44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 18, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I have asked a question a couple of times today, and I still have not gotten a satisfactory answer, so my question for the member who was just on his feet is this: Has he consulted with the B.C. health minister? The health minister would not answer this question, but has anyone in his party talked to any provincial health minister in the country who has said that this $10-billion program is at the top of their wish list? We all know health is provincial jurisdiction. I would like an answer from someone on that side about whether they consulted with the provincial health ministers about this program before they brought it to the floor of the House of Commons.
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Madam Speaker, one of the things that I think health ministers across the country would say is that the government has done a tremendous job of consulting with them on a variety of health care matters, and has done far less damage, I would argue, to the health care system than the previous government did when it chose to gut transfer payments to the provinces for health care.
One of the most important things about the bill is that it helps the provinces support many of the plans they have, and where provinces do not have coverage for kids, it is something they could actually benefit from. Frankly, the benefit to provincial health care systems from kids with good oral health is not just a today thing. It is an outcome that delivers value today and in the future.
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Madam Speaker, I just heard the question from the hon. member for Regina—Lewvan about whether dental care was a priority for provincial governments, so I guess my question for the member for Vancouver Granville is whether he has found the same thing that I found in my riding: that dental care is definitely a priority for seniors and definitely a priority for families, and that any money we spend on this program, despite those partial provincial programs that do exist, would save provincial governments money. For those people who are asking for dental care, we are beginning with families with kids under 12 and then are extending it to people with disabilities, and eventually seniors and everybody who earns less than $90,000. That is where the demand is coming from. It is from constituents in my riding.
I want to know if the member for Vancouver Granville shares that experience.
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Madam Speaker, the member's reflections on what he is hearing in his riding are exactly what I am hearing in mine.
I have families that are struggling. I have seniors and young families that would benefit from the support. I also have a large number of people who work in health care, particularly doctors and nurses. They have all said that dental care would improve the long-term health care indicators of Canadians, and would reduce the burden on the health care system long term.
These are investments that help provincial health care systems save money in the long term. We can make all the decisions we want for the short term, but they provide long-term benefits for a sustainable health care system for the future. That is what we need to be doing together.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech. I also heard the question from my other colleague.
As I already said today, this bill was announced on the same day that seniors' groups were addressing Government of Quebec health care officials, demanding assistance with dental care. We know that children aged 10 and under are already covered in Quebec.
When the Government of Canada announced this bill, the seniors' groups said that it was not the right place. They wanted to speak to the Government of Quebec, which is responsible for dental care.
What seniors in my riding want is for the federal government to increase health transfers to cover 35% of costs so that Quebec's department of health can take care of them and make decisions about dental care.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her comments and her question.
We need to pay attention to our seniors. We will work together to improve oral health for all Canadians, particularly youth and seniors.
If we continue to work together, and if, as I hope, all members of the House of Commons here today support the bill, we will also be able to work on other elements.
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Madam Speaker, let me begin by saying that I will be splitting my time with the member for Peace River—Westlock.
This motion and the underlying Bill C-31 are effectively an admission of failure by the Liberal government when it comes to the economy and fighting inflation. To be very clear, Bill C-31 is setting up a national dental care program focused on children; it also provides for 500 dollars' worth of rent relief, which does not go very far nowadays in most of our cities. That is what this does.
I want to focus on the term “relief”. Why is relief even required in the first place? Something went wrong in the economy, so that the government decided, “Listen, we are going to have to borrow more money and send out cheques, because Canadians are suffering and falling behind.”
Why are they falling behind? There is a very clear reason. Inflation is rampant. The government did not get hold of the problem of inflation in a timely way.
I will be the first to recognize that there are different things that have affected the inflationary pressures within Canada. We know the global community has suffered from a COVID pandemic, which has disrupted everything in our lives. Our lives have been changed, actually, forever by the COVID pandemic. A pandemic had not been experienced for over 100 years, and suddenly it was at our doorstep.
