44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 14, 2023 10:00AM
- Feb/14/23 10:28:59 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, obviously what we are repeating is working, since that member repeated what we are repeating. It is definitely working. It is too bad the Bloc party will not stand with Canadians, will not stand with Quebeckers, to help lower the cost of living today that the collective parties have caused on Canadians. There is more pain today than ever. It is too bad they are not standing with those 1.5 million Canadians who are visiting a food bank in a single month, the one in five Canadians who needs to skip meals or the seniors who need to turn down the heat and use blankets because they cannot afford to heat their homes and buy groceries at the same time. Conservatives will continue to fight this unjust tax and make sure Canadians can keep on living and have the best way of life.
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- Feb/14/23 10:57:57 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I find it interesting that the Bloc Québécois is talking about consultants. The use of consultants is necessary in order to provide Canadians with services that meet their expectations. I do not understand why the Bloc is criticizing the federal government's use of consultants when the Government of Quebec, the government of Mr. Legault, uses the same consultants to provide services to Quebeckers. The Bloc does not seem to have a problem with that.
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- Feb/14/23 11:38:29 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it will be very refreshing to have our own national government in Quebec. Our economy will be based on the needs of Quebec and Quebec alone.
It is clear that Ottawa is hurting Quebec's development in all sectors. They are focusing their energies and centralizing, concentrating, health expenditures without taking into account what Quebeckers need. I find that problematic.
Ottawa is also causing a systemic slowdown, particularly in terms of housing, by signing agreements with Quebec two or three years after signing with Ontario. That, in my opinion, is the heart of the problem. A Quebec government by and for Quebeckers would be a magical solution.
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- Feb/14/23 1:14:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it takes a strong stomach to sit here in the House and listen to Conservatives tell us about inflation yet again. If we read between the lines, it is clear that this motion is about the carbon tax, as if we were not living in 2023 with climate change. The Conservatives do not see the problem and think we should continue to encourage oil and fossil fuel companies that do not contribute to clean-up efforts in any way.
As for the government, its talking points must be getting crumpled with use, because we keep hearing the same things over and over. The Liberals talk about the universal child care program, even though Quebec has had one for 27 years. The Liberals talk about the dental care program that no one asked for but that the government decided to put forward even though it will never be able to administer it. The Liberals also talk about the one-time $500 cheque for housing assistance, which 87,000 Quebeckers will not be eligible for because we have better social programs than elsewhere.
However, the government never talks about its inability to provide high-quality, timely services to citizens. Currently, workers and families have to wait six, seven, eight, 10 or 11 months to receive an EI cheque for which they have contributed. EI reform is not part of the Liberals' commitment.
I would like to see the government come up with real solutions to help workers and improve the quality of services, which it is not even able to deliver, instead of telling us how we should deliver our own.
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- Feb/14/23 3:30:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we on this side of the House are romantics, so I too wish everyone a happy Valentine's Day.
I am pleased to share my time with my colleague from Prince Albert.
I am very happy to speak today about this important motion introduced by my colleague from Calgary Forest Lawn. I congratulate him on it. I think he has done an outstanding job.
Unfortunately, the Bloc member for Longueuil—Saint‑Hubert is criticizing us for speaking often and extensively about the cost of living. In my opinion, it is our duty as members of Parliament to discuss these things. These concerns and issues worry and trouble the lives of our constituents, Canadians and especially Quebeckers.
I will read part of the motion, because it contains extremely important elements that can never be repeated too often to get the government to see reason. It reads as follows:
(i) after eight years of this Liberal Prime Minister, inflation is at a 40-year high, (ii) after eight years of this Liberal Prime Minister, the cost of groceries is up 11%, (iii) after eight years of this Liberal Prime Minister, half of Canadians are cutting back on groceries, (iv) after eight years of this Liberal Prime Minister, 20% of Canadians are skipping meals, (v) after eight years of this Liberal Prime Minister, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment across Canada’s 10 biggest cities is $2,213 per month, compared to $1,171 per month in 2015...
I would like to remind the House that 2015 is the year the Liberals came to power with the current Prime Minister.
