SoVote

Nov/3/22 4:31:12 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, we absolutely understand that times are tough for so many Canadians today. That is why I was so glad to share some great news, which is that the GST credit will start arriving in the bank accounts and in the mailboxes of 11 million Canadian households tomorrow. That is much-needed support. It is going to provide such valuable inflation relief to the Canadians who need it the most. That is not all. We are moving forward with $500 to support Canadians who are struggling to pay their rent. Again, it is much-needed support for the people who need it the most. That is not all. We are moving forward to ensure that never again in Canada will a mother have to choose between buying groceries and taking her kid to the dentist. That is not right in Canada, and we are going to change that. There is a lot more we are going to do and we will talk about it in a minute.

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Context: House Hansard - 124 - Nov/3/22

Hon. Pierre Poilievre (Leader of the Opposition, CPC)

Nov/3/22 4:41:01 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, when we learned that the costly coalition would be introducing this economic update today, we had two demands: no new taxes on workers and seniors and no new spending unless matched by equal savings. Today, this inflationary scheme triples the tax on home heating, gas and groceries, and adds $20 billion of inflationary spending that will drive up the cost of living. The Conservatives will stand up for Canadians, their paycheques, their homes and their savings, and we will vote against this inflationary scheme. How did we get here? Well, the cost of government is driving up the cost of living. Half a trillion dollars of inflationary deficits have bid up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay. Inflationary taxes have increased the costs for businesses, farmers and workers to produce those very same goods. The Liberals will pretend that they had no choice but to double the debt. The Prime Minister will claim that it is not his fault that he added more debt than all previous prime ministers combined. Let us start with the fact that he added $100 billion of debt before the very first COVID case was ever discovered here in Canada. He cannot blame COVID for that. In fact, he blew through his promise that the deficit would never exceed $10 billion. It was already $100 billion in total before the first case of COVID. Then when COVID came, 40% of all the new spending measures had nothing to do with COVID, according to the Prime Minister's own named Parliamentary Budget Officer. There was $200 billion of spending unrelated to COVID, and even among the COVID spending, there was an “all you can eat” buffet of waste and mismanagement. The Liberals sent CERB cheques to prisoners. They sent them to public servants who were simultaneously drawing public salaries. They gave wage subsidies to wealthy corporations that were rich enough to pay out dividends and bonuses to their executives, even after I warned that they should ban that hideous practice. They tried to give half a billion dollars to the WE Charity, an organization that had given half a million dollars to the Prime Minister's own family. The Liberals then spent $54 million on app we did not need, that did not work and that could have been designed in a weekend for $250,000. The previous Conservative government had successfully delivered apps that were necessary, useful and of a similar complexity for $200,000 to $300,000, but somehow this one went up to $54 million. Many of the recipients of the money admit they did not do any work. They just hired other people to do work. The Liberals gave the money to people who did not do anything other than delegate the work to someone else. Do we not have public servants getting paid within the government to deliver that type of contracting? The government will not even tell us the identities of all the recipients of that money. Do not tell me the government had to double the size of the national debt. Do not tell me that every dollar of inflationary spending was necessary. The Liberals were irresponsible and unnecessarily profligate with the dollars of Canadians, and now people are paying the price. The Prime Minister will now say that Russia caused the inflation in Canada. Of course, we do less than 0.3% of our trade with Russia and Ukraine combined, beyond which the stuff they make is the stuff we have here already. They have energy and food. We have energy and food. If only the Prime Minister would get out of the way of our farmers and energy workers and let them produce those things. Beyond that, under the previous Conservative government, there were wars. There was a massive war in Afghanistan, and there were others in Iraq and Syria, but we never had inflation anywhere over 4%. In fact, we were able to successfully contribute to defeating terrorists and tyrants in those conflicts while keeping the inflation level low here in Canada. We were able to get our spending under control and our budget back into balance. By contrast, the government's spending today is 30% higher than in the pre-COVID year 2019. Why? The Liberals said all the deficits were the result of COVID. COVID is now behind us and spending is still 30% higher because we know it is not COVID that has caused the costs to rise. It is a costly coalition and an irresponsible Prime Minister who put these burdens on Canadians' shoulders. This is a Prime Minister who has no control and no respect for Canadians' money. Canadians are the ones paying the bills here in Canada. The more the government spends, the more Canadians pay. That is why we have the highest inflation rate in 40 years. It is “justinflation”. The Prime Minister also loves to blame all the cost of living rises on other people. Why is it, then, that house prices in this country are the second most inflated anywhere on planet earth? Why is it that land costs have gone through the roof? Land is not imported from Ukraine or Russia; land is right beneath our feet. We have the second biggest supply of it anywhere on earth, yet Vancouver is the third most overpriced housing market on planet earth and Toronto is the 10th. Can members imagine that? Two of our biggest cities have more inflated housing prices than New York City; London, England; and countless other big metropolises that have more people, more money and less land. In fact, Vancouver's house prices are more inflated than Singapore's. Singapore is an island. It is out of land. Canada has more land where there is no one than it has land where there is anyone, so why is it that we cannot find a place to house everyone? The first reason is that local government gatekeepers prevent housing construction by piling on massive delays that drive up costs and drive down the supply of housing. The Prime Minister has had seven years to stand up to the municipal and provincial gatekeepers who stand in the way of housing construction, but he would never do that because he does not want to confront the Liberal and NDP radical left in city halls across the country that has made this problem worse. What he has done instead is continue to shovel money into their local bureaucracies