44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 8, 2022 02:00PM
- Jun/8/22 6:30:35 p.m.
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The hon. member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, on reply to a comment.
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Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate the question from the hon. member from Quebec. In her question, she asked whether I support less taxes and at the same time strong services being provided by government. It reminds me of an answer I received at a business luncheon from my predecessor, the Hon. Stockwell Day, before I was elected.
He actually said at that business lunch that he was a strong proponent and that he thought Canadians felt that usually a government is either a fit or a flabby government. It does not matter about the size; what matters is the health of government, and if it is fit, it is able to supply services at a reasonable level. If it is flabby and unable to healthfully be able to respond to things, it just is not as effective.
I support, again, that kind of fit government, and I think Canadians would too. They want their passports and they also want to get value for their dollar.
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Madam Speaker, I will go back to the amendment that the Conservatives have put forward.
I will note that it is the role of the opposition to oppose, but it is not the role of the opposition to be on a relentless crusade of obstruction. Unfortunately, that is what we have seen at every step of the way with respect to this bill. I will recap that.
The Conservatives put forward amendments at second reading to not allow the BIA even to be scrutinized. Then they went on to move motions of concurrence to delay the debate at report stage. They moved multiple motions of unanimous consent, again to delay the debate on this bill. They put in 62 amendments at report stage, and some of those were to cancel the luxury tax and health care rebates. Now there is another motion to amend the bill at the final reading.
Would the member not agree that perhaps it would be in the better interest of Canadians for Conservatives to actually play a constructive role in scrutinizing this bill, as opposed to being on this relentless crusade of obstruction?
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Madam Speaker, there are two sides to every coin. We have a job to do, which is to present views and to be heard. The government also has tools, such as time allocation at report stage. The Liberals imposed time allocation almost right away, before many members, including members in their own caucus, had a chance to speak. We could talk about process here, but what I am going to talk about is the actual bill.
In this amendment, we would send back to committee elements of the changes to the Competition Act that have been proposed by the government. We did not have a lot of time to scrutinize them. Even when we had the Canadian Chamber of Commerce appear, one of Canada's most trusted industry associations, they said they had not had time and had not been able to consult. We just asked the government to stop on this issue and consult with industry before proceeding with those amendments.
While this member may want everything to go his way 100% of the time, this is a democracy and people should be heard.
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Madam Speaker, many points of my hon. colleague's speech prompted me to want to ask a question, but I was very pleased to hear his analysis of what is going on at the port of Vancouver.
In my riding in Saanich—Gulf Islands, the inefficiencies in loading bulk goods in the port of Vancouver have resulted in a real crisis of freighters basically getting free parking in the waters of the Salish Sea, all the way up as far as off of Ladysmith. They are stuck waiting there, because they have several holds and the delivery of grain and other bulk goods like coal is not efficient.
Given that the harbour authorities have been created as stand-alone agencies at arm's length from the minister, what does the Minister of Transport need to do to ensure that we get the port of Vancouver working efficiently? It hurts everyone from grain farmers in the prairies all the way through to my constituents in Saanich—Gulf Islands.
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Madam Speaker, this is where I have always said that leadership is everything. If something is not working, we would expect the minister to be there and to be immediately working with all the force that they can to identify where the gaps are and how to close them.
As my fellow member from British Columbia has said, there are externalities that are being created by the slow processing times. In my community, there are small business owners who are suddenly receiving bills from the port in large amounts that are causing them to raise their prices because they cannot afford to sell the furniture or items that they have brought in, with the shipping included, at the rate that they originally promised. This is causing inflation and it is causing aggravation.
As the member said, there are some environmental externalities that are causing negative spillovers. We should be asking the government, but unfortunately this Minister of Transport is missing in action when it comes to the port.
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Madam Speaker, I want to congratulate and thank my colleague for his speech and his very honest, but unfortunately sad, presentation of the financial reality of this government.
The big issue of the day is inflation. It has hurt every family, especially when we talk about the price of gas. We all realize and recognize that elsewhere offshore we see great countries applying positive action to reduce taxation, such as the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Australia and South Korea.
I want my colleague to talk about why the government is not doing the same as our allies.
