44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 6, 2022 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, budget 2022 does three main things. It invests in economic growth and innovation. It invests in people, and it invests in the green economy. All three of these things are about creating jobs and building the economy, but they will also help make life more affordable.
Bill C-19 is so critical to making sure the government is able to implement our budget. Some of the things in the budget implementation act include a two-year ban on foreign investments in Canadian housing; $2 billion for provinces to boost their health care investments for Canadians to get rid of the backlog in surgeries and procedures; a labour mobility deduction for tradespeople, which is something people in my own riding of Edmonton Centre asked for; a luxury tax on new luxury cars, planes and boats; and a reduction by half to the corporate and small business tax rates for businesses to manufacture zero-emission vehicles.
The Conservatives proposed an amendment at second reading that would not even allow the BIA to be scrutinized. They are playing games; we are moving forward.
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Madam Speaker, I rise today on a serious and sober note. I am here to ring the alarm bells. Our future prosperity is at risk. I am expressing this concern not out of some sense of blind partisanship but rather out of a sense of duty to my country, which I love, but which I also fear for.
As has been said by the Prime Minister, the finance minister, the associate finance minister, many members across the aisle and experts across our country, one of the keys to our national prosperity is economic growth.
Economic growth allows parents to pay for their children's education. It allows teenagers to get their first job and buy their first car. It allows single mothers the opportunity to not have three or four jobs but one. It allows workers the opportunity at a promotion. It allows young people to buy a house for the first time. It allows employers to create jobs. It allows hard-working families to pay off their ever-mounting credit card bills.
In short, many of the conditions for the pursuit of happiness are preceded by economic growth. Economic growth gives Canadians hope. In contrast, the economy we are currently experiencing, which may very well go to a seventies-style stagflation, is of lower wages and fewer economic opportunities for families and individuals. It creates mental health issues across our country as people struggle with the financial consequences of declining economic growth. It sows the seeds of division in our society, so instead of uniting, we are dividing, as we have seen from our Prime Minister.
For all of these and many other reasons, it is indisputable that economic growth is absolutely critical to Canada's future. However, I am ringing those proverbial alarm bells because Canada is poised for slow, if not zero, economic growth for many months or even years to come.
Sadly, the reasons are starting to become structural within our economy. One of the key drivers is a struggle to be competitive and a leader in economic productivity. Canada is falling behind the rest of the world. We are increasingly less productive than many of our peers in the G7 and the G20.
We are also struggling with innovation. Although we have brilliant people from coast to coast to coast, we are failing to bring new innovation and products to market. We are struggling as a country to be a leading innovator in the world.
The last issue I will discuss is a little more subjective. We are facing a declining morale and an increasing mental health crisis. We are not seeing a winning attitude going forward, which all starts at the top with the federal leadership of this country.
Let us explore these areas one by one. Productivity has been an issue, unfortunately, that has dogged the Canadian economy for decades. However, the problem has become particularly acute over the last few years. One of the ways economists measure the productivity of a country is in the amount of contribution per worker per hour. Canada is among the lowest in the OECD countries. We are at $50 per hour per worker. When we contrast that to those of the United States, Switzerland and Ireland, they are all considerably above that number.
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- Jun/6/22 2:38:37 p.m.
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Scale the wall, my friend.
Mr. Speaker, without pulling up to a pump and paying for the gas himself, the Prime Minister is utterly out of touch with the struggles Canadians are faced with. With the affluent means available to him, the Prime Minister truly does not understand that struggling mothers are having to choose between nutritious food or fuelling the family vehicle to get to work.
Will the Prime Minister finally admit today that his economic policies are what is driving up the cost of fuel and food across this country?
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Madam Speaker, this is part of what I am talking about when I say we need a national economic development plan. Part of that will be more traditionally Conservative ideas, such as reducing regulation and taxation, but part of it is also more traditionally the space of the NDP, I might say, which is funding the areas of education that are in demand. Right now we have a disconnect between the education system and what the private sector needs. We need to bring that together, so I would agree.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise to talk about budget 2022, or what the Liberals are calling “A Plan to Grow Our Economy and Make Life More Affordable”. I thought I would put that audacious claim to the test against reality on the ground.
Inflation is at a generational high. House prices are out of reach for most first-time buyers. The price of gas is soaring, at $2.36 a litre in my home in the Lower Mainland. Now interest rates are creeping up, with the promise of more to come as the Bank of Canada seeks to fight inflation. This is hardly a formula for making life more affordable.
We are going to hear in a minute about what the current Minister of Finance says, but I want to draw attention to what the former minister of finance has said now that he is no longer tethered to the talking points of the Liberal Party. This is what he said about the government of which he used to be a part: “So much time and energy was spent on finding ways to redistribute Canada's wealth that there was little attention given to the importance of increasing our collective prosperity—let alone developing a disciplined way of thinking and acting on the problem.”