to reward them for blocking the poor, our immigrants and our working-class kids from ever owning a home. When I am prime minister, we will impose conditions so that if cities want more federal infrastructure money, they will have to remove the gatekeepers. We will connect their infrastructure dollars to the number of houses that actually get built so that young people can find a place to live. We will also sell off 15% of the 37,000 federal buildings we have so they can be converted into housing and our young people can have affordable homes. The second reason we have such expensive housing and such expensive everything is the Prime Minister has engaged in a massive orgy of money printing over the last two years. He said money printing would not cause inflation, even though that is exactly what it has done every single time it has been tried over the last roughly 3,000 years. Here is how it worked. The Prime Minister wanted to be able to claim that he was borrowing all this money on the cheap. He loved to stand in the House and say his debt was not costing any money, because interest rates were so low. The only reason he could borrow for next to nothing was that his central bank was creating the cash out of thin air. If it had been a real lender, it would have demanded a real rate of return on the loans. What happened was that they created something called “quantitative easing”. Whenever they invent new, incomprehensible terminology, we can be sure that there is something sinister behind it. Here is how it works. It is very simple. The government sells bonds to lenders. The Bank of Canada buys back those bonds at a higher price. The lenders love it. That is why the banks thoroughly endorse this strategy, because they made the money on the difference. It is simple arbitrage. The government sells them something on a Monday and buys it back from them at a higher price on a Wednesday. Who would not go for that deal? Unfortunately, only about 100 financial institutions are eligible to participate in it. The rest of the ordinary, hard-working Canadians who pay for it are not, but the banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions profited off of this transaction. The Bank of Canada pays for those bonds by depositing money in the accounts of those large financial institutions held on reserve at the Bank of Canada. Those reserves skyrocketed over the last two years as the bank bought up to $400 billion of new debt. What happened? That exploded the money supply, and more dollars chasing fewer goods caused higher prices. Much of the money then funnelled into the financial system and was lent out in mortgages to wealthy investors, who saw a massive expansion in the number of real estate holdings they could accumulate. Thus, housing prices went up 50% in two years, creating the biggest housing bubble in Canadian history. Now that the central bank is forced to raise interest rates, it risks bursting that bubble. All of the people who got on the balloon when it was on the ground floor and went up into the sky now risk coming crashing down as that balloon is bursting. Worse than that, the Bank of Canada now has hundreds of billions of dollars of deposits that it made into the accounts of those large financial institutions that it has on its reserves. What has happened to those deposits? They now bear more interest, because interest rates have gone up. The wealthy bankers who participated in this arbitrage transaction at the beginning and were paid for it by having more money deposited into their accounts at the Bank of Canada now collect 3.75%, because that is the policy rate that the bank pays. What does that mean? It means that the central bank is now losing money for the first time in its history and Canadian taxpayers are forced to bail them out to a tune of $4 billion every year. This entire wretched scheme, of which I warned two years ago, will, maybe in the end, amount to the single biggest wealth transfer from working-class people to ultrawealthy insiders, from the have-nots to the have-yachts, at any time in our history. Now we see the painful consequences. It is not just about numbers on a ledger. It is about 1.5 million people forced to go to a food bank in a single month. It is about one in five people skipping meals or cutting portions because they cannot afford their food. It is about the forthcoming winter, of which the minister spoke in metaphorical terms. People are now not going to be able to heat their homes, as the cost of home heating is expected to double or even more for those people who are on home heating oil. It is about the 35-year-old living in his parents' basement, despite the fact that he did everything we asked him to do. He got a job. He got an education. He worked hard every day, and now he cannot afford a home, which means he cannot build up collateral, cannot build a credit history, cannot build savings for his future and, therefore, cannot start a family. In Canada, a country with among the most abundant supply of land on earth, we cannot find places for people to live. These are the real-world consequences of irresponsible decisions. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister sits and smirks at the fact that he took a $6,000-a-night vacation to sleep in the fanciest hotel on planet Earth, staying up in opulent hotel lobbies and jazzing it up with his friends while people back home cannot pay the rent. Canadians are out of money and the Prime Minister is out of touch. We are going to inherit this mess, all of us, and we are going to have to fix the problem. We have a big job ahead of us; do we not? We have a very big job ahead of us. He will leave a big mess just like his dad left. He will be off on a beach somewhere surfing, and the rest of us will be busy working to clean up the mess he left behind. The sooner that happens, the better it is. Only then he will have to pay for his own hotels. We will not be paying for them anymore. He will have to pay his own way like Canadians are today. How are we going to clean up this mess? For one, we are going to bring in a pay-as-you-go law so that every time we bring in a new dollar of spending, we will find the savings to pay for it. Do members know who does that? Everybody in the real world. That is how single mothers pay their bills. When they want to send their children on vacation, they find a way to save money in other areas. The same goes for small businesses. When they want to increase their advertising spending, they find ways to save money in other areas of the business. It is normal. It is the reality of every person living in the real world. In fact, scarcity is the condition that faces every creature in the universe as there is only so much to go around, every one except for the Prime Minister, who just takes everyone else's money to pay for his own wants and desires. In the real world, if a family wants a new deck, they might pass up on their vacation, or find a deal on the vacation and maybe pick up some used lumber at a local construction yard to save some money so that they can do it all within the same budget. Imagine if instead of just piling on new spending all the time, the government actually had to find savings to pay for it. That would force the same real-world trade-offs—