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Madam Speaker, every economy is different, but the member is 100% right. Those G7 countries and other OECD countries are doing what they can to protect not only their consumers from the issue of high gas prices, but their economies.
If we look to Alberta, it has reduced its gas tax when it is above $90 a barrel. Trevor Tombe, a University of Calgary economist, has said that this reduces inflation in Alberta by half a percentage point. It not only helps consumers put food on the table and drive to work and helps small businesses cope; it protects the economy from rising inflation. That is what the government should be doing. It is not doing it.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak during third reading of Bill C-19, which of course is the budget implementation act. I thought I might treat it as a bit of a case study, because in the debate about our electoral system we often hear that Canada needs strong majority governments in order to have decisive decision-making and action and to not end up with a hung Parliament. This is one of the main motivations for some to oppose electoral reform, and particularly forms of proportional representation, which tend to lead to more instances of minority Parliaments and minority governments.
My view is that the process around this budget bill, without being a perfect process and without the bill being a perfect bill, was actually a decent process, so I want to talk a bit about some of the improvements that were made to the bill during the course of it and some of the ways that it suggests we can make progress on other issues in this Parliament through members of various parties working together, and not only members of the same party working together. I think this process, in fact, showed that members can be nimble in terms of whom they are working with on particular issues and still get outcomes that make sense for Canadians and that benefit a lot of Canadians. We do not need one party having 100% of the power here in Parliament in order to make substantial progress for Canadians.
The first example I would point to is related to changes to the disability tax credit. We heard a fair bit of testimony at committee on this point. A Conservative colleague of mine on the committee brought forward an amendment, and the way this happens, as I am sure members will know but folks listening at home may not, is that parties will typically submit their amendments independently. Sometimes there are pleasant surprises when we receive the package. In this case, it was an identical amendment.
I was happy to work with Conservative colleagues and my Bloc colleague on the committee to pass an amendment that would change the disability tax credit requirements. A person has to show that they spend 14 hours a week tending to their condition, as somebody with type 1 diabetes does, whether that is injecting themselves with insulin, going to the pharmacy to get insulin, monitoring their blood sugar or doing other things that folks living with type 1 diabetes have to do. Then they often have to prove this every year, despite the fact that type 1 diabetes is not a condition that simply goes away and despite the fact that the requirements of the condition do not simply go away. Nevertheless, people have had to constantly show they have it, again and again.
This is reminiscent of some of the stories we have heard over the years out of Veterans Affairs Canada about veteran amputees who have to demonstrate every so often that, in fact, their leg is still missing and they are still an amputee and continue to require the same help. Folks with type 1 diabetes were having to continually show this.
We were able to bring forward an amendment, pass it at committee and even overcome some procedural wrangling, after the amendment was initially ruled out of order. We were happy to overrule the chair at committee on that point and very pleased that the Speaker saw fit to uphold the will of the committee in respect of that amendment when it came back to the House.
What that means concretely for people who are living with type 1 diabetes is that they will no longer have to do all of the paperwork, with the bother and expense that comes with it, in order to qualify for the disability tax credit. Once they have qualified as having type 1 diabetes, that will be sufficient to qualify them in the future.
I think that was a really hopeful exercise, and not just hopeful for Parliament in general, but also hopeful because we know that when it comes to Canadians living with disabilities, there has not been enough meaningful action on the part of the current government to serve that community. We saw that last June, when the government presented a bill for a Canada disability benefit that had absolutely no details about what the benefit would be, how much it would be, what the eligibility criteria would be and how it might impact other benefits that people living with a disability already receive. There was a lot more work to do, and since the new Parliament was elected in the fall, an ongoing priority of the NDP has been to call on the government to present new legislation and better legislation that would actually tell Canadians living with disabilities what the government has in mind and would provide far better ongoing income support for people living with disabilities.
Why is that important? It is because under the current federal programs and under provincial programs across the country, people living with disabilities have been consistently legislated into poverty to the extent that someone with a disability has to rely on existing disability pensions of various kinds across the country, none of which provide an income that brings them to the poverty line. This means that as soon as they have to rely on those things, people know they are going to be living a life of poverty with all of the challenges that come with that. Those are challenges of poverty over and above the challenges people living with disabilities already face.
