44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 18, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, as I outlined in my speech, there have only been 11 and a half hours of debate for a bill that will effectively cost taxpayers $10 billion. When I was debating Bill C-31 last week, I outlined some of the work from every big bank in Canada that talked about the inflationary impact of further spending right now.
If the government continues to spend money, the people who are going to be impacted the most are low-income Canadians. We need to get a handle on our spending right now to prevent further inflation and a further demise of the spending power of low-income Canadians, who are struggling the most.
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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, 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, it looks really good in the headlines and it looks really good when we get the government to tell us that we do not care about children's teeth. No, we care about a program that works. We care about the economy. We care about the next generation. When we talk about spending money right, let us talk about the $4.5 billion that has been sitting in the coffers for the last year under the government when we know we are in a mental health crisis.
Earlier today, I heard that one person each week in the city of London is dying of an overdose. That is one person a week. In 2015, I was hearing that about Vancouver, but this has gone across our country. We are talking about dental care when we should really be talking about the opioid crisis.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.
Earlier, I heard a Conservative colleague say in the House that the government needs to stop spending when she was talking about housing in relation to Bill C‑31. If the government stops spending, how will it solve the problem?
Recently, I was speaking with an economist from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation who was saying that, if nothing is done in the next 10 years in Quebec, 500,000 housing units will be built. However, to address the affordability and accessibility crisis in Quebec alone, an additional 600,000 units need to be built. This is not a problem that is going to solve itself. The government is going to have to invest in housing somewhere along the way.
What does my colleague think about that?
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Madam Speaker, one of the interesting things here is that there are many things I think the government can and needs to do, without spending money, to encourage the building of houses. I do not have a really clear grasp on that, but I would say that when it comes to the border crossing at Roxham Road, to go to an example I know a bit more about, the Liberals have always accused the Conservatives of not spending a lot on border measures. However, when we were in power, Roxham Road was not an issue because we had enforcement at the border in Canada. There are many things the government can do to encourage these things without spending money.
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Madam Speaker, people on Vancouver Island do not want to see the carbon tax triple in terms of what we are having over the course of the next little while.
What I will say about this is that we are in this cost of living crisis, in the name of that bill, because of the spending habits of the Liberals and New Democrats for the past seven and eight years and it is only going to get worse. We are in this crisis and we are in this problem because we have two parties working together that do not care about balancing a budget or our economy or managing it. They are printing new money. They are adding debt and deficit, and they are leaving it to future people to actually pay the bill. Every single dollar of this program is going on a credit card. It is driving inflation and it is driving the very problem we are facing in this House of 40-year-high inflation and no date and no timeline to ever balance the budget again. The Liberals will just leave that for people in a good strong Conservative government to finally fix when we get around to it.
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Madam Speaker, this bill is going to spend another $10 billion. The government's national debt is already over a trillion dollars. The latest update shows consumer debt is at $2.24 trillion, which is a 16% increase from the prepandemic levels with about a 10% increase year over year from the second quarter of last year.
We are talking about the cost of living relief, but I am wondering how adding another $10 billion to a program the provincial governments are not necessarily asking for is going to help. They are looking for other health care transfers and spending.
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Madam Speaker, what we are here to talk about late into the evening tonight is a huge inflationary bill. It is a bill that is adding tons of government spending, and I have some serious concerns about it.
One of the spaces where I have some real concern is over the fact that the delivery of health care is the purview and the jurisdiction of provinces. I have heard, many times over, members opposite say that the federal government has a space here because it has the power of spending. That is absolutely accurate: The federal government has the power of spending, effectively, in any space it wants, but the question is whether this is the best way to be spending this money.
My space on this is a serious question, and I have not heard answers from the government. Instead of it being the member for Kingston and the Islands getting up and trying to do a “gotcha” question, I would love to hear answers, perhaps from the Minister of Health, as to what work happened with provincial and territorial governments to see what programs they had in place, so that we looked at best practices and took the best programs that existed in provinces and territories across the country and tried to build on those, rather than create an “Ottawa knows best” scheme. This is all this is.
This is not a dental program. This is not dental insurance. Members from the NDP keep saying that we are voting against this, and that members in the House have dental care. We actually have a dental insurance program, a private insurance program, like many Canadians have. We have a dental insurance program.
This is not a dental insurance program that the government is creating. That would be a dental program. What we would actually be getting is a convoluted program that would deliver money through a CRA application based on income, which would not take into account what I think are important factors, such as how many children are in the family. If we had consulted with provinces and territories, we might have found that provinces and territories take into account some of these things, whether it is a single-parent or a dual-parent family, or how many children there are in the family, some of these pieces. It is critically important.
Dental care does not cost the same in rural Alberta as it costs in downtown Toronto or in rural Nova Scotia. Dental care varies widely even in my own community. If I call dentists, trying to figure out the costs of a dental cleaning, it could vary widely, just in my own community. I think this highlights one of the issues with this program. It puts a lot of weight without actually having the program to support and make sure the children who need this the most are getting it.
