44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 27, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, one critical issue the member has raised is affordability in housing, with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Part of the problem is with respect to the financialization of housing, where housing is being treated as a commodity instead of what it is, which is a basic human right. Would the member agree that we need to take action to address the financialization of housing and begin putting a moratorium on it?
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member for her advocacy on this issue.
I would agree that the commodification of housing in recent times has become a problem in Canada. It is resulting in housing shortages and also housing becoming increasingly less affordable. One of the important aspects we can tackle initially is real estate investment trusts, which formed part of campaign platform. That is one thing that I prioritize.
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Madam Speaker, today we are discussing Bill C-31, known colloquially as the rental and dental bill. Before discussing the substance of the legislation, it is important to give some context as to the position we are in.
The bill is largely in response to the economic conditions that were created by the Liberal government. After seven years in power, we have seen a dramatic rise in the cost of living and the pain for Canadians has risen exponentially over those past seven years.
Let us take a bit of walk in history. When the government was elected in 2015, the then candidate, now Prime Minister, said that there would be a tiny deficit, so small that one could not even see it. It appears that maybe he was a little off in that math calculation. We know that the NDP are not well renowned for their math abilities. It is perhaps not surprising where we are with the NDP-Liberal coalition. Under the previous finance minister, there was a $100 billion deficit spending before COVID even touched our land. That is $100 billion of reduced fiscal firepower that the government could have used to help Canadians. Instead, it piled on to the deficit.
Then let us go to COVID, and let us put the record straight. The Conservatives supported COVID benefit supports. People were in difficult situations so we supported many of the programs to help them through it. What the Conservatives did not support was the wasteful spending. Over $200 billion, according to the government's Parliamentary Budget Officer, were not used for COVID. Therefore, we have $100 billion and $200 billion of non-COVID-related deficit spending.
Let us look at the government's track record. It has racked up more debt than all the previous governments combined, from Sir John A. Macdonald to Brian Mulroney to Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
History, it has been said, repeats itself. In this case, we are certainly seeing that. In Pierre Elliott Trudeau's time we saw record spending, record deficits and record debt. What followed that? Inflation.
I was watching the finance committee when the Leader of the Opposition, then just the member for Carleton, talk about the fact that if we printed money, we would get inflation. The response from the Governor of the Bank of Canada was, no, that we would not have inflation. The response from the deputy prime minister and current finance minister was that inflation was not an issue; it would be deflation.
If doctor is completely off with his or her diagnosis that has consequences. If an economist is completely off in his or her predictions that has consequences. Unfortunately, for the government, it is going to very much fulfill the definition of insanity and keep doing the same things over and over again.
Let us talk a bit about the pain that inflation is causing Canadians. Food inflation is now at over 11.4%. For the members in the House, it is not fun to go to the grocery store, but for the most vulnerable in our society, it is downright devastating. When they go to the grocery store, when they look at their bank accounts on their apps or count the cash in their wallets, they realize they simply do not have enough to feed the whole family. There are literally moms out there who are watering down milk. In 2022, over 20% of Canadians went to food banks. This reached a record high in Canada in March of 2022, with 1.46 million Canadians going to the food banks. Fully one-third of the clients of food banks are children. This is a desperate situation.
Seven years in, I love how the government seems to think inflation is something that just came in, and that this affordability crisis is something that was out of its control. It has had seven years to control the economy and take the steps necessary to make life more affordable for Canadians. Instead, it has done the exact opposite. It continues to tax and spend, and tax and spend.
Conservatives definitely believe that all Canadians should pay their fair share, yet there has been no nation on this earth ever in the history of humanity that has taxed itself into prosperity. Once again, the Liberal government seems to be finding this out the hard way.
When we look at the costs of living, one of the primary drivers of our everyday costs is the cost of energy. The government has done nothing but drive up the cost of energy. Some will even say that is perhaps on purpose, as it continues to reduce our ability to extract and explore great clean and sustainable Canadian energy. At the same time, it is piling on its carbon tax. The carbon tax is set to triple, which will increase the cost of home heating, groceries and everything.