With the great work from my colleague, the NDP disability critic in this Parliament, to press the government to bring legislation forward, we finally got wind on the Notice Paper that legislation was coming. It was an exciting moment. We had hoped to get more detail, just as we had hoped that certain changes to the disability tax credit in this legislation might have meant that finally the government would act on the long-standing call by people living with type 1 diabetes to make their lives easier and make their access to the disability tax credit available.
That was a disappointment, initially. However, by working together across party lines, we were able to remedy that, similar to the tabling of the Canada disability legislation. I almost said the “new” legislation, but I think I would have misspoken because it is pretty much the same legislation and has the same problems, therefore. It does not spell out what the program is supposed to look like. It does not let Canadians living with disabilities know what kind of financial help there is and the extent of financial support they could hope to receive from the federal government.
I would go further and say that part of the problem with legislation like this, and there are a couple, is it essentially just empowers cabinet to design a program and fund that program by statute, without having to return to Parliament. There is a procedural question, which I think may be less interesting to a lot of Canadians, but that procedural question is important to the extent that Parliament is a place that is meant to provide oversight on government spending. This bill would empower the government to create a program without having any idea what the price tag is, when it should be quite clear with Parliament on how the program is going to be designed. Parliamentarians should be able to authorize a new program like that knowing those things. That is a problem.
The other problem with setting up that program in legislation without actually legislating it is that a future government and a future cabinet that does not agree with the program or that wants to change it would not have to come back to this place. There would be no legislative process. This would also mean that the time it normally takes for a bill to go through the House of Commons and through the Senate would not be there. That is the time civil society often uses to mobilize in order to influence the content of legislation and government policy. It is an opportunity lost. It would make it very easy for a future government to undo whatever the current government does. If it finally gets around to creating a program for the Canada disability benefit, it would be far too easy for it to be undone.
Our experience at committee with the initial disappointment around the disability tax credit shows that a minority Parliament can come together and can have a positive influence on government policy and legislation. It can get things done for people that a majority government clearly would not have done because it was not in the Liberals' proposal.
I would also point to the example of employment insurance reform, something the government promised in its election campaign in 2015. We have had two elections since. The government has been in power now for coming on seven years, yet we have not seen any meaningful EI reform. We have to bracket a lot of what happened in the pandemic, because there were substantial changes to the EI program during the pandemic, but the speed with which those reforms occurred shows that it is possible to make meaningful reform quickly. Also, the nature of many of those reforms shows that what workers have been asking for in their EI program is in fact possible. This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. Most of what they have been asking for are things the government did through the EI program during the pandemic.
As the pandemic recedes somewhat, at least for the moment, certainly the Liberals are of that view when they are talking about their financial support programs, less so when they are talking about public health restrictions. As the pandemic recedes somewhat, the government is going back to its regular inaction on the employment insurance file.
The Liberals finally did try to do something important but relatively minor in the grand scheme of systemic employment insurance reform: They presented a proposal to change the EI appeal board and undo some of the damage that was done by the Harper government to the EI appeal board. They fell flat on their face. It was not well received, even by the very people the Liberals sought to please with those reforms. They were lambasted for it, and they themselves sought to remove that part of the budget bill.
New Democrats were pleased to support that removal, for two reasons. One was that we agreed that those reforms were misguided and did not represent what I would dare to call a consensus among EI stakeholders about how the system, and particularly the appeal board, has to change. However, we were glad to support the reforms on a condition, which was satisfied, which was that the minister declare publicly that they would bring legislation back in the fall in order to make better changes to the EI appeal board system that people would actually welcome. Having secured that commitment, we were happy to support the removal of those appeal board changes that were quite ill-conceived.
However, it does raise a question of trust in the government. After being in government for well over six and a half years and having not really made any major reforms to EI except those that were forced by pandemic circumstances, when they finally came out of the gate to do something, how could they get it so terribly wrong? I take some solace in the fact that we have a minority Parliament, that Canadians did not entrust the Liberals with a majority of seats here in the House of Commons, that they do not have 100% of the power in this place and that negotiation is possible, because I think it is leading to better outcomes.