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Context: House Hansard - 124 - Nov/3/22

Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Nov/3/22 4:58:48 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, I am not allowed to mention the presence or absence of the Prime Minister, but I will just say that some people bring happiness wherever they go and others bring happiness whenever they go. Conservatives are going to cap government spending. We are going to get the Bank of Canada back to its core mandate. For 25 years, the Bank of Canada had a very simple mandate of 2% inflation, brought in by the Mulroney government. It was to stick to 2%. Interest rates and money supply were all governed to that purpose, and it worked. It worked until the current Prime Minister came along and pushed the bank to print cash to pay for his spending. We are going to have no more of that. Conservatives will fund our programs with real money, rather than printed cash, because we know that there are no freebies in this world and we know that, ultimately, the taxpayer and the consumer pay for everything. We will reinstate that mandate and we will audit the central bank through the Auditor General to make sure that never again is there such a horrendous abuse of our money as we have seen over the last couple of years. Instead of creating more cash, we are going to create more of what cash buys. We are going to grow more food, build more houses and produce more resources right here in Canada, and here is how we will do it. We will incentivize our municipalities to remove their gatekeepers so that we can build more houses. We will remove the gatekeepers off the backs of our farmers by cancelling the tariffs and taxes on their fertilizers and fuel so they can produce more in this country. We will remove the government gatekeepers that stand in the way of our resource sector. Do members know that Canada today has the second-slowest time for building permits of any country in the OECD? The only other country that is worse is the Slovak Republic. In Canada, if we take all the types of building permits that exist, everything from a renovation permit on a house all the way up to a full uranium mine, and we average it out, the average permit time is 250 days. In South Korea, it is 28 days. We wonder why investors are taking their money to places like South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland. It is because they can actually get things built in those countries. That is what Conservatives are going to do in this country. We are going to compress the timelines and speed up approvals. We are going to challenge all levels of government to meet the goal of Canada being the fastest place to deliver a building permit anywhere in the developed world. The minister said today she is going to pitch the world on our critical minerals. The problem is that she cannot get them out of the ground. She is going to tell everyone that they exist. Out there in that field there is some lithium, copper and nickel, but companies have to wait seven years for us to give a permit for anyone to dig that mine. She says she is going to give out a bunch of corporate welfare to mining companies, which can fill their bank accounts with taxpayers' cash. If they cannot get a permit to dig the mine, they will not be able to turn it into anything other than big, fat boondoggles for taxpayers. Conservatives will repeal the anti-energy law, Bill C-69, so that we can build Canadian pipelines with Canadian steel to take Canadian energy to Canadian marketplaces and around the world. We are going to eliminate the anti-investment taxes that pile on the backs of our entrepreneurs so that it is actually rewarding to build things in this country. We are going to axe the carbon tax so that it is possible for our industries to compete and for our people to afford energy in this country. As for energy, there are two very different approaches. Across the aisle, they believe that we should tackle climate change by making traditional energy that Canadians rely on more expensive. Conservatives believe in tackling climate change by making new alternatives more affordable. We will do that by incentivizing and speeding up permits to mine lithium, copper, cobalt, graphite and other necessary minerals that will eventually go into Canadian-made electric cars and other forms of renewable energy. We will incentivize the production of these energies here in Canada. We will incentivize nuclear energy here on Canadian soil so that we can power our economy emissions-free. We will also get rid of the red tape to get dams built in Quebec. We know that in Quebec, there will not be enough electricity in the future to charge electric cars and to meet all the needs of a green future. Their solution is to build dams. However, the Prime Minister wants to prevent or delay the construction of those dams with duplicate processes. We agree with the Government of Quebec. It is not necessary to add three or four years to the time frame for these projects since the Government of Quebec already has processes in place to protect the environment. Quebeckers are capable of protecting the environment, and we are going to help them by approving the construction of hydroelectric dams. Finally, we will make this a country where work pays again. It does not pay to work for a lot of people. Let us look at someone on disability who recovers to a point or arrives at a point in their life where they realize they can work 10 or 15 hours and they want to get out into the world and contribute. The clawbacks right now mean many people on disability lose more than a dollar for every extra dollar they earn. The government published a report showing that if a single mother with three kids who earns $55,000 a year earns another dollar, she loses 80¢ of that dollar. She earns about $25 an hour. She loses in clawbacks of her benefits and taxes on her income 20 of those dollars, so her real wage on that extra hour of work is five dollars an hour. Nobody in Canada should be expected to work for five dollars an hour. That is an outrage. That is why my government will reform the tax and benefit system to ensure that whenever somebody works an extra hour, takes an extra shift, or earns an extra bonus, they are always better off and they always keep more of that dollar. We will do this to restore the Canadian promise. I look around this chamber and I see many inspiring stories, like my finance critic, who rose today to ask the first question. He is the son of immigrants. He grew up in a tough neighbourhood and had a difficult childhood, but he was able to get a diploma in accounting, which he is putting to very good use in this House. He started a business, built homes and was elected to serve in a G7 Parliament. I, myself, am the son of a 16-year-old unwed mother who had to put me up for adoption to two school teachers. They always taught me it did not matter where I came from, that it mattered where I was going, and it did not matter who I knew, that it mattered what I could do. That is the country I want my children to inherit, and that is the country we will fight for every single day in this House.

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Context: House Hansard - 124 - Nov/3/22

Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Nov/3/22 5:08:27 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, first of all, the Conservative government created what the Liberal government now changed the name of to the workers benefit. We created that benefit in the first place, because we wanted to allow, along with increasing the personal exemption, more and more Canadians to be off the tax rolls altogether and keep a bigger share of their paycheques. Furthermore, on the child benefit, the Liberals wanted to take the money from parents and give it to bureaucrats. We were the ones who put the money directly in parents' pockets. There is something very simple to realize. The government cannot give people anything without taking it away. The government does not have any money. First they try taxing it, which makes people worse off. Then they try borrowing it, which means that future generations are worse off. Then when they ran out of those two options, because they ran out of other people's money, they tried printing the money and now we have 40-year highs in inflation. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Stop the insanity. Stop the inflation.

