44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 5, 2022 10:00AM
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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Madam Speaker, again, how do we do that? That is what needs to be asked. On what land do we do this and for how much? Who gets those units? There is a much greater supply issue than that. Will those units be allowed to be Airbnbs or sit vacant?
Those are the fundamental questions that no one wants to talk about, of any political stripe. If we do not get to the heart of those questions, we are never going to address the affordability crisis in housing in Canada.
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Madam Speaker, today we are debating Bill C-19, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 7, 2022, and other measures. For my constituents, budget implementation acts are the mechanisms for Parliament to approve the spending outlined in the government's annual budget. In other words, it is when rhetoric meets reality.
My constituents were hopeful that budget 2022 would provide much-needed relief and address the key challenges facing Canadians, such as the labour and housing supply shortages and, of course, the rising cost of living. Instead, budget 2022, while indeed making many promises, fails to meaningfully address critical issues facing Canadians. It has piled more debt onto the backs of taxpayers, and has raised taxes while failing to address tax evasion. Bill C-19 is very long, yet it somehow manages to leave out most of the things the Liberals promised to do. Imagine that. Why did the Minister of Finance table a budget that makes so many promises if she had no intention of implementing them at this critical time?
During my time, I am going to talk briefly about the labour market, Pacific economic development, housing and some local issues.
On the labour market, it never ceases to amaze me how many businesses in my riding need employees right now. I see “help wanted” signs on billboards across my riding, on window fronts, in newspapers and on company vehicles. There is a significant shortage of skilled workers throughout not only my riding and province, but our entire country.
We all know Canada's population is aging. In fact, we have known this for a long time. For years we have been warned of a coming “grey tsunami”. I would argue today that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this point. It means that more people right now are exiting the workforce through retirement, with fewer people entering to replace them.
Budget 2022 makes lots of promises about labour shortages and attracting new skilled workers, but when I looked at Bill C-19, I saw only two of the nine different commitments made in the budget.
The first one in Bill C-19 is the amendment to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that commits to increase the number of permanent residents accepted each year. While this sounds great on the surface, what this budget does not do is address the other side of this problem. If we are increasing the number of skilled immigrants coming into this country who want to buy homes and use their capital, we are only making the housing supply shortage worse. The government never addressed this key fact. The permanent residency point only conflates the housing problem that we are facing.
The second point is that, while I support tax recognition of up to $4,000 a year in travel and relocation expenses, as outlined in Bill C-19, this will not add new workers to Canada's labour force, nor will it provide the skills training for Canadians who seek a promotion or a new career.
One commitment that could have been included, which even the Liberals have talked about, is foreign credential recognition. Many skilled workers who enter Canada come here under the pretense that they will serve as doctors or nurses or work in skilled health care fields. The current government, which does not work with the provinces, does not address that issue. This is an easy way we could solve part of the doctor and nursing shortages that my province is so acutely facing at this moment.
Another important promise missing from Bill C-19 is the opportunities fund supporting people with disabilities. This is a segment of our workforce that does not get enough attention. It is a segment of our workforce that wants to find purpose in the work they do. The government made a promise to work with them, but it is obviously not a priority because it is not in Bill C-19. I would encourage the Liberal members of the House to push their government to include the promises on workers with disabilities. That is very important.
Third, the government made multiple promises regarding temporary foreign workers, but they are also excluded from Bill C-19. I raise this point because I come from an agriculturally rich area of the country. In fact, the riding of Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, the riding of Abbotsford and the neighbouring riding of Chilliwack—Hope have the highest farm gate sales in the entire country. The greenhouse growers, dairy farmers and fruit growers are all calling for more temporary foreign workers to help meet the food security challenges that we are facing. The government could have done that and it failed to.
Turning to Pacific economic development, last August the government launched the department of Pacific Economic Development Canada. This agency was touted as a long-term partner dedicated to supporting B.C.'s economic development on the ground and in our communities. Indeed, it came with a lot of fanfare and big announcements, but almost a year after it was launched, Pacific Economic Development Canada has not opened its new office in Surrey. It is still in the old western economic development office in downtown Vancouver, and it has not fulfilled any of its promises to serve rural Canada.
I mention this today because, as everyone in the House knows, the one thing I have spoken about most is disaster recovery and emergency management. Pacific Economic Development Canada and, by extension, Community Futures, which I believe is the most efficient government organization, could be doing a lot more, so I encourage the government to fund Community Futures to help address labour shortages and business capital shortages for the many people in rural British Columbia. It could have gotten this done.
