governments and the municipalities to see transit projects built. The green line, the LRT project I was talking about earlier, has failed in Calgary. Although the funding was announced nearly 10 years ago now, virtually nothing has been built. The project has decreased in scope to a quarter and has ballooned in cost four or five times what was originally projected. That is a bad investment with respect to how this management works. The federal government should put boundaries around funding to make sure these developments actually get built. People cannot afford to keep having taxes increase, prices increase and lack of supply of goods, housing and energy increase, while not addressing those core, fundamental issues. From that perspective, this budget is a huge missed opportunity.
I wish I had an hour and a half to get into all of the issues around the amount of money that is spent, which puts Canada into debt, but just on those two issues alone, this budget is not addressing them. It spends so much and it disadvantages Canadians. I hope the government can get it right. Until then, it does not have my support.
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Madam Speaker, it was not that long ago, a few years back, when we could get a litre of gasoline at 88¢. At that time, the government was being criticized by the Conservative Party, which was saying that Alberta was collapsing and everything was going so bad because the price of gas was so low. Today, we are being criticized because the price of gas is so high. I wonder if the member can provide her thoughts with respect to the whole concept of the world pricing of oil and to what degree Canada really has an impact on the world price of oil.
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Madam Speaker, I think my colleague misunderstood. I was eviscerating the government on the fact that there are no substitute goods for carbon energy, to a large extent, across Canada to ensure that the price on carbon makes carbon pricing elastic. It is inelastic right now.
The second thing is what the government has done, and we have criticized the government for it. Canada still needs carbon energy. That is just the reality. We cannot argue with that; we need it right now. With the policies the government has, all that is happening is an offshoring of our jobs to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and it is raising the cost of energy because we do not have a stable domestic supply.
There is a lack of investments or a prevention of investments in energy infrastructure. I am not saying that we should not be looking at ways to provide alternatives, but that has not happened and the government fails to realize it. I think there is a record of policy failure over several years, and this budget does not rectify that.
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Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to see my colleague from Calgary Nose Hill in the House again. It has been a while, and we miss hearing her during our debates.
One section of Bill C‑19 has to do with the luxury tax. I agree on the principle: Those who benefited more during the pandemic can and should contribute to helping those who struggled a bit more.
However, this section includes a measure on private aircraft. When we talk about privately owned aircraft, we think of well‑off people with means, but that is not always the case. Private pilots are often enthusiasts who spend a tremendous amount of money on their hobby because it is expensive. They often have to get together as a group to buy a small plane, and even then it will cost far more than $100,000, which is the threshold for the luxury tax.
Does my colleague think that this luxury tax may have been designed without any consideration for the reality of people who enjoy recreational aviation?
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Madam Speaker, I think there are a lot of people in my riding who would get really mad at me if I started talking about private aircraft right now, because they can barely afford their cars.
I would just say this. This aspect of the budget does not address the broader issue of income inequality, rising unaffordability in Canada and inflation. It is window dressing. The systemic issue of housing affordability that I addressed in my speech and the cost of energy are two very fundamental issues that the government has not addressed from a realistic perspective, and I think that is very unfortunate.
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Madam Speaker, the member talked about housing affordability. She said it was a huge problem and I agree with her. I think everyone would agree with her. However, I listened carefully and she offered absolutely no solutions. She just said we should talk about this.
I am wondering what her solution would be. Would she agree with the NDP that we need to get back into the affordable housing game through the federal government and build 500,000 units of affordable housing just to catch up to where previous governments have left us over the last 30 years?
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