When we look across G7 countries, every single one has attempted to reduce the cost of fuel. The Liberal government has not. It is going to go ahead and triple the carbon tax. It just does not see the suffering of the people of Northumberland—Peterborough South and the rest of Canada, as they go to work every day trying to put gas in their cars and feed their families while inflation continues to increase year after year after year.
What is the government's next step? If we look at the workers of this country, we are dealing with a labour shortage, and what is the government's response? On the affordability crisis, we have seen its response is to make things more expensive. It does not make much sense to me, but I do not know. Its response to a labour shortage is to disincentivize work. The average employee earning $65,000 a year will pay $750 more in payroll tax because of the government's efforts to increase taxes over and over again on our workers.
We have the best workers in the world. We should be incentivizing and celebrating their work going forward, not continuing to add additional layers of taxes and regulation that do nothing but suffocate workers and business owners. We need to have an environment where we encourage, celebrate and incentivize work.
Once again, the government's response to an affordability crisis is to increase expenses. It is to raise the inflation tax and raise the carbon tax. Its response to a labour shortage is to disincentivize work through incredibly high amounts of taxation. There are people who are earning $50,000 or $60,000 a year who are being taxed at a cumulative rate of taxation of 30%, 40% or even 50% after we add clawbacks, and provincial and municipal taxation. It is simply not leaving enough in their pockets.
The government's response to this affordability crisis, in addition to increasing taxes and making life less affordable for Canadians, is to virtue signal to make it look like it is doing something. There is a rental bill that would offer a $500 one-time payment. In my riding, in communities such as Port Hope, Cobourg, Orono, Cramahe, Campbellford and Brighton, the average rent is more than $2,000, if one can find a place. That $500 would be a mere drop in the bucket in helping our residents.
What the government needs to do is give itself a look in the mirror and reverse the policies that have caused the conditions Canadians are currently in. A simple $500 one-time cheque, more of the same tax and spend, will not solve the issues that plague this country. We need to celebrate workers. We need to empower businesses, and we need to make life more affordable by getting this inflation machine under control.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his speech. He had a lot of stuff in there. I was listening to find one positive thing the member would say that our government did in the last seven years. I did not hear one, so I think it was somewhat biased.
That being said, the big difference between the opposition and our government is that we look at investing in Canadians rather than what the Conservatives call “spending money”. What areas does he think we should withdraw from? We have invested in the child care benefit, which continues to help families. In my riding alone, it is $5.2 million per month. That is $60 million a year going to my riding. It is also going to his riding and every riding across this country. That is one big one.
Would he cut that? Would he cut the child care down to 50% in his riding? Can he tell that to the people in his constituency? I would like to hear if there are a couple of good programs we have invested in that Canadians are benefiting from in his constituency.
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Mr. Speaker, I, too, have not been able to identify one thing in seven years that the government has done right. We share that and have something in common.
I would cut $50 million from the arrive scam app. I would cut $50 million going to Mastercard. I would cut $12 billion going to Loblaws. I would have looked at the $200 billion in non-COVID-related spending or the $100 billion of pre-COVID deficit spending that has led to the inflation crisis and will cause children to go hungry tonight because the government cannot get its spending under control.
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Mr. Speaker, let us be serious and talk about housing.
When they talk about housing, my Conservative friends are quick to criticize the Liberals, but they are not so quick to come up with solutions. They keep saying that the government should not be spending money. They think that we should let the market decide.
The housing crisis—
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- Oct/27/22 12:07:27 p.m.
- Watch
I must interrupt the hon. member because there is a problem with the interpretation.
I am told it is working now.
The hon. member for Longueuil—Saint-Hubert may start over.
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Mr. Speaker, I was saying that, essentially, my Conservative friends are quick to criticize the government, and rightly so, because there is a huge housing crisis right now. Bill C‑31 does absolutely nothing to address the issue, and I just wanted to point that out today in the House. However, we do not hear a lot of solutions coming from my Conservative friends. They keep saying that we should let the market decide and that the government does not need to get involved.