Sure, that contributes to inflationary factors. Supply chain disruptions that occurred, the war in Ukraine and weather-related challenges, whether they are drought and famine, storms and hurricanes, or heat domes in British Columbia, all contribute to inflation.
However, there is one big factor that is very clearly in the control of the Liberal government, and that is its spending and its borrowing.
Here is a factoid that a lot of Canadians are not aware of. Are members aware that over the last seven short years, the Liberal government has spent more money than all previous governments in Canadian history combined? That's going back from 1867 all the way to 2015. The Liberal government, in the subsequent seven years, has spent more money than all of those governments combined. Now we know there is a problem.
Some of that money was required to support Canadians in their time of need during the COVID pandemic. That was a crisis that required a government response, but much of that spending was not actually COVID-related. We know that because the Parliamentary Budget Officer said so.
The spending this government did has now accumulated a national debt somewhere in the order of $1.5 trillion. If the spending that has brought us to that point, much of which was not COVID-related, was effectively money that was pumped into the economy, then more dollars are chasing the same number of goods and services, and that drives inflation. Every credible economist will tell us that. If a nation's productivity is not improving, which in Canada it is not, but it is pumping more liquidity into the marketplace, that is going to drive inflation.
I challenge the government to show me the steps it has taken to discipline and to restrain spending, and the borrowing that was required to sustain that spending, much of which was not COVID-related.
That is the first challenge I throw out to my Liberal friends. I ask them to explain to me where the plan is to control spending, that reckless spending that has taken place. Also, by the way, where is the plan to return to balanced budgets? Where is the plan to start repaying that massive debt that we have accumulated over the last few Liberal years? I ask them to explain to me how they justify to future generations of Canadians this massive debt, in an environment of increasing taxes and increasing interest rates, that their children and grandchildren are going to have to repay. I cannot defend that to my children. I cannot.
What is even worse is that much of this COVID spending, the amount that was invested in relief and support programs, came through programs like CERB. They were poorly designed, so yes, fraud took place, much more fraud than should have taken place. The programs were designed in such a way that people who did not need the support got the support. I can speak from personal experience. I have had constituents come into my office to tell me they applied for some of the benefits, such as that loan program of $60,000 that they did not actually need, and that now they have to pay only $40,000 back, because $20,000 is forgiven. They asked why they would not apply for it if they qualified.
Why did Canadian businesses and individuals who actually did not need them receive benefits during the COVID pandemic? During the COVID pandemic, because people had to stay at home, some businesses catered specifically to that kind of situation and made a ton of money. They had never made profits like that before, yet they applied for these benefits and received them from the Liberal government. That is a failure.
Then there is a question that has to be asked about a government that cannot fix its passport system, a government that cannot deliver passports on time, a government that botches the ArriveCAN app and pays $54 million for that app when the private sector says it should not have cost more than $1.5 million or $2 million, and a government that came up with the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank and the CERB program. I could go on and on about these programs that were absolute failures and that the government could not deliver in an efficient and accountable manner. How is it that the government now expects to roll out a $10-billion national dental care program? Nobody in this country trusts the government to manage that, to do it in a coherent and accountable way.
Bill C-31 is effectively a band-aid solution to an underlying problem that is much more significant, which is a failure of the Liberal government to address the underlying causes of inflation. Effectively, Bill C-31 camouflages the real problem, which is incompetence on the part of the government on the economic file, its inability to understand that it needs to control its wild borrowing and spending because that is what is driving inflation, at least in part.
I will be fair, as I said at the beginning. Some of the influences on inflation are not within Canada's control, but a very significant component is, which is its spending. My challenge to the Liberal government is to get its borrowing and spending under control. Then it might gain some credibility with Canadians when it rolls out these expensive programs, multi-billion dollar programs that are going to saddle future generations with permanent obligations. It should not do that to future generations. Canadians expect better.
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Mr. Speaker, the member opposite's speech was very entertaining, but Bill C-31 is a measure that is based in positive health outcomes for Canadians. Even when universal health care was first being discussed in this country, there were people like this member who did not want to see Canadians have positive health outcomes and benefits.