Finally, on Pacific economic development, what irks me the most is that when I went through the estimates, I found out that PacifiCan will receive just $48.44 on a per capita basis for every citizen in the province of British Columbia. Members can compare that with Ontario, where the agency will receive $55.14 for every citizen, and Quebec, where it will be $67.85.
Why is British Columbia being underfunded again? Why now, especially when our province has faced unprecedented challenges, is the government not empowering an organization in the government or Community Futures to do the work that we need to do right now to help people who are facing some critical situations? It is not fair to British Columbian taxpayers that we are underfunded. In fact, it kind of sets the stage for the argument that the Laurentian elite do not care about British Columbia.
I will turn to housing. Last year, as the opposition's shadow minister for housing, I highlighted the failure of budget 2021 to address the critical supply shortages, money laundering and foreign investment that have contributed to the high cost of homes. On this side of the House, we have said over and over that supply is the biggest factor in skyrocketing home prices. We are not alone in this. There is industry consensus, and CMHC has been saying the same things. We are not keeping up with demand.
The government claims it is finally addressing the issue of foreign investors flooding Canada's real estate market, doing so through its temporary ban on foreign non-residents purchasing residential properties. However, Bill C-19 is very vague on the details. It says that temporary residents are exempt from this ban. We are left to wonder what this government means by temporary residents. Could wealthy foreign families still buy real estate through their children who come to Canada as international students? The loopholes are just astounding.
In the months leading up to the budget, we heard a lot from the Liberals about how they heard Canadians and how they would address the housing crisis. The Liberals made grand promises in this budget, including a housing accelerator fund for 100,000 homes, a direct payment to those struggling to afford a home, doubling the first-time homebuyers' tax credit, a new savings account and increased funding to tackle homelessness. However, the previously mentioned ban on foreign buyers and a tax on house flipping were the only items included in Bill C-19. They are not even including their primary promises in this bill. Canadians just want an affordable place to call home, so when we talk about rhetoric and reality, all we are seeing from the government is rhetoric on housing. It is not even doing what it says it is going to do.
In conclusion, from this budget my constituents were hoping for a commitment to improve infrastructure, which was wholly ignored by the government; a partner to support much-needed economic development in B.C. after devastating floods and wildfires; a substantial increase in our housing supply; and a plan, which I did not have a chance to talk about, for the backlog at Passport Canada that is stopping people from travelling right now.
With that, I would like to wrap up my comments today by moving a subamendment to Bill C-19. I move, seconded by the member for Bay of Quinte:
That the amendment be amended by adding the following:
“, and fails to combat tax evasion.”
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The subamendment is in order.
Continuing with question and comments, we have the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader.
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Madam Speaker, one of two things is happening, as this is the second or third time that Conservatives have moved amendments to amendments. Either somebody is not doing their homework in properly preparing their amendment before introducing it or Conservatives are intentionally adding more votes to our vote count in order to burn more time. I will let the public be the judge of that.
My question to the member respects his comments around housing, and that we are not doing anything about housing. All I heard him do, which was very similar to what I heard the previous speaker do, is complain, rather than offering some solutions.
I would like to hear what the member thinks we should be doing. I heard him be very critical about one program, and that he does not think it is going to be successful, but can he offer some ideas as to what we should be doing to deal with the housing crisis?
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Madam Speaker, what I actually said at the very beginning of my speech was that Bill C-19 “is when rhetoric meets reality.”
I pointed out very clearly that all of the promises made by the Liberals, even some where we might find consensus in the House, were excluded from Bill C-19, including all of their commitments to address the supply-side crisis we are facing in this country. In addition, Bill C-19 does not even include their signature program of a new savings account.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague's intervention in the House today was very interesting, and I listened with attention.
The member comes from British Columbia, and of course, I am a member from Alberta. They are arguably two of the provinces that have dealt the most with the climate crisis in recent years, with fires and flooding in my province and flooding in his region just recently.
One of the things I have always wanted to do in this place is to ensure that we have a robust climate strategy, and as an Albertan, the best way we can do that is ensure that there is support for Albertan workers to transition to a green, future economy. I wonder if the member feels that what we saw in this budget implementation act meets that desperate need to support workers as our economies transform.
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Madam Speaker, the member for Edmonton Strathcona raises an important point.
In Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon and throughout British Columbia, when we are talking about climate change right now, we are talking about climate resilient infrastructure. I do acknowledge the $5 billion allocated in the fall economic statement from the government, but as I have said in the House and before, in my home town of Abbotsford alone, which is part of my riding, just to upgrade the diking system could cost upwards of $3 billion. This region of the province, and in our country, has the highest farm gate sales per capita. We have a critical sector of our economy that needs infrastructure investments to stop or manage future floods and other disasters such as those we experienced in 2021.
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Madam Speaker, oil subsidies figure prominently in this economic statement and in the budget. In this context, what concerns me is the energy transition. How can we promote the electrification of transportation?
Is my colleague satisfied with the measures that are in place? Would he like to comment further?
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Madam Speaker, what we need to do in British Columbia is support the construction of infrastructure such as a rail system for the public. We need a lot of public transportation to help our economy and families, who are paying too much for gas right now.
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Madam Speaker, it is great to see everyone. I wish all my colleagues a wonderful and productive day. The sun is shining outside, and warmer weather is close at hand. I think we are all happy about that.
I will be splitting my time with my friend and colleague, the hon. member for Milton.
It is a pleasure to rise to speak on Bill C-19 and the measures in the bill that would continue to drive the Canadian economy forward by leveraging the inherent strength and resiliency of all our citizens, create good-paying middle-class jobs, and ensure a bright and prosperous future for all Canadians, including the wonderful residents of Vaughan—Woodbridge, who I have the privilege of representing.
As many of my colleagues know, I am an MP who is focused squarely on the economy, competitiveness, job creative and fiscal prudence, backed by my entire educational and professional career in the field of economics and working in the global financial markets literally throughout the world. It is the economy for me.
At the same time, I am a socially progressive person who believes fundamentally that we as a society must always ensure that human rights, women's rights and the rights of minorities and the most vulnerable are always protected. As a father of three beautiful young girls, including a seven-month-old, I will state this in reference to what we are seeing transpire in the United States, where I lived and worked for several years and where I have many friends and family. A woman's right to choose is simply not up for debate. A woman's right to reproductive health services is not up for debate. We must always ensure that women across Canada, from coast to coast to coast, have full access to the health services they need. Protecting and promoting women's rights is something we must always stand for, full stop, non-negotiable.
The Canadian economy is strong, characterized by historically low unemployment and strong economic growth. The future is truly bright. I am the chair of the Liberal auto caucus and in the last two months we have secured, as a government working with industry and our partners, more than 13 billion dollars' worth of investment in Canada's auto sector, maintaining and creating more than 16,000 direct jobs.
The auto sector is something near and dear to my heart, since my time in New York City working for a rating agency. At the rating agency, I was actually in charge of the global auto parts coverage, and worked in tandem on the global OEM manufacturers, visiting Wolfsburg Volkswagen in Germany, Peugeot in Paris, Fiat in Turin, Hyundai in Korea, and Japanese manufacturers as well. It is an industry I am very well versed in, and something I have been watching for many years, including during the 2008-09 recession.
It is great to see our government working hand-in-hand with industry, leading the charge, so we can have a vibrant industry here in Canada. It is also good to see the ongoing transformation to electric vehicles, for which Canada is uniquely positioned, both on the human capital side and on the natural resource side.
Turning to Bill C-19, tradespeople and skilled trades build and maintain the critical infrastructure we utilize, and we are dependent upon them on a daily basis in the communities where we raise our families. In my youth, I worked at a pulp and paper mill in northern British Columbia. I spent a few summers there. It was a phenomenal experience, and I learned a lot from the hard-working Canadians who work in our resource sector.
Much like in other infrastructure, be it refineries, pipelines, chemical plants, major infrastructure projects, people who work in the trades travel. They travel quite a distance for what are called “turnarounds” or “shutdowns”. I remember experiencing that. They also travel for permanent relocation.
With that, I am very happy to see, and I was very happy to advocate for, the labour mobility deduction of $4,000 in Bill C-19. It would allow these skilled trades folks to offset some of the costs associated with this travel. It is a well-needed measure that I again advocated for, and it is great to see it in the BIA, Bill C-19.
My riding is home to the training centres and the headquarters of LiUNA 183 and the Carpenters Local 27, and the individuals from these two unions, day in and day out, toil, sacrifice and build without a lot of fanfare. They build our infrastructure and communities. I salute them, and I am proud to be their representative in Ottawa. I will always have the backs of all of them and all the great skilled trades people across this country.