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Context: House Hansard - 124 - Nov/3/22

Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Nov/3/22 5:16:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do not have to google that, because Jim Flaherty was against quantitative easing. We specifically said we would not do it, and we did not do it, and we proved this nonsense today that the Liberal government had to do quantitative easing because the Americans did it. That is the excuse. The Americans did it in 2008, 2009 and 2010. They printed money like crazy and ballooned income and wealth inequality as a result. Here in Canada we said no. We banned our Bank of Canada from doing that. As a result, we did not have an inflation crisis. We kept our debts low and we kept income inequality lower than it would have been. We can have an independent monetary policy. Our mothers taught us that just because all of our friends are jumping off a bridge does not mean we have to.

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Context: House Hansard - 124 - Nov/3/22

Mr. Gabriel Ste-Marie (Joliette, BQ)

Nov/3/22 5:17:25 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Speaker, I want to start off by saying how excited my colleagues and I were this morning to get a look at this important economic statement behind closed doors. As we read through the opening pages, we felt hopeful. We thought the government understood the problems we are dealing with, the global inflationary crisis that is having a real impact on ordinary people. People are having to make do with less because prices are going up. Food, energy and gas prices, not to mention housing prices, have all gone up. People are facing major challenges, and the government says that we are in the middle of an inflationary crisis. A few days ago, even the Minister of Finance said she would be making an economic statement today because we are looking at an inflationary crisis. It is the same thing with the risk of a recession. Once again, it is a global issue. Most economists and analysts are saying that there is reason for concern and that we could enter a recession in 2023. We know that the Bank of Canada and the central banks decided to fight inflation to bring price increases back into the range of 1% to 3%, thus the 2% target. In order to do that, they are implementing a monetary policy that involves increasing interest rates. Higher interest rates mean an economic slowdown because of softening demand, which is why there is a risk of a global recession. The country's economy is facing a recession in the coming year, and the minister recognizes that in the economic statement. We commend her for that. The further we read in the document, the more we examine it from every angle, the more we do the math and compare the tables, statistics and figures in this statement with what was in last spring's budget, the more we realize that it is all very slick rhetoric. The document recognizes the economic problems that we face, but when it comes to proposing any solutions, it leaves much to be desired. There are actually very few new measures announced in this economic statement. It reiterates what has been adopted since the beginning of the fall. It reiterates the commitments made in the last budget. It announces that there could be additional measures in 2024, but there is not much new for now. There is actually some assistance for student loans. My Bloc Québécois colleagues and I, as the member for Joliette, can say that this does not affect us very much, given that the loans and bursaries system is under the purview of Quebec. I guess it is good for students in the rest of Canada, but this measure does not directly affect Quebeckers. Next the government says it will spend more to hire more public servants to improve service delivery. That is great. We saw what happened with passports in the summer. There are countless examples. There are many problems related to wait times. Nevertheless, this is a fairly minor expenditure. There is nothing major here. The statement also reiterates the funding announced for the people in the Maritimes and eastern Quebec who suffered through hurricane Fiona. We applaud that commitment as well. However, all of this is very minor and very marginal. The statement uses the word “inflation” over a hundred times, but the solutions it offers are the same ones that were presented in the spring budget, which made hardly any reference to inflation. There is an inflationary crisis going on, but what is being done about it? The government uses the word “inflation”, then rehashes the same proposals it served up in the spring, when it was not talking about inflation. One of Quebec's national dishes is shepherd's pie. People generally say that it tastes better when it is reheated. The same cannot be said of the measures we have here. What we are being served in this update, in this economic statement, is reheated leftovers. Most of the measures in the update are reheated leftovers. The significance of the current inflationary crisis and the risks of recession should not be minimized. The Bloc Québécois called on the government to take that into account and propose concrete solutions. For example, if workers lose their jobs because of the recession, we will need an employment insurance system that works. Everyone, including the government, knows that the EI system is broken. It is so badly broken