Fast-forward to today, and I do not think there is anything we are more proud of as Canadians than our ability to provide everyone in this country with health care if one is Canadian or a permanent resident. We have had challenges with health care, but I do not think the solution anyone would propose on any side of the House would be to do away with our universal health care system. It would be to invest more to make sure we have the doctors needed. Dental is a part of that type of system.
I have heard from many small business owners who have said that they would not have survived if it were not for the benefits this government provided, which the members opposite supported, for the economy and those businesses to survive. Does the member not have any businesses in his riding that benefited positively from the benefits that were provided?
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Mr. Speaker, the answer to that is that there absolutely were many businesses in my riding that benefited from the government's support programs. My focus was on the design of those programs, where there were also many businesses that did not need that support and some businesses that actually abused the programs because of their poor design.
The suggestion that somehow we as Conservatives do not want positive health outcomes is beneath a member of the House. We are all members of Parliament who represent our communities. The member suggests we somehow do not support positive health outcomes for Canadians. We have done this regularly to support Canadians in their time of need.
On the suggestion that the universality of our health care is somehow at stake, and we are challenging the universality of our health care system, show me evidence that we are doing that. Show me evidence. You have none.
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- Oct/18/22 7:31:30 p.m.
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I would like to remind hon. members, and I realize it is late and we are tired, to speak through the Chair and not directly to each other, unless of course they want the Speaker's opinion. However, nobody wants to hear that. They want to hear each other's opinions.
We will continue with questions and comments. The hon. member for Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a comment through you. I know that the parties are usually in caucus on Wednesday morning, tomorrow. I have a bit of a special request for the Conservative Party. Since we are talking about economic issues, for the mental health and well-being of the rest of the House, I would ask that the Conservatives stop saying “triple, triple, triple the tax”. It may have been funny the first 350 times, but now it is just “annoying, annoying, annoying”.
That said, I have a question for my colleague. Our colleague made a comment a few months ago suggesting that some of the ideas proposed by his future leader, particularly related to Bitcoin or firing the top executives at the central bank, were absurd, to say the least. We know that the fight against inflation is important to him.
What does he think of his leader's suggestions now?
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Mr. Speaker, what our leader, the Leader of the Opposition, has been speaking about is inflation. He has been speaking about taxes. He has been speaking about the cost of living and affordability of housing, all of the things that matter to Canadians. That is what he has been speaking to in the House, and I have been here for every single meeting.
The biggest challenge facing Canada today is the affordability crisis, where Canadians are having to make the choice between groceries and putting fuel in their cars or between sending their kids to ballet lessons and paying for rent. Those are decisions we should never have to foist on Canadians, yet it is the Liberal government's irresponsible approach to borrowing and spending that has brought us to this point. As I mentioned earlier, we can do better.
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Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to join the debate on Bill C-31. I have a few comments to put on the record.
Throughout the debate today, I asked some questions of some of my Liberal colleagues, and they have not really come up with an answer, so I am going delve a bit deeper into the question on the consultations that were done with the provincial health ministers before this piece of legislation was brought to the floor of the House of Commons.
I also heard a comment from the Liberal member for Vancouver Granville about how the government has done some of the best consultations with health ministers ever of any government, which from my standpoint, is a bit of a stretch.
Before I had the honour of being a member of Parliament, I was also a member of the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan. I still have some friends and good colleagues there, one of whom happens to be the current health minister, Minister Paul Merriman, of Saskatchewan. During the debate today, I took the time to send Minister Merriman a text asking him how much consultation had been done with provincial health ministers regarding the dental program we are discussing on the floor of the House of Commons today. He stated that they have had zero discussions at his level with the feds and there was nothing with his officials that he know of either. It has not been on the agenda at any FPT meetings.