I spoke with an economist from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation two or three weeks ago. He said that in Quebec alone, if we allow market forces to run their course for the next 10 years, 500,000 housing units will be built, including houses and condominiums and so on. However, given the current problems with availability and affordability, 1.1 million housing units would need to be built to meet demand. That is a shortfall of 600,000.
How can we get these 600,000 housing units built? That is my question for my colleague.
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Mr. Speaker, I think it is a bit of a mischaracterization that the Conservatives want to leave this up to the free market. We want to leave it up to Canadians because we believe in Canadians. We do not believe that the best decisions are made here in Ottawa. We believe they are made in Port Hope, in Quebec and everywhere else in this country.
Secondly, we would get the gatekeepers out of the way. It is governments that are the problem. They are stopping houses. We will sell off a percentage of federally held properties, as the government is the largest landlord in all of Canada, and we will get those properties to people. We need the government out of the way so we can get people into homes.
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Mr. Speaker, we are talking about global inflation and the reality is that Canada is the worst in the world. If we look at our ports, the Port of Vancouver is the worst in the world. Toronto Pearson International Airport is the worst airport in the world. People are waiting in line for passports for days. These are the failure of the Liberal-NDP government.
I want my colleague to comment on health care. In my riding, when I go out to doors, my residents are pleading with me. They say, “Scot, I would love to have a doctor.”
We are spending a billion dollars on this dental care program, and people are saying they do not have a doctor. People are waiting months and months for a specialist. Could my colleague comment on that?
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Mr. Speaker, unfortunately, it appears as though over the last seven years, more things in Canada are not working. More things are broken in our country. Whether it be getting a passport in a reasonable amount of time, getting a ship built in a reasonable amount of time, or delivering the most basic of government essentials, it seems like there is delay, and failure after failure. It is time for a change. The Leader of the Opposition will finally put people first.
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Mr. Speaker, I understand that the member for Northumberland—Peterborough South is concerned with policies such as a carbon tax, which only raised gas prices by just over 2¢ a litre this past year while being an efficient tool to address the climate crisis and returning revenue to Canadians.
He is also aware that we are in a climate emergency. Oil and gas company profits were up 18¢ per litre this year alone. Can he talk more about the need to address affordability by addressing the gouging by the oil and gas industry?
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Mr. Speaker, the organization or the institution that has been taking excess revenues is the Government of Canada, so perhaps he has gotten that, in fact, wrong. If we look at the oil and gas sector, it contributes, per worker, per hour, $645. For an average Canadian, that figure is $50.
The oil and gas industry is literally fuelling our economy as we go forward. We need to support Canadian energy. The carbon tax is raising costs. I am not sure if he has talked to the residents, but it is making gas unaffordable.
How many emissions targets has the government hit since it has had the carbon tax? Absolutely none. That is an abject failure.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank all my colleagues for coming here today to listen to my speech, my colleagues on this side of the House in particular. It is an honour to stand in front of the House and talk about a bill that is going to affect Canadians for a long time going forward, another trinket.
Let me start, because it is a big bill, by focusing my comments on the dental care benefit that is part of this bill, Bill C-31. I see the Liberals over there are shrugging their shoulders about the support they gave the NDP when it brought this legislation forward. They know the support from the NDP, to continue on with its support of the government, came cheap. Dental care is a cheap trinket for them to push forward here.
The House will note that the government has aligned with the NDP, continuing to drip a dental care plan into delivery with its continued deficit. Why would it not? No sooner would the Liberals deliver on their full promise for dental care than the NDP would up its demands for continued support of this spendy government. Who is playing whom in this support agreement? It allows the Liberals to continue to plunge the country into an economic hole, and it will take decades of responsible government to recover our previous fiscal stability.
That is why dental care is in front of the House. It is not for any health reasons and not because it is going to give something to Canadians that has been taken away with the inflation that is making a dent in their take-home pay. It is a political support agreement, so that the NDP can show people that it might be relevant, even though it is backing a government whose spending is out of control. A great amount of taxpayers' money is going to Liberal lackeys.