that for every 10 people who lose their job, barely four have access to EI. Since 2015, the government has been telling us to wait. It has been telling us that change is coming, that the system will be reformed. We have been listening to the same broken record for seven years. We expected it to happen last September, as the special measures for the pandemic were ending, but no, back we went to the old Axworthy system that does not work at all. The government is telling us that we are headed for a recession, so the time has come to take action. It is urgent that we fix the EI system. There has been plenty of consultation. We know exactly what needs to be done to improve the system, but no. This is yet another missed opportunity. According to this economic statement, the EI system will not be fixed. The government is going to leave it broken. The government is saying that it is presenting an economic statement because we may be headed for a recession, but at the same time, it is saying that it will not fix the EI system. I completely agree with my colleague from Terrebonne when she said that the government seems to be working in silos. Did the minister responsible for EI talk to the Minister of Finance? Do these people talk to each other? This would have been a good opportunity to do so. We are in the midst of an inflationary crisis. Prices are going up, and the primary victims are obviously those whose incomes are not indexed to inflation. I am talking about seniors. As we know, the government decided to help people aged 75 and up, but not those aged 65 to 75. This government created two classes of seniors. Today, faced with a significant increase in the price of housing, gas and groceries, low-income seniors aged 65 to 75 do not have enough money to eat properly. They must turn to food banks and make some agonizing and very humiliating choices. Given that today's statement acknowledged the problem of the current inflationary crisis, now would have been the time to announce measures for these people. The Bloc Québécois believes that the government must not create two classes of seniors and that it must increase old age security for seniors 65 and up to cover inflation and deliver a modicum of social justice. This government willfully refused. Why is the government refusing to help those aged 65 to 75? I believe it is because the Liberals want these payments to be insufficient for low-income people in the first class of seniors that it created, those aged 65 to 75, so they will no longer have enough public support to make it to the end of the month. That way, those seniors will be forced to return to work. In 2015, this government was boasting about rescinding the Conservative law that raised the retirement age to 67. However, when we look at what is happening to seniors aged 65 to 75 as a result of inflation, we see a government that is trying to bring in a similar policy through the back door, a government that is ensuring that seniors aged 65 to 75 do not have sufficient income from public pension funds to make ends meet. As a result, they are going to be forced to return to the labour market. If that is the goal, it is very hypocritical. If that is not the goal, then I do not know what this government's problem is. It could be gross incompetence, but I think it is more likely utter hypocrisy. This is not right. It is unfair. When low-income people retire, they have often worked hard their whole lives. They are often single women. In many cases, they were caregivers. They do not have a pension because they stayed at home to take care of their family. This government claims to be feminist, but it does not recognize their contribution, and it is failing them. In its statement, the government acknowledged that there is an inflationary crisis, but it is not doing anything for those hit hardest by this crisis. That is deplorable. We expected to see something like that in the statement, but it is not there, and that is deplorable. There is an inflation crisis, prices are going up, and there might be a recession. Communities in Quebec and the other provinces are also experiencing another major crisis, the health care crisis. People no longer have access to doctors. The health care system is broken. It was strained during the pandemic. Workers and nurses are all exhausted. They are burned out. Plus, the system is underfunded. The fact is, these problems started in the 1990s when the federal government in Ottawa decided to deal with deficit and debt problems by reducing health transfers. That is when things started to go wrong. In the aftermath of the pandemic, as infection rates begin to fall, we are starting to see how much was put off during that time. We thought that screening, care and surgery could wait a little while, but now we realize that the system is no longer working at all. The provinces and Quebec know what to do, and the specialists and the expertise are there. They know what to do, but they lack resources because Ottawa has been neglecting its role for quite some time now. The provincial and Quebec governments are telling Ottawa that it is time for the federal level to play its role by providing as much funding for health care as possible. These figures are calculated year after year by the Parliamentary Budget Officer. According to him, health transfers should amount to $28 billion, and there should be a 6% increase every year to cover the rising costs