Therefore, when some of my colleagues and hon. friends from the other side of the House talk about consultations, I would like them to make sure that what they are saying is factual and that they have had the proper consultations, because I think that is an important part of this bill and something that should have been done before we talked about a $10-billion program. This is not a one-time program, but an ongoing operational program worth $10 billion a year from here on out.
As we know, with inflation running rampant right now, one of the big things we hear from non-partisan economists is that the Canadian government has to get spending under control. We are sitting here discussing a $10-billion program, when this should be a discussion with the provinces because health care is a provincial jurisdiction.
We know that we send transfer payments to the provinces, but when I asked what the priorities for health care were, a member of the NDP talked about it as being one of the priorities. I asked what the top priorities in health care would be for provinces, and he also tried to put different words in my mouth. What I had asked was this: If there were a wish list for health ministers across this country, would a federal dental program be at the top of that wish list if the government was going to spend $10 billion? With a $10-billion price tag, is a dental program what they would have asked for? I asked this question because 70% of Canadians have dental coverage.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order, which is more of a courtesy. The ParlVu shot for the member for Regina—Lewvan was being impeded by the gentleman, our colleague, who was standing beside you. I just wanted to make sure that it was brought to your attention so the member's clip was not impacted as a result.
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- Oct/18/22 7:37:54 p.m.
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I want to thank the hon. member for pointing that out. I will let the hon. member for Regina—Lewvan continue, and we will try not to impede him. I am sure everybody wants to see him while we hear him.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Kings—Hants. I appreciate it. I do have a better side, so hopefully that is caught with the camera angle this time.
I was saying that 70% of Canadians do have dental coverage. There are two jurisdictions in the country that do not have it right now for low-income people, and they are Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. These are instances where I would ask if the consultations were done. I want to put that on the record because I think it is very important.
When we are talking about programs, one of the things that could have been on the table, if the proper consultation had been done, could have been to help top up the provincial programs instead of recreating a federal program. If there were consultations with provincial ministers, that could have part of the discussions on the table, and the price tag of this program could have been substantially less if that consultation would have been done because it could have helped with the provincial programs.
Another thing that could have been talked about is what the provincial programs would look like going forward and where they needed the most help. From my point of view, $10 billion is still a lot of money.
In Saskatchewan, some of the struggles we are having in health care are in the recruitment and retention of doctors and nurses. They are a very important part of our health care. One of the things our provincial government is focused on is recruiting 1,000 more health care workers because that is where they see a need. That is where consultations become a very important part of the discussion about this program.
Another thing I find interesting, and the hon. member for Abbotsford brought this up, is that we are talking about a government that had trouble running a $54-million ArriveCAN app and it now wants to try and run a $10-billion dental program. We are talking about a government that had a tough time running passport offices. We are talking about a government that had a difficult time trying to make sure that the proper funding was going out during COVID-19 with the CERB and CEBA cheques.
I realize why they want this federal program rolled out. We have a Prime Minister who has a perpetual white knight syndrome. He always has to come in and be the hero of the story. There could be other options out there with provincial colleagues trying to make sure that we bring forward a program that our provinces and federal government agreed on together, but that would mean that our Prime Minister would not be able to take all the credit.
Sometimes it is not about doing the right thing, but it is about being recognized as a hero and that is one of the problems our Prime Minister has. He always wants to play the hero. Halloween is coming up. We saw him dress up as Superman. It is something that strikes a chord. I do not think that was an outfit. I think that was a career choice.
One of the problems is I believe that if there is too much consultation with our provincial colleagues and we just had the money go into a more provincially dominated program, the feds would not get the credit. I hope that is not the case because we should all be here to do the right thing for the people of our country and the citizens who need help the most.
I want to talk about something my colleague from Abbotsford said. He is a very wise and experienced colleague. Everyone in the House, I believe, wants to have better health care outcomes. I do not think there is a person in the chamber who does not want to make sure that Canadians are getting the health care they deserve. We are having this conversation, and kids, the most vulnerable, are getting all of proper health care they deserve, which will help them have healthier lives. They will, therefore, be better off in the future.
