44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 6, 2023 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise to speak to Bill C-47 at report stage.
I want to share some reflections, particularly about the process the bill has undergone in its journey in the House of Commons and some of the debate that has arisen today on the subject of the bill. I apologize that the thoughts are not in any particular order, but there are some things that are nevertheless worth noting about the bill.
If you were to listen to the debate today and you were a Canadian who had not studied the bill, you might be under the impression that the recent increase in the carbon tax is somehow in this bill. It is important to say that it is not. There has been a fair bit of confusion around that, given the focus of the debate.
You might also think that a lot of the major spending items the government committed to in its budget are in this bill, or you might even think that this bill is the budget itself, given the nature of some of the conversation that has been had around the bill.
It is important to distinguish between the budget itself, which was already debated and voted on in this House some time ago, and budget implementation bills, which do not always legislate commitments from the most recent budget. In fact, sometimes they go back to previous budgets, but effectively, when the government is ready to move on some previous budget commitments and there is legislative work that needs doing, this is what we see in the budget implementation bills. There are some items from the most recent budget in this bill. There are some items from previous budgets in this bill.
One of the things that is important to emphasize is that as far as spending authority goes—that is, this bill giving permission to government to spend taxpayer money—there is not anywhere near the level of spending in this bill that some have said there is. For instance, even in respect of the dental program, this bill does not authorize the money for the dental program. It does have some legislative measures to facilitate the program, ultimately, once it is ready to be operationalized, like better sharing of information between government departments so that they can that ensure people who are making claims under the program are properly eligible.
In other words, there are some provisions designed to ensure eligibility up front and to move away from the attestation system, which is something Conservatives have said they do not like, and that there should be upfront checks of eligibility so people do not mistakenly receive benefits that then need to be clawed back. That is something this legislation seeks to do.
This legislation would reduce the excise tax increase that was going to be 6.3%, because it was tied to inflation through an automatic escalator, down to 2%. That is not a spending item. It is a reduction of government revenue, because it reduces a tax. It reduces a tax that Conservatives said they wanted to see reduced and takes on a tax increase that they thought was inappropriate in the circumstances. We agreed with that as New Democrats and we are glad to see that small brewers and small vineyards across Canada that are facing difficult times are not going to be hit with an outsized increase in the excise tax. However, that is only true if this legislation passes.
This legislation would also close a lot of loopholes in tax law and other law that is used by money launderers in order to avoid paying taxes and to mask their criminal activity. This bill would crack down on predatory lenders or payday loan places that are charging really inordinate amounts of interest. Canadians do not typically choose a payday loan centre as their first choice for banking. It is usually because they do not have a lot of options, and that is how they get there.
Somebody shared with me a statistic, and it was something like Canadians are 40% more likely to end up declaring bankruptcy if they just walk in the door of a payday loan place. There is clearly a close connection between payday lending and people on the financial margins. This bill seeks to do something about that by lowering the criminal rate of interest.
It also improves the Canada workers benefit, something that a colleague of mine on the finance committee likes to talk a lot about, which is the marginal effective tax rate for working-class Canadians and how it disincentivizes people to leave social assistance for work. That is his claim. He likes to reference the C.D. Howe Institute report to that effect. In fact, the changes to the Canada workers benefit would help reduce that marginal effective tax rate and make the transition from social assistance to employment easier.
The legislation also removes Russia and Belarus from a list of countries that get preferential tariffs for trading in Canada. In other words, it extends and strengthens sanctions that Canada has put in place since Russia's illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine. These are the things that are being held up. They are not being held up because there is another huge spend that goes along with them.
In fact, the biggest spending items in this bill were the doubling of the GST tax credit and $2 billion in health transfers to the provinces that was negotiated between the federal government and the provinces. That was by far the biggest direct spend in this legislation. With the consent and participation of the Conservatives, all parties in this House expedited another bill, Bill C-46, that had those spending items in it. There are now some coordinating amendments in this legislation to make sure we do not do the same thing twice.
The fact of the matter is that the biggest spending items, with the full participation and knowledge of the Conservatives, have already passed through the House of Commons. What is left are a number of administrative changes to set up the administrative infrastructure for the growth fund and some legal changes to facilitate the administration of a dental care program. This is not actually where the money is being authorized.
We would think that a former finance critic, which the leader of the Conservative Party is, would know that. We would think that the current finance critic might know that. Perhaps the finance critic for the Conservatives might have known that if he had bothered to show up much at committee during the Bill C-47 process, but apparently he had other things to do. He left it to other members of his caucus to hold down the fort while the finance committee was studying Bill C-47 to the extent that it did.