and the existing needs. There is a desperate need. In response to this public health crisis, the government had the role and the duty to address this issue today in this statement, especially since the government just announced that in a few days it is inviting all the provincial health ministers to a nice meeting with the federal government to discuss health systems and funding. What is the government going to tell those ministers just a few days after saying that it would not invest a penny more in the system when the need is there? When he was health minister in Quebec City, the very Liberal and very colourful Gaétan Barrette accused this government of practising predatory federalism, because the government was imposing conditions without providing the necessary funding to go with it. It was a Liberal health minister who accused this government of practising predatory federalism. That kind of infighting among the Liberals sends a clear message that things are not going well, not at all. Today, the government and the Minister of Finance had a unique opportunity to announce that they were going to address this issue and set the stage for the ministers' meeting. Again, they have been promising to fix this situation since 2015. Every time a Bloc Québécois member stands up in the House and asks the government if it is going to do its job, the government says that something is coming down the pike and not to worry. We may have believed that promise once or twice, but after hearing it for seven years, enough is enough. What message are we sending to the provincial health ministers who are trying to figure this out? They are the ones holding together the health care system, which is crumbling because of the considerable strain it was under during the pandemic. Now they are being invited for talks, but the numbers that have just been released show that there is not a penny more for them. It is contemptuous. This government stands up at every opportunity to lecture every other level of government. It even stands up to lecture the Pope and people around the world. However, when it comes to dealing with its own files, it is nowhere to be found, it is not up to the task. That is what we saw with passports and immigration too. Everything this government touches turns into a fiasco. There are cost overruns and service is not up to par. Now it is trying to tell the provinces what they should do, but it is not even investing any money. I mentioned immigration. A few days ago, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship announced new immigration levels. Canada will aim to bring in 25% more immigrants by 2025. That means 500,000 newcomers per year, as reiterated in today's statement. The Bloc Québécois is concerned about that for a number of reasons. Let me start with the practical, pragmatic reasons. We believe those targets are unrealistic. Our riding offices have been inundated with requests for urgent intervention because departmental employees cannot handle applications that are already in the queue. Wait times are atrocious, documents get lost, and mistakes are constantly being made. From a purely practical, technical perspective, maybe the government should show that it is capable of doing its job properly—and it is not—before it changes the target. Then we can talk. The government did not include one line about housing capacity. We have a housing shortage. In Quebec and across Canada, there is a shortage of housing. The Liberal government in Ottawa withdrew from funding social housing in the 1990s, and nothing has been done since. Of course, a bit of funding was announced recently, but it does not go far enough to meet the current needs. There is not enough housing. The private sector does not have the capacity to build enough homes, condos, apartments to meet the current needs. The government is planning to grow the population very quickly. Where are we going to put all these people? Condos and houses are no longer affordable. What do we tell young people? They want the American dream, which is to be part of the middle class and have a union job that allows them to buy a house and pay for it during their working life. Now that dream is shattered. Young people can no longer hope to be able to afford a home or become a homeowner in their lifetime. The housing shortage is exacerbated by the imbalance between supply and demand and the fact that the population is growing. Prices are skyrocketing, and housing is no longer affordable. These young people are being told that we are going to increase the population very quickly without restoring any balance to the housing market. This does not make sense. I used housing as an example, but the same is true for schools. There are not enough spaces. There is no coordination in that area either, nor in the area of health care. This is irresponsible. The situation is tough for us in Quebec, since we are not yet a country. Earlier, the leader of the Conservative Party talked about what he will do when he is prime minister. I want to talk about what Quebec will do when it is a country. I think this will happen within 10 years, because we will work hard. Seeing how this government and this nation ignore us, we will have all the cards to take control of our destiny. If we were to accept our share of the target that has been announced, which is prorated to our population, how could we properly accommodate and integrate such large