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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 108

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 5, 2022 02:00PM
Context: House Hansard - 108 - Oct/5/22
Hon. Andrew Scheer (Regina—Qu'Appelle, CPC)
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Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to pay tribute to a long-standing member of the Speaker's team who has decided to take a well-deserved retirement from this institution. Becoming a bit of an institution herself, Heather Bradley has served five speakers as director of communications. We, and I, have benefited from her wisdom and expertise. MPs are elected as members of a political party and sit as a caucus. As such, each member has a tremendous amount of support when it comes to communications, but speakers leave those teams and can no longer count on that network, so the need to have an effective communications director is all the more important. Heather was an absolute joy to work with. Her extensive knowledge of the precinct, members and historical precedence was invaluable. Her ability to interact with journalists, and the trust she had built with all parties over the years, was essential in assisting the Speaker as part of a non-partisan office in the backdrop of a highly partisan environment. I could always count on her for excellent advice, from issues of the board to the modernization of disclosure. She was there for Parliament's big move out of Centre Block, and, of course, the tragic shooting that occurred there. She was always calm, thoughtful and rational, and had an impeccable track record of honesty and transparency. I would like to thank Heather for her many years of service to Parliament, supporting speakers dating back to 1994. I also would like to thank her husband, Mike, and her boys, Nick, Jake and Sam, for lending her to us. We are all the better for it. I wish her all the best in her retirement. Some hon. members: Hear, hear!
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Context: House Hansard - 108 - Oct/5/22
Hon. Andrew Scheer (Regina—Qu'Appelle, CPC)
Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his support of this bill, and I would like to just quickly address some of the fallacies that came out of the government party in listening to the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader. I cannot remember which Winnipeg riding the hon. member is from. Mr. Kevin Lamoureux: Winnipeg North. Hon. Andrew Scheer: Yes, Mr. Speaker, it is Winnipeg North. It has been a tough year for Regina-Winnipeg relations from a Saskatchewan point of view, given the Blue Bombers and Roughriders, but thankfully we will talk about something that should unite us all here: accountability. Accountability should be the one thing that all members of Parliament embrace. I can never understand it, but only a Liberal would think that increased accountability somehow undermines confidence in an institution, even when showing Canadians more of what goes on behind closed doors and when showing Canadians more about why the bank took certain decisions, why it acted when it did and, most importantly, why it did not act when it did not. Only a Liberal would think that this somehow undermines the confidence in an institution. This is not surprising, because that is how we have seen the Prime Minister act with everything from access to information requests to redactions to refusals, even taking the Speaker of the House of Commons to court to cover up the scandal at the Winnipeg lab. However, we are not talking about that scandal today. We are talking about the economic vandalism that has gone on since March 2020, ever since the Bank of Canada decided to create money right out of thin air to purchase government bonds, depositing that brand new money, not backed up by any growth or increase in production, into the bank accounts of the large financial institutions. The bank bought IOUs from the government, bought them from those large financial institutions and flooded those institutions with large amounts of currency through digital assets and digital currency. Of course, they increased the money supply in other ways, including by printing cash and running the printing presses. My hon. colleague pointed out fallacy number one: Accountability undermines confidence. We all know that to be false. Accountability strengthens confidence in institutions. Audits are already being done. As my hon. colleague pointed out, audits are being done but they are a different kind of audit than what this bill calls for. I wish the hon. member for Winnipeg North had taken the time to read that part of the legislation. This is not just about bringing in auditors like KPMG. It is about bringing in the Auditor General, who does performance audits and value-for-money audits. While we are talking about value for money, did members know that the Bank of Canada, during the Prime Minister's tenure, for the first time in Canadian history is losing money. That is right. The state bank, the institution that has a monopoly on creating money in Canada, is losing money. That happened because when it bought government IOUs, when it bought those bonds, it did so at a time when interest rates were low. It put the new money as credits into the bank accounts of large financial institutions, and it has to pay interest on that. Now that it is raising interest rates, it is losing money on the money it received from the government because it has to pay even more to those large banks. Can members imagine that TD Bank, Royal Bank and other large financial institutions that have these credits from the Bank of Canada are getting paid more from the bank than the bank is receiving in interest payments from the government? All that money just washes through the system, and the people who get the money first are the big winners. They can go out and buy a large number of assets, and when prices rise, they can sell them and make the difference on the spread. My colleague, the hon. member for Winnipeg North, said that for the first time in Canadian history people are raising questions about the bank. This is not true. His former boss and former leader, Jean Chrétien, campaigned on firing the Bank of Canada governor in the 1993 election. This is the point I want to make today. Institutions are only as good as the human beings who run them, and human beings are not perfect. We are all capable of making mistakes. We have someone who has so much power in this country, with the ability to affect the value of the money that Canadians have worked so hard to earn, and when they make such monumental mistakes, they have to be held accountable. This is not about punishing someone for a mistake. This is about replacing the Bank of Canada governor with someone who knows how to keep inflation low. That brings me to my final point. My colleague from Winnipeg North said that there has been no failure at the Bank of Canada. He should tell that to the hard-working families that are using food banks for the first time because inflation has gone up so high. He should tell that to students who are living in homeless shelters because they cannot afford to make rent. If that is not a failure in managing our monetary system in Canada, I do not know what it would take for a Liberal to think it is time to take action.
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