There is another example that is a little outside the scope of this bill, but it is an important one when we are talking about the pandemic. Early on in this Parliament, one of the first things that the finance committee did was to deal with Bill C-2, which established the new pandemic benefit regime that has now expired. It was instituted in December and was effectively the pandemic support regime that saw us through the omicron wave, with some notable changes by order in council right after the legislation passed, because as New Democrats said at the time, the reason we voted against that legislation was that we thought it would be inadequate to the task. I want to zero in on an important change that was made to those programs, particularly the wage subsidy program that was conceived in that bill.
Working with members of the Bloc and the Conservative Party, we were able to pass an amendment that said that companies that were receiving wage subsidy money under the authority of Bill C-2 would not be allowed to pay dividends to shareholders while accepting money from the government that presumably they needed because they did not have enough revenue to stay afloat. Clearly, if they were making big dividend payments to their shareholders, they did have the money, so that was an appropriate reform. It was the kind of thing that New Democrats had called for at the inception of the wage subsidy program that the government would not agree to initially, but we finally found a way, again working across party lines. That is not always an easy thing to do, but it is always a worthwhile thing to try to do. This was again an example of Parliament being able to correct course for a government that had got off on the wrong foot.
It really matters and it serves Canadians well that we are in a Parliament that does not have a majority government. I do hope that is something Canadians will consider in the next election. I also hope that they will consider electoral reform when organizations like Fair Vote approach them to talk about it. I will remind some of my Conservative colleagues—and we have gone into it a little over the budget debate—that reform is the want of folks around here, and it is not a bad thing. Conservatives will know that they had more share of the popular vote than the Liberals, who are in power, but they got far fewer seats.
We just saw, in the Ontario election, the New Democrats get about 30 seats to the Liberals' eight, approximately, despite having roughly an equal share of the popular vote. We saw the Ford government form a majority with a very small amount of support when we consider how low turnout was and how the way we vote under the first-past-the-post system can generate very distorted electoral outcomes.
I raise all these things to contribute to the debate on this bill, but I also hope to contribute to a larger debate about how we elect Parliaments that select governments here in Canada and show that we have been doing good work in this Parliament. We have been correcting course for the government when it got it wrong on the first go, and that has been made possible by virtue of having a minority Parliament. It is exactly because we do not have a majority government that these corrections and some of the good things that came out of the committee process have been possible.
One of the things I hope we may yet make progress on, which I will be looking to colleagues in other parties for support on, is the call for a low-income CERB repayment amnesty. This is something that has come up at the finance committee. It heard compelling testimony, and there is an important moral dimension to this issue. We are talking about people whose incomes are already below the poverty line. CTV did a piece on this last week, but it is not new. It has been a running story and has had various permutations through the pandemic, with the CRA sending letters to Canadians already in very difficult financial straits even before the current round of inflation hit us. It is all the more so now that people are struggling with the cost of groceries. The cost of housing has been an issue—let us not kid ourselves—for a long time. The rate of acceleration of the problem got worse during the pandemic, but the problem was getting worse even before the pandemic.
People who applied in good faith for help and were told to apply, in some cases, by their very own Liberal MP are now getting letters saying that they have to pay the money back, that they did not qualify and were not eligible. In some cases, they are people who applied for employment insurance and would have preferred just to get EI, but were told no, they could only get CERB. Then they got the CERB cheque and figured that was what they were entitled to. They applied for EI, were told no, and got the CERB. CERB sent them the cheque; they did not ask for it, so they thought it must be okay. They spent the money because they had lost their jobs and were trying to get through a global pandemic, which I think we can all agree was not an easy thing to do no matter what people's incomes were, let alone if they had just lost their jobs, and now the government is asking them for that money back. They do not have the money, and the efforts to collect that money, particularly from people who are already below the poverty line, are not going to bear fruit.
There is the moral dimension in terms of the anxiety and the financial harm that it is causing, but there is also a very real financial dimension. We heard a bit about that at committee. The government is planning to spend around $260 million chasing after a CERB debt that is a function of how it publicized its own program and encouraged people, and in some cases forced people, into the CERB system as opposed to the employment insurance system. For the $260 million that the government is going to spend over the next three or four years chasing that debt, how much is it actually going to get back? I think it is unlikely that it is going to get back $260 million.
