44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 19, 2022 10:00AM
- May/19/22 2:28:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, last month, inflation hit a 31-year high at 6.8%. Meanwhile, wages increased by an average of just 3.3%. I doubt anyone needs a diagram to understand the resulting decrease in purchasing power.
The worst part is that while the big chains are making hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, everyone's grocery bills are going up by 9%. More and more families are turning to food banks.
When will the Liberals tax the excessive profits of big grocery stores and oil companies?
When will they double the GST tax credit?
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- May/19/22 4:06:37 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to talk about this government's inability to deliver basic services. The immigration department has been a disaster for years. There are incredibly long, intolerable delays. We recently saw that the government is unable to issue employment insurance cheques, making people wait three or four months.
Anyone who wants to travel abroad must first have a passport. However, getting one right now takes forever. People are really worried about next year's vacation. Passports have predictable, set expiry dates. How is it that this government is unable to predict that more resources are needed to produce more passports?
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Madam Speaker, I wish I could say that it is a pleasure to rise in the House to speak to this bill, but, quite frankly, I have been in this place for a few years now, and rarely have I seen such a hare-brained, preposterous bill as the one presented to us by the former leader of the Conservative Party.
Worst of all, this bill was introduced by someone who ran to be prime minister, but who is now sinking into a kind of crass partisan populism. I actually get the impression that this is a scheme to promote the member for Carleton in the current Conservative leadership race.
Let us turn to serious business. The bill focuses on the role of the Office of the Auditor General, one of the essential tools for our democratic quality of life, government accountability, and the proper functioning of government.
As an independent body, the office is able to go in, check the facts and see what really happened in a particular department, with a project, military or other equipment purchase, or government contract. It is able to see whether the rules and amounts were followed and whether taxpayer dollars were spent in a proper, reasonable and rational manner.
The office does extraordinary work. As an opposition member, I can say that we have often used the studies, reports and investigations of the Office of the Auditor General to ask questions of the government. It would have been difficult to get these data and studies otherwise.
The various commissioners, including the Commissioner of the Environment and the Commissioner of Official Languages, also do work that is essential to the proper functioning of Parliament and our democracy in general.
Unfortunately, under the government of Stephen Harper and the Conservatives, the Office of the Auditor General's budget was cut. They wanted to clip the Auditor General's wings because he was saying things that were unpleasant for the government. He was the one who reminded us that the government had not done exactly this or that, that it had misspent money, that it had not complied with the rules, and so on. The message they wanted to send was that he was not going to have the resources to do his job.
Not only did the Conservatives make cuts to the human and financial resources of the Office of the Auditor General, but now they are introducing a bill giving the Office of the Auditor General a new mandate. The Office of the Auditor General does not have enough resources to audit the entire government, which is considerable, to turn over all the stones and ask all the right questions—
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That is very kind.
I will take the next few minutes to review the purpose of this new bill introduced by the former Conservative leader. It is essentially designed to give more work to the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, but to do what? To investigate the Bank of Canada? Why?
As my colleague before me already said, the Bank of Canada is already accountable to Parliament for its own administration, its work, its monetary policies and its decisions through House and Senate committees.
It seems that the reason behind this is to hype up the bill introduced by the member for Carleton, who is pointing the finger at Canada's central bank, accusing it of creating all our inflation woes and blaming it for the current decrease in purchasing power that Quebeckers and Canadians are unfortunately experiencing. As we said earlier, the Bank of Canada is not perfect and we have a duty to criticize it and to demand accountability.
This bill is a thinly veiled threat, an attempt by the Conservatives to intrude on and interfere with the Bank of Canada, an independent body. They are doing this for partisan and political purposes. They want to use the Office of the Auditor General for partisan purposes, in a thinly veiled threat to Canada's central bank.
This bill reeks of populism. I think it is pathetic that they are taking up hours of our time in Parliament to help give a Conservative Party leadership candidate some credibility on this issue.
Of course, from a libertarian or far-right economic perspective, the likes of which can be found in the ranks of the Conservative Party, no one blames anything on big business and the massive profits these companies are making. They think it is perfectly normal for the big oil companies and big grocery chains to profit off the pandemic, the crisis and the supply chain issues by unreasonably increasing prices at the expense of workers, the least fortunate and families that are struggling.
The Conservatives are leaning into right-wing populism and will never explain why billionaires should exist or why companies make billions of dollars at Canadians' expense. Instead, they blame the Bank of Canada.
I do not necessarily agree with dramatically raising interest rates as a way to fight inflation. It has tragic consequences for people who, for example, are already having trouble paying their mortgages and bills. That is one way to do it, but it is really not in the best interests of the poor, workers and the middle class. I will come back to that later if I have time.
They want to discredit Canada's central bank in order to give more credit to cryptocurrencies. I do not know whether anyone has been following what has been happening lately with the collapse of cryptocurrencies. They are not governed or controlled by anyone, and no one is accountable to anyone else.
Of course, cryptocurrencies are an unbridled capitalist's dream. I am not sure that this is the kind of society that we want to live in. I am not sure that we should be telling people to trust this virtual currency and that this is how the country's currency is going to be run from now on, because some shadowy forces are controlling the evil Bank of Canada and that this is not in everyone's best interests.
This is really a bill that is being used for partisan purposes, for the leadership race that is going on right now.
If we want to point the finger at those largely responsible for the current price increases, then we must not be afraid to look at the facts and see who exactly is lining their pockets right now at the expense of the average citizen.
The Association des distributeurs d'énergie du Québec recently published a chart to make comparisons between the number of cents in the price at the pump between 2008 and 2022, that is attributable to different factors. In 2008, the price of oil was 84¢, while it is at 91¢ this month, May 2022.
That is not a huge increase. Pollution pricing rose from 1¢ to 9¢. Taxes have gone up, but not that much, just from 45¢ to 60¢. The refining margin, in contrast, has gone up from 9¢ to 48¢. That is the biggest contributor to rising pump prices over the last 15 years, and it is profit for big corporations like Suncor and Imperial Oil, which made billions in profits in the first quarter of this year.
We have to be able to tell people the truth. We have to be able to tell them that there are solutions other than raising interest rates. The NDP has solutions to help people get through this crisis. Increase the GST tax credit, which helps hundreds of thousands of people in Quebec and across Canada, and increase the Canada child benefit, which is a good way to redistribute wealth.
We need to be able to tax these companies that are making billions of dollars in profits so that we can redistribute that money to the people who really need it, people who are suffering right now and struggling to pay their rent and buy groceries.
There are other solutions. I would point out that, in this morning's edition of Le Devoir, a dozen economists went over different ways we could be helping people, including regulating Airbnb rentals, lowering the cost of public transit, building massive numbers of social housing units and bringing in rent control. Not all of these measures would come from the federal government, but there are some excellent ideas and solutions.
What is currently before us is not only unnecessary, but also dangerous for our democratic institutions.
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Madam Chair, I am so happy to see so many people rushing into the House to listen to my speech.
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