Budget 2022 focuses on three main goals: investing in creating economic growth and innovation, continuing to invest in Canadians, and investing in the ongoing green transition.
We all know quite well that we must act with all levels of government and all stakeholders to make housing more affordable for Canadians. With that, we know we cannot have a growing and strong economy and a diverse and talented workforce, particularly for newcomers coming to Canada, without more homes. We will act, and we are acting.
First, we will allow Canadians who intend to purchase their first home to help them save via a tax-free home savings account. Second, we will increase the supply of housing by launching a $4-billion home accelerator fund to support and incentivize municipalities to build more homes faster. We must break down the red tape, and we must break down the barriers to getting more shovels in the ground and boots working. Third, we need to protect buyers and renters by introducing a homebuyers' bill of rights and bring forward a national plan to end blind bidding. We will also ban foreign buyers from owning non-recreational residential property for two years.
I am one of the representatives in the city of Vaughan, along with the members for King—Vaughan and Thornhill. The city of Vaughan and the York region are home, frankly, to the largest number of home builders in the province of Ontario and, really, in the country.
The joke goes that infrastructure projects in Ontario all seem to touch the city of Vaughan because of the many infrastructure participants there in one shape, form or another, such as names like Greenpark Group, Deco Homes, The Remington Group, Empire Communities, Sorbara Group, Gold Park Homes, TACC Construction, Cortel Group, CountryWide Homes, Canvas Developments, Fernbrook Homes, Royal Pine Homes, Arista Homes and Caliber Homes. Those are from just doing a quick search, and I probably missed about another 10 names.
These are all home builders who are based in the York region in the city of Vaughan. They are entrepreneurs. They came to this country as newcomers. They worked hard and toiled, and they build. They build the communities that we live in. They sacrificed. They employ, directly, tens of thousands of Canadians and, indirectly, many, many more.
Their goal is simple, which is to ensure that Canadians have a home, to create memories for them and their families. We need to build. That is what we will be doing, and that is what these individuals and these firms do. We will work with them and we will work with the municipalities to ensure that we increase the supply of new home construction across Canada and more than double housing construction over the next 10 years.
On my last topic, I am a strong believer in our free market economic system and in competition. Competition leads to innovation and, yes, disruption as well, but competition in our free market and our capitalist system has brought with it the highest standards of living and pulled literally billions of individuals across the globe out of poverty.
However, competition can be eroded. When anti-competitive practices take hold, and with that, I have long advocated for changes and the strengthening of Canada's Competition Act to ensure that business practices do not hold back innovation and competition, it can be detrimental to the interests of consumers and employees. We must hold back on that.
With that, I am pleased to see, in Bill C-19 significant amendments to the Competition Act, which I know are highly technical, but they are very important. They include a proposed criminal offence for so-called wage-fixing and no-poaching agreements between competitors; an explicit prohibition against drip pricing; private access to Canada's Competition Tribunal for abuse of dominance claims; an increase in administrative monetary penalties; an expansion of the scope of the competition bureau's evidence-gathering powers pertaining to section 7; an expansion of the list of factors that may be considered when assessing the prevention and lessening of competition for merger review and non-criminal competitor collaborations; and the amendment of the definition of anti-competitive act for abuse of dominance.
Competition is the essence of our free market and capitalist system. It is wonderful to see the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister, along with the Minister of Innovation and their teams, collaborating and working in unison to ensure that anti-competitor practices are both disallowed and that the Competition Act be modernized, which we will need to continue to work on fo the penalties to be updated.
There is nothing more important to someone like me than to see healthy competition that leads to innovation, job creation and a growing and strong middle class, and there is nothing that makes me angrier and makes me speak out more than when I see anti-competitive practices take hold in any markets.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the hon. member's intervention today and his attendance at the occasional finance meeting, where we can discuss housing inflation, among other things.
He mentions, specifically, the so-called foreign buyers ban in Bill C-19. The minister has to, first of all, identify a particular property that falls outside the many loopholes and exemptions the government has given for all sorts of people, but if they legitimately find it, the minister has to go through a provincial court process, which can take years, and the ultimate slap on the wrist is $10,000.
Does the hon. member think that taking up court time and years of process to have someone who has violated the law of this country be fined $10,000 is sufficient? Does he think it should be much higher than that?
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