I would love to know. I would love to have the government tell us how much it thinks it is actually going to get back. I have asked the question. I asked it at committee and I asked in a number of different fora and I cannot get an answer. It is shocking to me that the government would decide to invest $260 million to collect a debt that it does not know the value of, let alone the likelihood of succeeding. When we talk about investing over a quarter of a billion dollars in collecting a debt, we would want to be darn sure we are actually going to get that money back. Even if it makes its money back and calls it a wash—spend $260 million and get $260 million, which I think is very unlikely—it would not be worth it. It would not be worth it because the time and expense that it is spending chasing after low-income Canadians who are already in dire straits, particularly in this context of inflation, is time and expense that it could spend chasing tax evaders who are hiding their money out of the country and using other means to not pay their fair share. It would get a better return.
There is a good financial argument for a low-income CERB repayment amnesty, and I hope that in the context of this Parliament that I have been talking about, we will find support among enough other parties to convince the government to do the right thing, which is to not chase that debt and try to wring it out of low-income Canadians but instead divert the CRA's resources to chasing the people who are really getting away with something, people who are not paying their fair share and who have the resources to pay it back.
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Madam Speaker, I want to commend and congratulate my colleague on another very interesting speech. He always has something constructive to say, both here in the House and in committee.
I am concerned about the length of the budget implementation bill currently before us. Bill C-19 is a mammoth bill that amends numerous laws and deals with many issues that have nothing to do with the budget, including, for example, enforcing the justice system in space and conducting strip searches in prisons.
What does my colleague think of the fact that the government regularly resorts to such mammoth bills that lump together so many issues? Can committees and parliamentarians study all this thoroughly?
On top of that, the paper version of the bill that was given to the opposition was some 420 pages long, while the official PDF version that was posted online was over 440 pages long. Could my colleague comment on that?
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Madam Speaker, I will start with the second question. The fact that the version of the documents tabled in the House is not the full version is obviously a problem, and it is part of a broader issue that bothers me a bit. We no longer see paper copies being tabled these days. For example, as a parliamentarian, I was unable to get a copy of the blue book of the estimates. The government and the House of Commons only work on computers now, whereas I work better with a paper copy, so I am having a tough time adapting.
As for omnibus bills, that is something that has been highly criticized, and rightly so in my opinion. If governments want to keep introducing massive bills, then I think we might need a separate process for budget bills.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for Elmwood—Transcona for a thoughtful discussion of what minority parliaments can do together.
I also lament the failure to provide the disability tax benefit, as does my colleague, the member for Kitchener Centre. We expected it. It should have been in the budget and it should have been in Bill C-19. I appreciate that we have made some progress for people with type 1 diabetes, but it is not nearly enough, nor is it fast enough.
The member will not be surprised that I will ask him to expand on his points about proportional representation. It is certainly timely, given the results from Ontario, where the election had the lowest voter turnout, as I understand it, in the history of that province. Barely 43% voted, which means that nearly 60% of Ontario voters did not vote.
I was taken with a column in Rabble newspaper by Karl Nerenberg on all the fetishizing and coverage by the media in just looking at the polling and kind of announcing that Doug Ford was going to win before the campaign started. Does the member feel that this played a role in reducing voter turnout?
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Madam Speaker, I do often worry about the extent to which the publishing of polls can affect public opinion, but it is something that is accentuated in a first-past-the-post system. If there is a proportional system of some kind, then in spite of whatever polling is saying about who is going to win the most seats, people can still feel they are contributing to electing people they agree with and who are going to speak on their behalf and raise issues that are of importance to them.
That effect is amplified by the voting system we have. Unfortunately, getting information about where people are at and the kind of attitude pundits have when they are predicting outcomes can affect voter turnout. I would hope that by moving toward some kind of proportional system we could diminish those effects, because people can still go and vote with confidence.
I was quite disheartened by the recent comments of the Prime Minister about proportional representation and some rewriting of history in what he presented to the electorate in 2015. Perhaps someone else will want to ask me a question about that and I can elaborate a little further.
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Madam Speaker, coincidentally, I was going to ask my brilliant colleague from Elmwood—Transcona about the Prime Minister's recent comments, which I was shocked to hear, frankly. I thought they were flippant and really did not do justice to the commitment he made to Canadians. It is a broken promise that really betrayed so many people in this country, especially young people.
Could the member speak to his own reaction to the Prime Minister's recent response?