There we go. This is what Bill Morneau said recently to the C.D. Howe Institute. The emphasis is on wealth distribution, not on wealth creation. When we talk about dividing the pie, we are not talking about growing the pie. That thinking has led to reduced economic productivity numbers.
Let us compare ourselves with our biggest trading partner, the United States. There, the average worker earns $67,000 a year. In Canada it is only $50,000, a 25% lower productivity number. The average American worker pumps $66 per hour worked into the national GDP. In Canada, it is only $50, so again, there is a 20% reduction. This lag in productivity is Canada's Achilles heel, and I am so happy that the current Minister of Finance has acknowledged that in her budget report.
I will get to that in a minute, but first I want to talk about housing. We are all happy to hear that the government has finally acknowledged that economic fundamentals are at play, that the free market can help us find solutions and that the federal government can help by leveraging monetary policy in a way that helps private enterprise find solutions. Here is a quote from page vi of the budget report:
Over the next ten years, we will double the number of new homes we build. This must become a great national effort, and it will demand a new spirit of collaboration—provinces and territories; cities and towns; the private sector and non-profits all working together with us to build the homes that Canadians need.
This sounds very optimistic, but again I want to test this against reality on the ground.
My riding of Langley—Aldergrove has been ground zero for Canada's housing affordability crisis, but there is also a housing construction boom going on thanks to the many hard-working men and women in the housing industry who are answering the call to meet the demand for new housing. I want to highlight the work of one company and one man in particular, Mr. Shawn Bouchard, who heads Quadra Homes, one of the bigger builders in the Lower Mainland. He and his business partners stepped up to the Prime Minister's challenge for private enterprise to come up with big ideas to solve the housing affordability crisis.
This is what he and his partners have done. They have taken one of their upcoming for-profit market condo projects and want to convert it into an affordable rental housing project. They put in an application with the Township of Langley and the township agreed with them. It has contributed $27 million to the project in the form of forgone fees and charges. Now Mr. Bouchard and his partners are looking to the federal government to come to the table too, in the spirit of collaboration that the Minister of Finance likes to talk about. All they are looking for is a guaranteed long-term, low-interest mortgage commitment from CMHC through the rental construction financing initiative. However, they put in a presentation to the Minister of Housing and are being ignored.
I advocated for it. I contacted the minister's office and we are being ignored. I met with Mr. Bouchard on the weekend, and he and his partners have had to make a final investment decision. They are going back to a market condo project. So much for creative thinking; so much for collaboration. Once again, the government gets an A for announcements and an F on delivery.
I want to talk about what the minister has been saying about investing in the green transition. She said that climate change is “an existential challenge. That means it is also an economic [reality].” Well, being from the Fraser Valley, I probably know that better than any member of Parliament, with all the flooding that we had recently.
I, together with some of my colleagues, all Conservative MPs from the area, met with Mayor Braun six or eight weeks before the flooding happened. He pointed out that what was required to beef up the dike systems protecting his area would be about $1 billion. It sounds like a lot of money, but now that the flooding has happened, and nobody knew it was going to happen or how bad it would be, it is now $5 billion just to do the repairs. That is what is in the budget, but if the Minister of Emergency Preparedness had been paying attention, he would have known that for $1 billion, the problem could have been solved. Now we are just going to repair the damage that has been done, but the dikes still need to be seismically upgraded. Again, it is an A for announcement and an F on delivery. That seems to be the practice of this government.
With the couple of minutes I have left, I want to talk about what the Minister of Finance calls Canada's Achilles heel, which is our lagging productivity numbers. Now, we have heard from witnesses in committee that Canada indeed does have a highly educated workforce. We have the best research universities in the country. We have lots of potential to compete with Silicon Valley. However, here is the problem: While we are very good at technology start-up, we are not very good at technology ramping up and scaling up into productive corporations. Investment dollars follow great ideas, and great ideas follow investment dollars. That, unfortunately, is happening in the United States, in the European Union and, sadly, also in China. In an exchange I had with one of the witnesses at committee, I said, “Are you saying that a company like Huawei gives research grants to universities and then walks out the back door with the intellectual property assets?” He said, “Well, there is just one small correction: It walks out the front door with them.”
I am very encouraged that the Minister of Finance is now recognizing this as a problem. She said, “This is a well-known Canadian problem—and an insidious one. It is time for Canada to tackle it.... We will encourage small Canadian companies to get bigger. We will help Canadians and Canadian companies to develop new IP—and to turn their new ideas into new businesses and new jobs.” Notably, she does not say “in Canada for Canadians”. I am assuming that was just an oversight, but perhaps not.
I want to end on a positive note, because I am a positive kind of person. I am hopeful that, with the Minister of Finance now putting in writing her acknowledgement that Canada has a productivity problem, the government is now going to get serious about solving the problem. Then again, given the well-known emphasis on dividing the pie rather than growing it, I am not holding my breath.
I am sorry, but that is as positive as I can be about this budget.
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