Dental care support is a nice gift. Like my colleague said earlier, it is a nice shiny trinket in the window. Dental care promotes good health. There is no doubt about it. Oral health leads to better health overall. We have known this for years.
I spoke to a friend at home. She brought it forth to me, asking why the federal government would establish a new federal bureaucracy in charge of Canadians' dental care, and why there is an “Ottawa knows best” approach to superimpose a new federal program on top of the existing provincial dental programs across Canada, because each provincial jurisdiction has a provincial dental care program. She asked how costly the program would be and how much taxpayer funds would be spent, or lost, in bureaucratic overlap. Federal bureaucrats would be interacting needlessly with provincial bureaucrats in a program that is already being delivered in every province across Canada. It would not be a health transfer to fix an underfunded health care system in Canada, but a new program overlap.
Let us ask the NDP about the Halloween candy it has bargained for with the government. It is provincial responsibility. Did any premiers, including the NDP premier in British Columbia, ask for dental care funding in their provinces? The answer is a very clear “no”. What did the premiers ask for? They asked for an extra $26 billion from the federal government to help the strain on our health care system, a strain that has been exacerbated by a pandemic that lasted two years, and to help with costs thrust upon the shoulders of the provincial governments.
Notably, all of this is provincial responsibility. The Canada Health Act imposed standards of health care delivery on the provinces, so it was a shared jurisdiction for a while. Health care was funded fifty-fifty, until the Liberal budget cuts of the mid-1990s, when suddenly it was changed and became not the fifty-fifty that the Health Care Act was premised on. Now, 22% of health care funding in Canada is funded by the federal government, and for every province health care spending has become the largest budget item.
The government has been running huge budget deficits the entire seven years since it was elected, so with this new program it is going to continue to buy Canadians with their own money and continue to put it onto the backs of taxpayers who are not paying taxes today and may not even be born today. This intergenerational transfer of taxation, versus the benefits that are being felt by Canadians today, is unjust.
The country's finances right now are more strained than they have been since the Liberals cut health care funding in the 1990s. Perhaps the NDP needs to take a lesson from history about how this ends.
My friend in Calgary and I did a little more research on dental coverage for people in my province of Alberta. Alberta child care benefits provide full dental coverage for low-income families. There are notable differences between the Alberta plans and the proposed coverage in this bill. The Alberta plan covers low-income households for full coverage up to the age of 18 in low-income families. This new plan would be for low-income families to cover children up to $650 per child up to the age of 12. In Alberta, it is up to the age of 18, no matter the number of children.
Additionally, the definition of low income ends in Alberta at $46,932, again, to cover 100% of the dental expenses of children under the age of 18. This new program would give a sliding amount per family up to a family income of $90,000 down to $260 per child. Will there be overlaps with these different definitions? Yes, of course, and obviously there will be. Private insurance pays out first; provincial insurance on top of that is a close second; and then there is the federal plan. Is this just another public service jobs debacle on the horizon? They are all different formulae and all different eligibilities. This spells huge bureaucratic overlap in the delivery of this new service.
Obviously, we would have to hire more federal government employees on top of the 15% increase we have had over the last two years. We are on a job-hiring spree, and we are getting less and less from federal government services. Surely, a realistic, accountable federal government could deliver a program like this a little more effectively. Unfortunately, a realistic approach to better dental care would not allow the government to buy the support of the NDP. This is another Liberal-NDP boondoggle. Canadians deserve better. They deserve not just optics, but the actual delivery of programs that help them and do not overlap with all their other provincial benefits.
Let us talk about inflation and how this is actually impacted. Every Canadian is having more expenses, including dental expenses, expenses for food, and expenses for housing, which is pronounced and is addressed by a minuscule amount in this bill. These are all mounting expenses for Canadians, and the government has thrust this upon Canadians with its full-on federal spending of over a half a trillion dollars in deficits over the past handful of years. It is a ridiculous financial strategy that has led us to where we are today, with mounting inflation, with mounting government debts and with no insight as to how or where this ends, except on the backs of future generations of Canada.