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Madam Speaker, I was flabbergasted, frankly. I think that is a proper parliamentary term. I could express my feelings a few other ways, but they may not be as parliamentary.
I was surprised in two senses, first of all, at the fact that he kind of made the blanket statement, “Well, any time you have proportional representation you have bitter disagreement and polarizing” as if that is something that is not happening here in Canada. I wish it were not, but I do not think any competent follower of politics could pretend that we do not have real issues of polarization, division and excessive antagonism in Canadian politics. That is a real thing. It was an interesting kind of blind spot. Also, for a Prime Minister who has shown up at rallies where there has been that on display in ways I condemn and think are inappropriate was also a little much. It was a little much to somehow pretend that there are not countries with proportional representation that are not doing at least a good job of managing polarization within their politics.
I was also surprised that the Prime Minister would try to say he only ever advocated for a ranked ballot and that he was never really interested in proportional representation—
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- Jun/8/22 7:06:01 p.m.
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I need to allow other members an opportunity to ask questions.
The hon. member for Red Deer—Mountain View has the floor.
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Madam Speaker, these have certainly been interesting discussions.
As far as proportional representation goes, I guess a lot of people are not overly surprised with the Prime Minister being somewhat flippant about anything he thinks might cause a bit of consternation for people.
A week or so ago we heard from former minister Bill Morneau about some of the constraints and the concerns he had when he was trying to present budgets and look at competitiveness. He basically said that it is not happening here with the present government.
I am curious whether the member has some ideas on how we can move forward to encourage competitiveness here in Canada.
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- Jun/8/22 7:07:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it may not surprise the member that I may have a different take on what constitutes building a kind of competitive culture, but I do want to offer some remarks to that effect.
When companies are looking to locate, we often hear about the importance of the tax regime. Other things we know they look for is a well-trained and available workforce, and so investing in people can also increase our productivity and our competitiveness. The government should be looking at investing in training and connecting workers who currently do not have work and are not able to be hired into the kinds of jobs they want with particular jobs and with real employers who are asking for that so there is a clear pathway through their education to a job that is already waiting for them at the end.
Things like a national pharmacare plan and dental care also help attract talent. When they are provided on a universal basis, that is something companies benefit from because they do not have pay for them, but they help attract talent. That is also an important component of building a competitive environment here for Canada to attract investment.
I know that where the economy is going, and not just here in Canada but globally, has to do with reforming our energy infrastructure. Public investment can help lead the development of talent not just for workers but for companies as well, which can then be exported out of Canada to help other countries build—
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- Jun/8/22 7:08:35 p.m.
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That is all the time we have.
Resuming debate.
The hon. member for Joliette.
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Madam Speaker, we are now at third reading of this omnibus bill.
In fact, there are all kinds of statutes stuffed into Bill C-19, with topics ranging from strip searches to justice in space. That might be helpful for addressing all the mischief Brad Spitfire could get up to, but it does not belong in a budget implementation bill. This is a half-baked omnibus bill. It is no wonder it is full of problems.
To start, the paper copy we were given was missing more than 20 pages. We were working with the wrong version for far too long. That is unacceptable, and it seriously undermines the government's credibility and our trust in it.
A lot of changes were made to this bill at the Standing Committee on Finance, and I applaud the work we did. However, it is so big that there was no way the committee could do an in-depth study of the entire bill.
I will have to criticize the government's approach once again. The government promised that it would not introduce any more omnibus bills, but only the willfully naive are buying Liberal promises these days.
Regarding our study, I am sincerely grateful for the help we got from the other House of Commons standing committees: Justice and Human Rights, Citizenship and Immigration, International Trade, and Industry and Technology. Let me add an honourable mention for the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities and our superhero there, the member for Thérèse‑De Blainville.
Bill C‑19 put forward a lot of changes to the employment insurance system, including the EI board of appeal. The government did not do its job properly. It did not consider the consultations and the needs expressed by stakeholders, such as unions. It is rare for the employer and the union to agree that something like this was poorly done. The member for Thérèse‑De Blainville was very efficient at bringing all those people together with the finance committee and the human resources committee so parliamentarians could hear from them. Their message was clear. Better to strike the issue from the bill altogether rather than pass flawed measures.
