44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 27, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, my colleague and I are members of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. I also studied the budget from a security perspective. I realize that not enough is being done, as she said, to counter gun violence.
Yes, we are working on Bill C‑21. There are good things in there. Is this going to solve all the problems? Unfortunately not and it is certainly not going to solve the problem of illicit firearms trafficking.
For months, the Bloc Québécois has been proposing that more people work together and that we create a sort of squad of New York police officers, Akwesasne Mohawk police officers, police officers from the Sûreté du Québec, police officers from Ontario and Border Services officers. They also need to be given more resources.
When these people appear in committee, they tell us that guns are crossing the border and they do not have the resources to stop it. Does the member think that the government is putting money in the right place?
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House to speak about such an important democratic exercise, specifically the budget and its implementation. A budget provides a framework and a guide for the government's policy agenda. It is normally quite thick and takes a while to analyze. This bill is huge, I have to say. The government has thrown a lot in there. This type of bill is called an omnibus bill.
There are many items in the budget, but a lot of reading between the lines is still needed. The government announces things without really describing them, so we have to guess what its intentions are, what those things mean and when they will be implemented.
In this budget, I noticed that the government wants to differentiate between the investments that have already been announced and those that are forthcoming. To do that, it is putting different markers at the start of each line. Checkmarks are used for investments that have already been announced. That implies that it has been done. Arrows are used for upcoming investments. When I flip through the budget, I see a lot of checkmarks. That means that the government is announcing things a second time. That is a rather odd strategy. Announcing an investment twice does not double the amount. That is not how it works. The government needs to stop treating us like fools.
It is difficult to see what new announcements this government is making. For example, in the housing section, all we see are checkmarks. There is nothing more for the regions of Quebec, despite the fact that they too are experiencing a housing crisis. The housing crisis is not something that is only happening in big cities. There is a crisis in the largest regions of Quebec and in the smallest, and I am sure that the same is true elsewhere in Canada. Unfortunately, the funding is not reaching the smaller regions.
I do not like it when politicians criticize everything all the time. We see this every day, and I believe it does nothing to counter the cynicism people feel toward politics and toward elected members who find fault with everything.
I looked at the budget that was brought down in Quebec City shortly before the one in Ottawa. The opposition parties had some harsh criticisms. They ranted and raved, saying there was nothing good in the budget. I decided I would do my homework and acknowledge the good things when it was Ottawa's turn. It is nice for our constituents to see us commend things instead of always criticizing the government. It is nice to note the positive things, the aspects that are good, while pointing out what could have been done better.
When I received the federal budget, I realized that it would be hard to point out the good things because there are not that many, especially when I look at what Quebeckers were asking for. Often, what the Bloc Québécois suggests aligns with what Quebeckers are asking for. What Quebeckers want is what we are going to bring forward and ask for in the House of Commons.
As I was saying, the bill includes nothing for housing, nothing for seniors, nothing about the EI reform we have been asking for for years, and no long-term solution to health care underfunding. I am willing to recognize the good points, but is it that hard to meet the public's expectations?
Still, I did want to go through the process of trying to find good things in this budget. For example, the government seems to want to resolve, once and for all, the uncertainty around the calculation of the taxable capital gain on intergenerational transfers of small and medium-sized businesses, especially farms. That is good. At last, this is happening. Farmers have been talking to us about this issue for a long time. Will it be resolved soon? We hope so.
Another good thing in Bill C-47 is that the government is planning to establish a real employment insurance board of appeal by incorporating elements of Bill C-37, which was introduced before the holidays. Great, that is a good thing. That is progress.
However, in all honesty, what we would have liked to see is nothing less than EI reform. That is what we have been asking for for years. Every year, unemployed workers' advocacy groups in every region of Quebec are promised that EI reform is coming and that it will be in the budget. They have been hearing this since well before 2015. Every time a budget is tabled, these groups realize they have once again been taken for a ride.
Need I remind the House that about 60% of people who lose their jobs cannot get EI, even if they paid into it with every paycheque? Need I also remind the House that it is worse for women and youth because many of them work in non-standard jobs?
The only other EI measure in the budget is a one-year extension of the pilot projects to provide an extra five weeks of benefits in regions where seasonal work is particularly prevalent.
We can hope that this is good news for our ridings, but obviously there is a “but” because only unemployed workers who have access to EI can benefit from that. As I was saying, unfortunately, 60% of seasonal workers are excluded from the program. Yes, it is a good measure, but there is always a “but”.
The problem is that the measures are temporary and ill-conceived. That is what workers in my area have been complaining about for years. We wonder whether it would be possible for the government to have a more long-term vision, or any kind of vision at all, really. The government seems to think only about tomorrow, not about what might happen in the coming years. It cannot keep using one-time cheques and temporary measures, because that will never really solve the problems that have been going on for far too long.