Right now, we are discussing if we are doing the proper consultations. I think that is an important question we need answered by the federal government, the health minister and people speaking tonight. If this were such an important program, why was this not brought up at the federal-provincial-territorial meetings? Why were the provincial health ministers not consulted?
One thing I will put on the table and let sit there for a few minutes is that when this backroom deal, this costly coalition, was signed, members on this side asked how much this deal was going to cost the Liberal government to make sure that it has the NDP support until 2025. What is the final bill for the taxpayers of Canada?
This is just a start. This is a $10-billion down payment on making sure that the Liberals are in government until 2025 with the support of the NDP. The problem I see is that there is another two years, and I do not know how much more debt is going to be compiled.
Canadians do not believe it, but this government has wracked up more debt than all other governments in Canadian history. I do not know how much more it is going to cost to keep this Liberal government in power until 2025. This is only the tip of the iceberg in making sure that the costly coalition is in power until 2025. Canadians cannot afford it. One thing I understand is that the more this government spends, the more the Canadian taxpayer has to pay.
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Mr. Speaker, I was in the Northwest Territories legislature last week, and it operates on the basis of a consensus government. I really enjoyed the decorum, and so I will ask my question trying to keep in the spirit of the decorum that I saw in the Northwest Territories.
The member talked about deficits and spending. I want to remind my hon. colleague that right now the government is in a surplus position. The government is being mindful about how it brings forward spending measures. We were there for Canadians. He talked about the debt that was taken on. It was really important during the pandemic.
I also want to talk about the program specifically, because, yes, this is one initiative. We on this side of the House and indeed the NDP, and perhaps the Bloc as well, support providing dental care for those vulnerable Canadians.
On the broader question of health, does the member think that this is just a money issue? Given his experience in the legislature in Saskatchewan, is there work that provinces and territories need to do to reform their system given that, of the OECD countries, Canada is one of the highest in terms of spending per capita on health? What else can be done by provincial legislatures to make changes beyond just monetary spending?
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Mr. Speaker, I will keep with the decorum mentioned by the member for Kings—Hants. I appreciate working with him on the agriculture committee.
In the crux of my speech, the point I was trying to make is that the consultation was not had with provincial health ministers. I will give the member a direct answer. I think that the federal government could have helped top up some of the provincial programs and even help my friend from Manitoba. It should have been a provincial program through the provincial health ministers and not done through a federal minister in rolling out another $10-billion federal program. That would have been a really good start.
I would be very interested to know if my colleague from Kings—Hants could reach out to the health minister in Nova Scotia and ask if he or she had been consulted about this program, and if the $10 billion could have been used for something other than this in the province of Nova Scotia.
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Mr. Speaker, since the first half of the 1990s, provincial health care systems have been sabotaged, particularly in Quebec. They were sabotaged from the moment the transfers stopped.
Since then, while the provinces have to hire staff, doctors, nurses and orderlies, the money stays in Ottawa. Is that acceptable?
Is it acceptable that, after having sucked the lifeblood out of provincial health care systems and Quebec's health care system, Ottawa wants to use that money to create a pan-Canadian dental care system?
There is nothing wrong with helping those who need it. However, since Quebec understands social programs and is going to do a better job than Ottawa, it would probably be much more acceptable if Quebec had the right to opt out with full financial compensation.
My question is this. Is it acceptable, this vampiric system that encroaches on and invades Quebec's jurisdiction, or should Quebec simply get the hell out of this country?
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Mr. Speaker, I note my colleague's passion.
My answer would be that I think the federal government should respect provincial jurisdiction. That was the point in the argument I was making when I was talking about whether or not the federal government is respecting jurisdictions at all any more.
The federal government is getting into all of the provincial jurisdictions, whether it be health care or the environment, and it is trying to actually bully provinces into doing things its way. Do I think there should be a new federal program worth $10 billion? No. Do I think the provinces could roll out this program and better spend $10 billion when it comes to health care? Yes, and I think that is something we should all think about before we vote on the bill.
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