The cost of living is going up; inflation is going up; deficits are going up, and the government does not have a handle on how it deals with those real problems that are affecting the lives of Canadians. Its approach is to give trinkets. There are trinkets in this bill that would not be able to deliver but would place a huge cost upon the Canadian population writ large.
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Mr. Speaker, the member talks about trinkets. I can assure the member that not every province is alike. For a 10-year-old child or an 11-year-old or a four-year-old child, depending on the province, there are different types of dental programs that are available. However, what we do know for a fact is that there are tens of thousands of children in every region of the country who will benefit by this dental benefits program.
We know that for a fact, yet the Conservatives seem to want to deny those tens of thousands of children having a dental benefit. We also know for a fact that many of those children will end up in hospital situations as a direct result of not having the types of benefits that are being proposed within this legislation. Will the member at least acknowledge that fact?
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Mr. Speaker, I watched my colleague listen to my speech intently, but he seems to have missed much of what I said.
There is definitely dental coverage in every province. However, there is a better way of delivering increased dental coverage if the federal government wants to contribute to the provinces that are actually delivering health care services across this country.
These are different modes. If we think about the way Canada is governed, we are governed in a federal system, and we have provinces deliver real services to their constituents. We, as the federal government, also have our realm. This is very clearly the provincial realm. If the federal government wants to be involved in dental health care, it should say so, put some constraints and direction on the provinces, and transfer some funds. Do not just give it as a gift to the NDP in order to stay in power. It is a really obvious power buy at this point in time.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend the speech given by my colleague from Calgary Centre. I really appreciated it, especially when he alluded to health transfers. He also spoke a bit about the various federal and provincial jurisdictions in his response to our friend on the other side of the House.
One thing that disappoints me a little is that I have been asking the Conservatives the same question for three years now, and I have never had an answer. I feel I may have a chance with my friend from Calgary Centre, because he is an honest, reliable person, and I think he will answer my question.
The Premier of Quebec and the provincial premiers all agree. They made a formal request based on a strong consensus. They want health transfers to increase to 35%. I have never heard a Conservative say in the past three years that the Conservatives would agree to increase health transfers to 35%.
As the party that prides itself on having the strongest economic record, would they be willing to put a figure on the increase in health transfers, once and for all? I am asking my friend whether he agrees with Quebec and the provinces that health transfers need to be increased to 35%.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.
I am not aware of the 35% that he mentioned in his question.
I do know premiers across the country have been asking the federal government to give the provinces $26 billion a year for Canada's health care system. I am not sure if that $26 billion is equivalent to 35%. I am sorry I am not aware of these figures, but I support the provinces' request for more federal money.
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Mr. Speaker, I had an adverse reaction to hearing national access to dental care being referred to as a trinket. It is very problematic to me when I hear day in and day out from constituents and Canadians across the country that they want access to dental care. We know that having access to dental care saves us money. There is no economic reason for us not to be proactive in preventing costs to our health care system.
I am wondering if the member could share what he has to say to constituents in my riding of Nanaimo—Ladysmith and Canadians across the country who are asking for dental care, instead of doing what in my opinion is belittling the need for dental care by referring to it as a trinket.
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Mr. Speaker, I called it a trinket in my speech, because it is a little thing for the Liberals to put in the window to show NDP members that they are relevant and should continue to be supported by those members over the short term, until it is actually done.
Giving dental care to Canadians is easy. As I said in my speech, and I hope the member was listening, there is a far more effective way to improve dental care across this country, and that is to transfer health dollars to the provinces, as we have said and as my friend in the Bloc Québécois also answered.
To call it a trinket means they are saying, “Here is something we have given that has to be identified.” It would create a massive overbuild, and more public servants would be required to deliver it. That is the overstep here. It is a provincial responsibility. If the federal government wants to deliver this to the provinces, and if the member actually has her constituents putting it in the top 10 needs of Canadians, then this is the way it should be more effectively done.
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