...(vi) after eight years of this Liberal Prime Minister, 45% of variable rate mortgage holders say they will have to sell or vacate their homes in less than nine months due to current interest rate levels, (vii) after eight years of this Liberal Prime Minister, average monthly mortgage costs have more than doubled and now cost Canadians over $3,000 per month...
I will keep it short because there may be more information to be shared from our colleague's very important motion. What we are ultimately asking the government to do is stop spending recklessly so that our economy can get back on track.
I am going to address some very specific elements of the cost of living, ones that affect different sectors, whether it is housing, groceries, or other aspects of people's daily lives.
On the overall economic front, I would like to remind the House that the Prime Minister of this Liberal government is the one who has single-handedly run up more deficits than all previous prime ministers of Canada. That is a lot of money. Somebody, somewhere, has to pay for that. We must also remember that the federal debt has doubled since the Liberal government took office.
I would also like to remind the House that this Liberal government has never managed to table a balanced budget. It repeatedly told us that there would be just small deficits for a time, not for all time. In the end, that has not been the case.
Experts have issued a warning to the government. It will have to rein in its spending if it wants to avoid adding further inflationary pressures. I am not the one saying this, but rather the experts. Still, we know that this Prime Minister almost never listens to anyone. In a report published in January, the Business Council of Canada and the firm Bennett Jones said that the forecasts in the last budget were overly optimistic. Not only do the Liberals not know how to count, but they are throwing money around like it grows on trees.
Let us talk about the state of mind of Quebeckers. I am a Quebecker, so I would like to talk about what is going on in Quebec. I should mention that their state of mind is at its worst. According to a Leger survey, Quebeckers are going into 2023 with a high level of stress, and their number one concern is the impact of rising consumer prices.
The Bloc Québécois has the nerve to stand up in the House and tell us that we are repeating ourselves and that we need to stop talking about this, when this is the number one concern of Quebeckers right now.
Furthermore, over 20% of respondents are worried about not having enough money and said that increased interest rates are problematic.
I want to quote a worker at the Association coopérative d'économie familiale de la Rive-Sud de Québec, a well-known organization in Quebec that helps Quebeckers ensure that they have a budget that they can stick to. The worker said this, and I quote: “People are very stressed about this. Before, they used to ask us how they would get by. Now they are telling us that they are not getting by anymore”.
Let us talk now about businesses. The results of a recent study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business were released this week. According to that study, 73% of Quebec's small businesses, about three-quarters, said that they will have to raise their prices to deal with inflation.
If businesses raise their prices, Canadian and Quebec consumers who need to purchase goods and services are the ones who will be affected in their everyday lives. Quebec businesses are now telling us that things are so bad that they will be forced to raise prices for consumers once again. Obviously, this will have a major impact on Quebeckers' wallets.
The study also found that just over half of companies, nearly 60%, plan to work longer hours to reduce labour costs. This really bothers many businesses.
There is a lot of information in this survey, and one statistic that was really troubling to me was this: 43% of SMEs plan to temporarily reduce their profit margins in order to remain competitive, and 32% of SMEs are going to reduce their investments and growth forecasts. What does this mean in concrete terms?
The vitality of a society is also measured by the vitality of its businesses. If businesses do not have confidence in the future, but rather fear it, they stop investing. It is not hard to see what this means. When a business stops investing, it is because it does not have confidence in the future. A lack of confidence disrupts society's economic balance.
Do I have to remind the House that Canada is in the middle of a major housing crisis? Young adults are sleeping in their parents' basement because they cannot afford a house. What are the consequences of that? It puts pressure on the rental market and drives rents up.
House prices have doubled in the past eight years. If I remember correctly, prices have gone up 21% in and around Quebec City. If we cannot house our people, we have a real problem. The cost of housing has gone up way too much, and now people, young families, cannot afford a house. Not only are they living in their parents' basement, but some students resort to shelters because they have nowhere else to go and not enough money for decent housing.
In closing, I want to touch on the environment. The government loves to crow about its environmental record. Not to rain on its parade, but I would like to see it set a more ambitious agenda in that department.