We have heard many times over through these debates that 70% of kids across the country have access to some form of dental care through provincial programs that already exist. That means 30% of children do not have access. I am curious as to whether the government did any research to see exactly what that 30% of kids looks like, and how we could support that 30% rather than just make a program that is “one size fits all”, which is the easiest to deliver but does not necessarily put the resources where they are most needed.
Frankly, Canadians are struggling right now: they are struggling to pay their bills at the end of each month; they are struggling to be able to afford to live, and while this would help in the short term, it would not cover the dental costs for a lot of kids who are struggling right now. This might cover a piece or part of the program.
Have we looked into whether provincial governments that currently have programs in place might pull their programs back because the federal government would have this program in place, therefore costing the federal government even more in the long term? This is part of the problem of not working with the provinces and territories and fixing the health transfer.
We have seen all the territorial and provincial leaders sit down and come together to say they want to see higher health transfers. What we have not seen from the Liberal government is meaningful work to get to that solution, meaningful work to build a dental plan. This is a payment scheme at best. This is not actually a dental program.
This is what happens when the members of the NDP-Liberal coalition realize that they effectively have a gun or a guillotine held to their heads so that if they do not deliver on these promises by a certain date, we will be triggered into an election. They came up with a fast solution. I would argue that we need to not be looking at fast solutions. We need to be looking at the best solutions for Canadians. I do not believe that this gets there.
The fact is that this is an omnibus bill. It brings together dental and rental benefits. It is effectively two different departments with two different ministers, the Minister of Housing and the Minister of Health, but it is going to the health committee. This is a health bill, even though it talks about a rental benefit. I am not sure how a rental benefit and housing relate to the portfolio of health, but that was how it was decided. Those are some of the decisions that must be made with an omnibus bill, like which minister takes the lead.
I find it awfully rich. When the Conservatives were in power, the members opposite used to complain about the fact that there were omnibus bills and closure motions, yet the second the government came into power, it had no problem doing the exact same thing. It was a simple thing to complain as the opposition, but it was not an ideological space that they were in where they truly were in disagreement with us. They just did not like it being used against them.
I think it is sad that we are sitting here at 11:30 at night discussing a critically important bill that is going to add $10 billion of spending at a time when we already have out-of-control inflation. We already have people who are routinely going to food banks to provide food for their children. Not having healthy food has to be a contributing factor to kids' dental health.
I can only imagine that this is a serious problem, but this is something that the government could have worked on. It could have put actual effort in to create a real program, working with provinces and territories to see which jurisdictions do it best and which ones are doing it poorly. I know in my home province of Alberta we have a dental care program that covers kids up to 18, including certain kids up to 19 as long as they are still in high school. I know that the thresholds are a little bit lower, in terms of the income thresholds, but they do have some qualifications in there for when there are multiple children or if it is a single parent. It even goes as far as adding to the income for the threshold based on how many kids over four children meet the age. I think that is an important qualifier.
I am not here to say that Alberta's program is the be-all and end-all. In fact, I do not know what all the programs look like. I know that the member for Kingston and the Islands really has a problem with the Ontario program and does not think it is sufficient.
What I would love to see would be for the health committee to be tasked with studying what the dental programs are across the provinces and territories and where we could find the optimal solution. That is something that I think has been completely missed in this omnibus bill, this bill that has been set with such strict timelines that we might not even have a real opportunity to have witnesses at committee because of how soon the government is forcing us to go to clause-by-clause.
Frankly, that concerns me. I think that Canadians expect that important pieces of legislation with this level of spending would have extremely high diligence, expertise and hear from witnesses, but not by using stalling techniques or filibustering. Legitimately, we should have more than a few hours to hear from witnesses on a bill that adds $10 billion of spending. I think that is part of the issue. The government is so quick to ram it down our throats and then say that we are stalling the bill.
The actual fact is that I would love to work with all members of the House. I do not think I am speaking out of turn by saying that most members from the Conservative side would like to work with the government, but what we see is this costly coalition continuously ramming its way through Parliament and disrespecting the fact that it is a minority Parliament.
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Madam Speaker, that is awfully rich coming from the member opposite, and if he had been here to listen to my speech, and intently listen, he would have heard that I addressed this in my remarks.
Frankly, what members of Parliament receive in terms of dental care is a dental insurance program. This is simply a spending scheme. It is not the same. Please do not misconstrue what this bill would do.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for the amazing work he does for the constituents of Calgary Rocky Ridge and all of northwest Calgary. He is one of the hardest-working members of Parliament in northwest Calgary, if not the hardest-working member.
One of the things the member highlights that is critically important is that this is just a spending scheme. This is not a program. This is simply words to check a box. This is not the solution.
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