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House Hansard - 131

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 21, 2022 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 131 - Nov/21/22
Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC)
Madam Speaker, I do have a degree in economics. I want to talk about why this bill is so important and ask the member to reconsider. When Bernie Madoff ran his Ponzi scheme, we did not seek to ban email or ban phones because he used those to lure victims, and we did not try to vilify the entire investment services industry because of one bad actor. What we did was seek to strengthen safeguards to ensure that bad governance and “too good to be true” schemes were not taking place anymore. We sought to educate people so they would not be lured into schemes, and most importantly, we said we need to do these things so this sector that is important to our economy can continue to grow. I am very concerned by, in Parliament, the words and speeches on this bill, which is fully amendable. It can go to committee, and every single different party can edit the scope of the framework. I made it purposely non-partisan. The reason “growth” is in the title is that the toothpaste is out of the tube on Web3 technologies, and cryptocurrencies are but a small, infinitesimal drop in the bucket of how our economy and our society are changing by blockchain technology. It is called “Web3” for a reason. If we think about Web1 as our just being able to read a site on the Internet, and then Web2 as being things like Facebook where we can read and write, Web3 means that individuals can own data and digital assets. For each of us in this place, and probably in the broader Canadian economy right now, the production value of our data might be greater than the value of the labour we provide. Thus how can we sit here and say we should not be putting together a growth framework that provides all the safeguards we have been talking about here for an area of the economy that we so desperately need? I represent a riding in Alberta, and I hear, day after day, colleagues of different political stripes talking about how the people who work in my community in natural resource-based jobs need to transition away from these jobs into digital-economy based jobs. Digital asset jobs are the very jobs we all are talking about. It is those jobs, but we have had the Bloc Québécois who, on behalf of their colleagues and the people in Quebec, make the argument that we need fewer natural resource-based jobs and more digital economy jobs, and the speech they gave was that we need to not support this growing more, but to restrict it, and similarly the government said the same thing. I do not want to ascribe motive, that this is what my colleagues meant to say, but I want them to understand what investors hear when they listen to this debate, and investors are listening to this. They say not to invest in Canada, because politicians in Parliament are willing to get cheap political points. We are talking about making a decision on an industry over cheap political points, instead of doing something that resembles work at committee. I could have picked any private member's bill. I could have picked the national day for something and gotten a big win, but instead I tried to pick something that was one of the hardest things for us to deal with as a Parliament, and I tried to do it in a non-partisan, non-prescriptive way, so that if this bill got to committee, everybody in this place could amend it. Why would we leave this to happen behind closed doors in the government, if it happens at all, without the input of industry? If we allow that to happen, the result is things like Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin's organization, which now has a market cap of over $150 billion. All of those jobs and all of that capital, even though he is Canadian, are in Switzerland, because they have a legislative framework. The Americans have a legislative framework. The Europeans have a legislative framework, yet we are sitting here trading partisan barbs, instead of talking about how we grow a sector that could be the solution to all of our job problems in this country. Yes, we need safeguards. Yes, we need better rules, but we are the ones who are supposed to do that. Why are we abdicating this responsibility? I do not want to look back in 10 years on this debate and say we missed an opportunity because of partisanship. Members should go back to their colleagues on Wednesday, have a caucus meeting and support this bill through to committee stage.
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