numbers? That is impossible. It is impossible to guarantee that the French language would be preserved and respected. Even in Quebec, we see that the French language is in decline. Bill C-13 is currently being studied in committee, and the government wants to reject the Bloc's amendments, which seek to better protect French in Quebec. I am not even talking about French outside Quebec, because the figures have plummeted and that is so very sad. With the complicity of the fourth party in the House, the government will continue to erode the weight of the French language even within Quebec. We are not equipped to properly welcome all these newcomers in the language of Molière, the official language of Quebec. That is a serious problem. It is an impossible situation because if we welcome fewer immigrants in order to integrate them well, Quebec's weight as a proportion of Canada's population will quickly diminish. Either way, we could be marginalized, and it is the very survival of our culture that is at stake. Let me be clear. Immigration is a great asset. Welcoming newcomers is wonderful, except that Quebec culture does not support the policy of multiculturalism, which basically consists of telling immigrants to come live here as though they were still living in their own country and not to integrate because their grandchildren will. That is not what immigration is for us. We want to be able to say hello to a newcomer, to talk with them. We want to benefit from their rich cultural heritage, and we want them to be one of the gang, someone we can interact with. That is not going to work if the the immigration levels are quickly increased as announced. That is very worrisome. I am sorry that I spent a little longer than expected on that aside, but it is still very important. Let me come back to the economic statement. With regard to EI, as my colleague from Terrebonne said, the Minister of Employment and Workforce Development likely did not talk to the Minister of Finance. As she also said, it sounds like the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry did not talk to the Minister of Finance either. It sounds like the Liberal government is using the Apple method of developing policies and projects piecemeal without any communication. It looks like that is what is happening here. Everything that the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry has said, in the House and in the media, is missing from the economic statement. I do not get it. That is problematic. In times of economic uncertainty, discipline is called for, but not austerity. That is why we want the most vulnerable, like seniors aged 65 to 75, to have support measures they can count on during this inflationary period. That is very important. We do not want austerity. We have asked the government to focus on its basic roles, on the federal government's primary functions, to try to concentrate on those and do them well for a change. Health funding is one example. We were really surprised by the last budget, in the spring. The government announced 15 or so new policies, new ways of doing things, mostly in health. These were all encroachments on provincial jurisdictions. Instead of focusing on doing its job well, the government wanted to work on the ground in Quebec and the provinces and encroach on their jurisdictions. Here we have another example. The government is announcing the creation of a jobs secretariat. That is something Quebec is taking care of, and it is going quite well. Ottawa wants to use us as a model. One of our fears is an encroachment in a few years' time. Sooner or later, it is going to impose conditions on us. It is going to steal our model and then tell us that it has its own program now and that we have to follow suit. Then we will no longer have the freedom to implement our model, which is based on the labour market in Germany. We drew inspiration from Germany. Again, these are encroachments. Instead of doing its job well and focusing on its role, the government continues to stray. The media reported a new tax on share buybacks. It is an interesting measure. We look forward to studying it, but the update states it will be implemented in 2024. It is now 2022. Today, the government was either rehashing old measures or announcing measures that will not be implemented in the next little while, or next year, but the year after that. Once that time comes, we can talk about it then and see if the government has made the same announcement about the same measure six times by then or if it changed its mind. Evidently, this is not an economic update that will go down in history. The minister's speech earlier was full of fine rhetoric, fine principles, and a fine acknowledgement of the problems affecting the economy. However, this government was either rehashing old measures, approaches and actions it wants to take or putting off new measures to the distant future. The rest is inconsequential. The government had a golden opportunity to solve problems and consider the seriousness of the current crisis, but it did not do so. That is extremely unfortunate. Obviously, I encourage the minister to talk to her colleagues, to come to the Standing Committee on Finance more often, and to communicate more with representatives from all sectors of the country's economy, without ever forgetting Quebec. That will only do her a lot of good and may even inspire her to implement concrete measures.