We in the Bloc Québécois prepared for both eventualities. We introduced several amendments and asked that the section be deleted. In committee, I pressed the Parliamentary Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance to lobby his government to have it removed.
I tabled a motion to that effect. My colleague from Thérèse‑De Blainville got the human resources committee to adopt a unanimous motion to delete it. The Conservative and NDP members also requested the same thing. The government listened to reason. It backed down and committed to tabling something a little better in the fall.
This is what we MPs are here for. It is what the House and the parliamentary committees are here for as well. We study government bills. We review them with the people they would affect. If the bill is good, we support it. If it is bad, we reject it. We work tirelessly to improve the bills.
We know the government is tired and worn out. The pandemic took its toll on us all. The Prime Minister gave an election a shot in the fall. That tired out his government, which is still a minority. We had the blockades in the winter, followed by the war in Ukraine, which has been going on for over 100 days. That has kept everyone busy.
The Prime Minister is overwhelmed and exhausted. The Minister of Finance is playing the roles of both prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, especially with respect to the war. All the work she is doing is very honourable. The problem is that she is caught up in all these fast-moving issues, so she no longer has enough time to do her job properly as finance minister.
We saw that with her budget. We saw that with the crisis facing specialized businesses that convert trucks into ambulances, armoured vans and other specialty trucks. They are affected by the semiconductor shortage, which has shut down truck manufacturers in the United States. This input shortage is hitting our businesses hard. We cannot afford to lose these good niche jobs.
In December, the finance minister promised that the shortage was over. We supported Bill C‑8 based on her assurances. She had agreed to provide us with the statistics showing that things were getting better. We believed the Liberals' promises, but we never got the statistics, and the situation of these businesses is getting worse and worse as the weeks go by. We have been pressing the minister on this issue since January, but we have still heard nothing.
The only response we received came in her fall economic update, when she committed to subsidizing semiconductor manufacturers. However, this is a far more complex market, and she has completely missed the mark. We were unable to secure a meeting with her to discuss this subject. We were also unable to get her to come to committee to talk about inflation, even though we officially invited her in January to come testify sometime before May 31. It is now June 8, and we have still heard nothing.
We know that the Minister of Finance is very busy with the war and all of the other files she manages for the Prime Minister. The only problem is that that does not leave her any time to take care of finance. The associate ministers and parliamentary secretaries have not been delegated to follow up on this or other files. It is a serious problem that will have harmful consequences for our economy.
I have another example. In Bill C‑19, the budget implementation bill, the government presents the details of its luxury tax. It is 170 pages long. We agree in principle that people who buy luxury cars, planes or boats should pay a luxury tax. That is one way to redistribute wealth. However, the tax needs to be well constructed and the situation properly assessed.
For example, this tax will have serious repercussions on the entire economy and on jobs related to the use of personal boats. When I asked the Department of Finance to show us its impact studies for this new tax, the departmental officials told me that they had not done any studies. There is nothing. This has a real boys‑in‑short‑pants feel about it. Santa Banana could have done a better job of this.
What we have here is an ideological tax. It is all about the principle, and no one cares about how it will be implemented. In any case, the minister does not have time to waste on that.
This tax will be disastrous for the aerospace industry, which has been in a complete panic for almost a year now, not because the wealthy will no longer be able to afford to buy private jets, but because the tax will apply to companies and exports, even though it is not supposed to.
This whole thing is a big mess. The government gave the Department of Finance carte blanche, and it did not do its job properly. It did not feel like doing it, so it did a poor job. Because the Minister of Finance is busy dealing with the situation in Ukraine, the government is letting this slide. That is unacceptable. This measure is so poorly thought out that unions and employers, along with some members of the House, have banded together to warn us about how serious this situation is.
Canada is already the only country that has an aerospace industry but no industry strategy, not even for government procurement. Now the government is imposing poorly designed taxes that are harmful to the industry without even doing an impact study. That undermines Canada's credibility with the industry.
I would remind members that greater Montreal is the third-largest aerospace hub on the planet. Such a high value-added sector helps drive our economy. Anyone in the world would be very careful to preserve such a cluster—anyone, that is, but Ottawa. Is this all because the industry is in Quebec? That is unacceptable, and it reminds us of the repercussions of being under our neighbour's thumb.
