44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 5, 2022 02:00PM
- Oct/5/22 2:38:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in 2018, the government was made aware of a horrific allegation. It was an allegation with regard to gang rape by eight members of the Hockey Canada team. The government was made aware but chose to do nothing, absolutely nothing. Canadian tax dollars continue to flow to the organization. Zero accountability was put in place. It was swept under the rug until four years later.
Why did the government fail to act when it first came to light?
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- Oct/5/22 3:13:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canada has some of the strongest sanctions against Iran of any country in the world. We have recognized Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. We have moved forward with strong and meaningful sanctions against the leadership of the IRGC, and we will continue to do more.
Over the past 1,000 days we have stood with the families of the victims of PS752. We have worked with the international community, including the ICJ, ICAO and other places, to ensure accountability for Iran. We will not rest until this regime is held to account for its bloodthirsty, murderous actions.
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Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to rise at any point in the House of Commons. It is such an honour to be here. Today, specifically, we are talking about the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle's private member's business, which is called the Bank of Canada accountability act.
I am a little confused about this bill, to be honest. I read it through and looked at the reality and cannot quite understand why the member would pick this particular pathway to express his concerns about the country.
I think of some of the private member's bills that I have tabled. I am really focused on things like the right to housing and making sure that seniors get their guaranteed income supplement, even if they get their taxes done a little late. For me, people really matter. I know that the member would argue that this is about accountability, because it intends to have the Auditor General audit the Bank of Canada. I will get to that a little, but when I look at the role of the Auditor General, there is some significant and important work that is done in the country by that role.
The first thing that it made me think about is that, earlier this year, the Auditor General of Canada presented a report called “Processing Disability Benefits for Veterans” and I found that report to be incredibly helpful. The purpose of this report by the AG was to measure if Veterans Affairs Canada, or VAC, as it is called, is taking steps to reduce the wait times for disability benefits. If anybody has been paying attention to the House, we have heard, for numerous years, that many veterans in the country are applying for their disability benefit and they are waiting far too long. It is having a profoundly negative impact on the veteran and on the people who love them most.
If we are going to look at how how we hold departments accountable, the Auditor General does important work. This is a perfect example of it. The report said that veterans are still waiting too long for their compensation and that veterans are still waiting to get the benefits that they need just to get through everyday life.
I hear this a lot. I hear this from veterans across the country, who contact my office and let me know that they are still waiting. I also get calls from the loved ones of veterans, who are worried because the veteran that they love and hold dear is struggling profoundly because they do not have those supports.
I think that this is an important conversation for the House, because it often feels like veterans serve this country and just get nothing back. The fact that they have to wait so long takes away from that commitment and sacrifice that they made, and the value of it to this country. That is something that I hope all parliamentarians are hearing from the veterans in their riding and that they are standing up for them in this place.
What the AG found was that the median waiting time was 39 weeks. Imagine that: Someone is a veteran, they served the country, they have a disability based on that service, and they are waiting around 39 weeks for a decision to be made. Their family is waiting. The people and their loved ones who are surrounding them are caring for them and they are not able to get the supports that they need to be better, to be stronger, to take the next step in their own evolution.
The other thing that the AG pointed out is that VAC's data is so poor that it does not allow the department to realize or understand if the initiatives that they are taking are actually making an impact. That concerns me greatly and I am really glad that the Auditor General was able to put that into a report.
We need to be looking at VAC and saying that it is time for it to figure out how to gather data so that we know that, when it does something, it is actually working. At the end of the day, it is the veteran who matters. It is the people who love that veteran who matter. We want to see those application processes speed up but if we are not collecting the right information, we cannot verify if that is the truth.
Finally, the AG pointed out that the department does not have a long-term strategy in terms of staffing. I just want to say how concerning that is.
We all know, because we have heard it from our communities, from businesses and small businesses, that people are just trying to figure out how to find enough staff to do the things they need. It is getting increasingly harder to find people, because we have a population of retirees who are leaving. We do not have enough immigration, because we had a couple of years during COVID where we could not have people coming into the country. Staffing is just becoming incredibly hard.
To find out that Veterans Affairs does not have a strategy on how it is going to make sure it has enough staff to serve the people who served this country is shocking, so I thank the AG for doing this work and for this report because it tells us important things. Most importantly, it keeps that department accountable, accountable to all Canadians, Canadians who want to know that the veterans who served this country are being served well on the other side.
The bill that we are looking at today, in my opinion, is simply not useful. The Bank of Canada already undergoes two external audits simultaneously by two separate firms. By the way, the Auditor General also has the authority to audit certain aspects of the Bank of Canada's affairs under the Financial Administration Act, so there is already a component that can be looked at.
My concern is that the Auditor General is being asked to do more and more without the resources to be able to do it, without having the resources to make sure that the incredible people who work in that department are paid properly, looked after and can take on this level of accountability. We know, funnily enough, that the Conservatives cut funding to the Auditor General, so I find it interesting that when they were in government they cut the funding, but when they are over here on the opposition side they are asking the Auditor General to do more work without any more resources.
I appreciate accountability. I will always fight for more accountability and transparency, but this bill does not promise that. It also asks an already overworked department to do things it does not have the capacity to do and that do not make any sense. Hopefully, we will see something that comes forward soon from this member that actually thinks about the needs of the people in this country.
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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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