After eight years of Liberal rule, Canada is ranked 58th out of 63 countries in the fight against climate change, according to the UN. The government must carry out a full review of all the bad decisions it has made and its entire vision, because it is the wrong one and is getting us nowhere.
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- Feb/14/23 3:43:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that was more of a comment than a question. I am rather surprised to hear the Bloc Québécois criticizing us today for wanting to talk about the cost of living and about how badly Canadians and Quebeckers are suffering because of what is currently happening in Canada, with high costs and families overburdened by tax hikes and increased housing costs.
What we are proposing is to make sure that we are spending in a smart and careful way. For every dollar spent, there must be a dollar found in savings.
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- Feb/14/23 5:01:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will take a few seconds to remind or inform my colleagues that this is the first St. Valentine's Day that the NDP and the Liberals have spent together since they struck their alliance. I wish them a happy Valentine's Day.
We, in the Bloc Québécois, are sovereignists, and we want Quebec to be its own country. We would like Quebec to make its own decisions and choices. There are many reasons for that, historical and institutional reasons, but we also want to be efficient.
In Quebec, we are against duplication. We believe that doing the same work twice, once in Quebec City and once in Ottawa, is not a good thing. It is not a good use of resources. I can see my Conservative colleagues nodding. That is a good thing because today we are faced with the duplication of previous motions.
This is the fifth or sixth identical motion. This unnecessary duplication, this waste of energy, is something we have seen before in the House of Commons. It is the same thing every Conservative opposition day. Economists call this looking for economies of scale. An economy of scale means trying to always produce the same thing with less and less effort. Lucky for us, it takes less and less effort to give them the same answers. Obviously they get paid big money just to copy and paste, in other words, to hit “control c” and “control v”. We already voted against a virtually identical motion last week. I would say that I am throwing their motion in the garbage bin, but even the garbage bin might vote against that.
We will talk about the motion for a few minutes. The diagnosis within the motion is not entirely false. It is true that there is inflation. It is true that Canadian families are facing a crisis. It is true that times are hard because many people are struggling. We have to think about those people. It is true that the inflation rate is at its highest since 1982. It was over 10% in 1982. It is roughly 6% today. The motion is a little overblown, but there we are.
However, what the Conservatives forgot to say is that if we do not consider energy and food, which are important components, the core inflation rate used by the Bank of Canada is 5.5%. The price of fossil fuel energy has increased by 28%.
Once again, the Conservatives think that attacking the carbon tax, which does not even apply in Quebec, is the solution to all our woes. Instead, we need to take measures to start an energy transition, so that the next time there is a crisis, we do not end up with a 22nd, 23rd and 24th identical motion. Surely it is clear why we are uncomfortable.
The reason the Conservatives can afford to keep tabling the same motion over and over is because the Liberals did little to help families during the crisis. True, there were some measures. They increased the Canada child benefit and so on. However, those measures were planned before the crisis. Very little was done. They did double the GST credit, something the Bloc had been asking for for months. We also asked that cheques be sent out more frequently, but that has not been done.
The Liberals are complacent. They spend too much time talking and not enough time helping people. That is why the Conservatives' populism, as expressed in yet another of these motions, is unfortunately beginning to gain credence among groups of people who are not always well informed.
One good thing about the Conservatives' motion is that at least we get an opportunity to talk about the federal government's efficiency in delivering services. We get to talk about the efficiency of the machinery of government and McKinsey. We will discuss that later.
I just want to say that inefficiency, especially in the form of duplication, is rampant in Ottawa. I would like the government to explain to me why it costs two and a half times more to process an EI claim than it does to process a social assistance application in Quebec, and that is the truth. That is a 250% markup on processing.
Why does it cost four times more to handle and process a passport application in the federal bureaucracy than it does for the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec to deliver a driver's licence? Of course, a driver's licence is not a passport, but that is 400% more. These are not unreasonable comparisons. This is a major problem.
Members talked about duplication, and I want to talk about federal government costs that have doubled or even tripled.
We know that Ottawa duplicates some things that Quebec already does. That management could be decentralized. There will be further discussion on the single income tax statement and the duplication of taxation centres. That is one thing.