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Context: House Hansard - 124 - Nov/3/22

Mr. Daniel Blaikie

Nov/3/22 6:22:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, when an election comes, we will be campaigning on our own terms, just as we work here on our own terms every day to advance in this place the things we committed to advance for the people who voted for us. We are doing that to the best of our ability, and rather effectively on a number of items, I would say. When it comes to inflationary spending, we should look at the GST rebate. It is targeted at the people who have the least amount of money in the country and who have seen extraordinary increases in the price of groceries and rent. That money is not going to chase more goods. That money is going to try to keep their boat afloat to buy the things they used to buy. Therefore, the idea that somehow doubling the GST rebate is inflationary is simply false. The poor are not driving inflation in Canada, and if the goal of government policy is to help them get through these difficult and trying times, it will not be contributing to inflation.

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Context: House Hansard - 124 - Nov/3/22

Hon. Greg Fergus (Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister and to the President of the Treasury Board, Lib.)

Nov/3/22 6:58:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, every time I listen to my hon. colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands, I learn a lot. I would like to thank her for her excellent speech and her analysis of the fall economic statement. The member mentioned that inflation was not typical this time. The Minister of Finance and her department also recognized that fact. I listen to my colleague quite often, and I have a very honest question for her. We know that even if we stop all economic activity, there is a time lag between our activities and the greenhouse gas emissions. That means there will be some modifications and changes in our climate regardless of what we do now. Is my colleague also telling us that she believes that there will always be inflationary pressure from now on because of climate change and that it will persist until we resolve the climate crisis?

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