Working with the unions and employers, we submitted several amendments to correct the poorly drafted tax measure. For instance, one amendment stated that the tax must not apply to exported aircraft. Another would have excluded businesses from the tax, which is how it is supposed to work. The Liberals and NDP voted against all those amendments. Yes, the NDP voted against what the unions were calling for. Why? It is because of their deal with the Liberals and their promise of unwavering support, to the point of compromising their principles.
The Conservatives voted with the unions on the luxury tax in Bill C-19, and the NDP and the Liberals voted against the unions. They were so quick to compromise their principles for a promise that benefits only the party that wanted it in the first place.
All of this will undermine our important aerospace industry and its unionized, well-paying jobs. This is all because the tax is ill-conceived and fails to meet its objective of taxing people who purchase luxury vehicles. Instead, the bill will tax airplane and helicopter manufacturers on aircraft that they export, over 90% of their output, or sell to businesses. This comes at a time when the industry is barely recovering from being hard hit by the pandemic. This is all because we have a finance minister who is no longer doing her job, since she is doing the Prime Minister's job and nothing is delegated. This is all because the government is not putting more effort into supporting and developing our economy.
In a normal democracy, a government like that would be overturned and replaced, but not in Canada. This government is supported by a party that is afraid of losing seats and is facing an opposition that is torn apart by extreme and polarizing ideologies. This is the price of following our neighbour's lead. It has little concern for our economic issues and has its own fish to fry.
With respect to the problems that the ill-conceived luxury tax will cause for the aerospace industry, I spoke numerous times with the finance minister, members of her team, her parliamentary secretary, her department and several other government members. That accomplished next to nothing. All we were able to get passed was an amendment that allows the government to delay implementation until after September at its discretion.
In addition, we had to wait until the report stage. My colleague from Saint-Jean and I introduced the amendment, as did the member for Elmwood—Transcona. This is the last glimmer of hope. If the government can take its head out of the sand and does its homework, we are offering it the opportunity to not implement the tax and to come back with a better bill in the fall. I urge the government to take us up on our offer.
The government is proposing a vast array of legislative changes in this mammoth bill. It has cut corners and done a poor job. The government is patting itself on the back for holding lots of consultations on everything. The only problem is that it is not taking the feedback into account. The Liberals' idea of democracy is letting everyone talk without listening to a word they say.
Luckily, we got the government to backtrack on its ill-conceived employment insurance amendment. We told it to go back and do its homework and listen to stakeholders. Unfortunately, we did not get the government to backtrack on its new tax that is 170 pages of poorly written text, but we did get one amendment passed that will create a window for changes in the fall. That will depend on whether the government sees fit though. I am very worried, as are the industry and union members. The government has not seen fit for quite some time now.
We managed to fix another of the government's egregious errors on another subject entirely in Bill C‑19. Australia took its dispute with Canada over an excise tax on wine to the World Trade Organization. Obviously, it was about wine made from grapes. However, because wine is not just grape wine to Ottawa, the tax applies to many other products too. In committee, we heard from cider and mead producers. The tax would have really hurt them and undermined a rapidly growing sector. We worked with them to propose an amendment that would exempt them from the tax. I think we made some important progress that will enable these passionate people to keep improving their quality products so that we can enjoy the fruits of their labour. I think we deserve congratulations.
More generally, let me say that I am very proud of every member of the Standing Committee on Finance. We spent many hours working constructively and collaboratively. From my perspective, we engaged in successful dialogue and made progress. I am sincerely grateful to every member of the committee, including its chair and the parliamentary secretary. I believe we made substantial improvements to Bill C‑19, and that is down to how well we worked together.
I also want to commend the work done by the other committees that studied parts of Bill C-19. I thank them for their insights. Lastly, I want to once again commend the hard work of my esteemed colleague and friend from Thérèse-De Blainville, who helped force the government to commit to redoing its homework on EI. I salute her for that.
Despite all my criticisms, Bill C-19 does include many good measures. Even though the government introduced a mammoth bill, even though it cut corners, even though we were not able to improve the bill as much as we would have liked, the fact remains that, when we weigh it all out, there are more pluses than minuses for the Quebec economy. That is why we decided to support the bill.
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