It is a little disappointing, and it is kind of symptomatic of this government. I believe that it would not be that difficult to put in place a more well-thought-out measure, one that might perhaps take more than two weeks to create. I understand that EI reform cannot be done quickly, but people have been proposing solutions for years, and everyone has been weighing in and saying that there are solutions and they just need to be implemented.
I will quickly address another point that my colleagues have already brought up. This is the proof that this whole thing is half-baked. Bill C-47 contains items that were in Bill C-46. We thought this meant that the GST would be doubled once again and that there would be an extra $2‑billion top-up for the health transfer. It was a nice surprise for us, but it was actually just a little mistake. When Bill C‑46 was passed last week, the government forgot to remove those items from Bill C‑47. These are really rookie mistakes.
I will now talk a bit about the environment. I see that time is flying and I have a lot of things to say. The government is announcing significant sums of money for the transition to a low-carbon economy. We are talking about $80 billion over 10 years. That is a lot of cash.
To me, the energy transition means transforming our energy sources, our economic model, our consumption habits and our vision of production. That, in my opinion, is where we should be investing our money, but that is not all the government's vision. No, the government says it wants to continue to do everything the same way, but by polluting less. Obviously, we wonder how that could be done and how we can do the same thing and hope for a different result. How can we increase production while lowering greenhouse gas emissions? The government says it will be easy with carbon capture and storage technologies. Oh, that is interesting.
Now we are left to wonder whether it actually works. No one knows, because it is virtually non-existent in Canada. The Minister of Environment himself said in a Radio-Canada interview in 2021 that he wanted to lower expectations around this technology. He said that the government wanted to invest in these technologies, but added that it must be understood that nothing will happen overnight. He said that this is not the best way to reduce our emissions over the next few years. He also said we are going to need a lot of new technologies in the years to come, including things like carbon capture and storage. He said we are several years away, maybe a decade, from commercial use. That is what the minister said in 2021.
Between you and me, I would not count on it too much. This is the same government that announced in its 2015-19 policy agenda that it would ban single-use plastics by 2021. However, that ban was only put in place a few weeks ago, and it is 2023, so we will not put too much stock in that. Considering that Canada began developing this technology in 2021, perhaps we can hope that it will be ready for 2031.
The problem is that the government has set greenhouse gas reduction targets, and the next milestone year is 2030.
The government's plan for 2030 is to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% to 45%. The Minister of Environment often says that our emissions are going down, but everyone knows that was because of the pandemic. Even in 2020, emissions started to go up again due to transportation and oil and gas production.
I see my time is up, and I am ready to answer questions about the environment.
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- Apr/27/23 6:45:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, they should be proposing something. When I look at the section on housing in the budget, I do not see anything new. I see nothing new for the regions of Quebec, nothing new for the Lower St. Lawrence, nothing new for the Gaspé.
I would certainly like to support a national housing strategy, but the money has to be made available. It is not just major cities that are affected. Housing, affordable housing and social housing, is not going to get built by re-announcing amounts of money that have already been announced. There is a need for housing across Canada. The need is great in Quebec and in the regions. However, the money is not there, so it is difficult to support it.
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- Apr/27/23 6:46:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her extremely important question. I have two first nations communities in my riding, so I am well aware of the issues. I know that they too are facing housing challenges.
This is nothing new. It has been an issue for a long time. We keep bringing it to the attention of the federal government, which throws us a few crumbs in the hope that they will solve all the problems. It is definitely not enough. As my colleague mentioned, we will not see any of that money before 2024.
I think the government could be more proactive in addressing the country's housing needs, in both indigenous and non-indigenous communities. The need is great. We are seeing it more and more. The government could certainly have done more with this budget.
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- Apr/27/23 6:47:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for giving me the opportunity to continue talking about that, because it is extremely interesting. I was talking about how many megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions Canada produces. It was 670 megatonnes in 2021. Our levels are obviously lower than they were in 2005, which is good, but it is important to remember that, when we say we want to reduce our greenhouse emissions by 40% or 45% by 2030, it is compared to the number for that base year. When we look at the overall picture right now, we have only reduced our emissions by 8.4%. We have a long way to go, and 2030 is not that far off.
We often hear the Minister of Environment and Climate Change say that we are a quarter of the way there and that everything is going well. When we are at 8.4% and we are trying to reach a target of 45%, I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that we are a quarter of the way there, particularly when this budget is focusing on technologies that have not yet proven to be effective. It is being said that these technologies will be ready in 10 years and that they will start giving results in 10 years. By then, 2030 will have come and gone. What are we actually relying on to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?
I think that investing in these technologies is an underhanded way of continuing to give public funds to oil and gas companies. We are telling them to continue to produce but to pollute less as they do so.
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