Yesterday, the procurement ombudsman appeared before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates. Based on what we heard, ministers can indeed subcontract work, even if the public service is available and has the skills needed to do the work. The work can be subcontracted to companies such as McKinsey.
I asked him if, during his audits, he identified whether work that public servants could have done had been subcontracted. Quebeckers and Canadians will not pay just once or twice, but three times. He responded that his work was rather to ensure that, when taxpayers get ripped off and pay twice, pre-established rules are followed. In other words, we will be ripped off in accordance with the rules. That is exactly how it works. I invite people to listen to the ombudsman's testimony yesterday.
There are ways to ensure that the machinery of government operates more efficiently. Are these solutions contained in the Conservative motion? I read it three times. It was quite painful but I did it, and I noted that it does not contain any solutions, so we will be voting against this motion.
There is another thing that is niggling at me. It bothers me, and I feel uncomfortable. The Conservatives and the Liberals both know that not all inflation is created equal. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, whom the Conservatives love to quote every 15 minutes, said and showed that the trajectory of the federal government's debt-to-GDP ratio would drop over the coming years. It could actually reach 10% of GDP, maybe even 0% of GDP, depending on the budget, in a few decades.
The federal government's long-term public finances are healthy, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer showed that the provinces' finances, which cover health, are going to be in bigger and bigger trouble. They are in trouble because the cost of the system, even before the inflationary crisis, was increasing at a rate of 5.5% to 6% per year. That is before any increase in the cost of nurses, orderlies and all the other inputs involved in health care systems.
Now there is a new agreement being imposed. I do not know of many marriages that are entered into legally and with mutual consent with this type of agreement. It is an agreement imposed by one side only. It is so stingy that the Conservatives have decided to support it. When inflation affects the sick people who are waiting in hospital corridors, people whose cancer diagnosis or treatment is pushed back a month, two months or three months, or families who will lose loved ones, inflation is the least of their concerns. All they want is to adopt austerity policies.
What will the Conservatives cut? Will they cut help for seniors, like the Liberals did for seniors aged 65 to 74? They will make cuts to the energy transition, obviously. As far as employment insurance is concerned, they are not proposing anything for people who have to deal with the spring gap. They are even proposing that pensions be reduced because they want to offer premium holidays. The Conservatives are going to force future retirees into poverty, and when they turn to Ottawa for help in 20 or 30 years' time, they will be told that the government needs to make cuts and will not help them. With the Conservatives, it is two layers of trouble, not one.
Workable solutions exist. The Bloc Québécois has put forward proposals. We have been doing so for a year and a half. We proposed GST and QST cheques. In cases such as the McKinsey affair, we are always there to ensure that we do not pay double or triple and that taxpayers get their money's worth. When it is time to defend the competence of our public service, the Bloc Québécois is always there.
When it is the Bloc opposition day, we are always accused of raising useless subjects. We are told that people are not interested in what we want to discuss.
In conclusion, I will explain why we are capable of talking about other things. It is because we do not move the same motion seven times. We understand things right away, and it gives us the time to think about other things. The Conservatives want to be in government. The people sitting in this place want to be ministers, but they are not even able to walk and chew gum at the same time. What will they do? Will there be 2,000 seats in the House and 22 parliamentary secretaries for each minister so they can think about two things at once? No, thank you.
For their next opposition day, I invite them to think about their motion, to speak to the other opposition parties and to ensure that the door is not slammed in their face for the eighth or ninth time. That way, they will stop crying and blaming the other parties.
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- Feb/14/23 5:14:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague keeps doing the same thing while hoping for different results. He did not listen to my speech.
When we say that we need solutions to permanently increase the incomes of Quebeckers and Canadians, and when we say that, during a crisis, we need to offer people temporary assistance to get through the crisis—
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- Feb/14/23 5:21:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if my colleague thinks he can keep doing the same thing over and over with different results, he is clearly not listening to our proposals to permanently increase the incomes of Quebeckers and Canadians. We must give temporary help to those who are going through this crisis, and we must undertake an energy transition.
I wish the Conservatives good luck with the eighth, ninth and tenth motions. I will be happy to debate them.
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