Of course, we did not do as much extensive study of that bill as I would have liked, because Conservatives chose to talk out the time we had. First they talked out the time we had for hearing witnesses. They did that in the lead-up to the Minister of Finance's appearance.
Was it on a grand principle? I am not sure. Did they have an important point? I think so. It is one that I supported on the record many times. I thought the minister should have committed to come for two hours. As it was, she came for an hour and 40 minutes, but she told us she would only come for an hour. I do not think that was helpful to the process. I think more forewarning by the minister about how long she was actually prepared to appear would have been more helpful.
In the end, it meant that the Conservatives chose to talk over all of the time that we would have had to hear from Canadians who are concerned and from stakeholders who represent various concerns.
Then there was an agreement at the committee to have a process to move to clause-by-clause study. It would have allowed us some time to debate the clauses and various amendments and subamendments. Instead, Conservatives chose to talk through that time as well. Then they said that they wanted to hear from witnesses after talking through all the time we had for witnesses. They say the agreement they signed on to with the Liberals to do clause-by-clause study provided for another 10 hours of witness testimony that they never got.
Did they raise it when we still had three or four days to hear from more witnesses and come to an understanding? No, they raised it afterward. All the time to hear from witnesses had elapsed, so they knew when they raised the issue that there was not going to be a positive outcome and that they were not going to get what they wanted, and then they repeated this kind of behaviour in the House.
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Mr. Speaker, I certainly think that carbon pricing is one piece of the puzzle. It is meant to be a kind of market tool.
Putting a price on carbon gives companies an incentive to come up with more ways to try to get carbon out of their supply chains so that they can offer a more competitive price. Folks will be more likely to buy those cheaper products, so companies that have a lower carbon supply chain are rewarded. That is the idea. It was not originally a left-wing idea; it was a kind of right-wing idea, designed by folks who are on the political right but who nevertheless accept the reality of climate change.
I would remind my Conservative colleagues that the oil and gas industry in Alberta was built with a lot of public funds and a lot of upfront public investment. In fact, a lot of public investment continues to go to the industry, which is why we know that if we want to shift the economy somewhere else, that too will require a lot of public investment.
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Mr. Speaker, I would note that New Democrats are quite firm in our belief that as we look at the record profits that oil and gas companies have been enjoying, we do not think that oil and gas companies should be able to walk away with that money and pay it out in dividends to their shareholders or squirrel it away in international tax havens, but that instead there should be an appropriate tax applied to oil and gas companies.
We, of course, have also been open to the idea of having some kind of a public utility board that would regulate the price of oil and gas. We recognize that long before the carbon tax, a long weekend was enough reason for oil and gas companies to jack up the price of oil and gas. We think that Canadians ought to be just as concerned about the advantage that those companies are taking of Canadians in their basic pricing structure; never mind what is added in tax.
There is a larger conversation to be had about how we get fair pricing for oil and gas. I think that the Conservatives' kind of monolithic focus on the carbon tax obscures a lot of ways that Canadians are getting screwed at the pump by oil and gas companies themselves in order to outsize their profits.
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Madam Speaker, earlier in his speech, the member complained that certain Conservative amendments were defeated at committee and then suggested that this was the result of a coalition. He said that there is a common ideology at work there.
I was at another committee recently where Liberals and Conservatives voted down NDP amendments to the air passenger bill of rights. When I voted against the new interswitching provisions, which are going to put railroad workers in Canada out of a job, Liberals and Conservatives voted together against me. I am just wondering what the common ideology was between Liberals and Conservatives and the coalition developing there, such that they decided to defeat NDP amendments together at committee.
Alternatively, would he rather say the truth, which is that sometimes parties have a common cause on certain issues and they vote together when they are working in the same direction and they vote against each other when they do not agree on certain things? Which is it?
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Madam Speaker, I am glad to have the opportunity to speak to this bill that seeks to create some permanence around the progress that has been made in respect of funding child care in Canada. I want to talk first about the policy, and then I want to talk a little bit about the politics of it.
We have heard a lot of stories here in the chamber tonight. I could add personal anecdotes about the challenges of child care. I will not, because I think we have heard many, and I think we all know that these experiences are common enough that Canadians can appreciate just how stressful it is for families, both in terms of financial stress and just the stress of having child care fall through. We had our kids in home day cares and then we had our kids in centre day cares. Especially when they were in home day cares, if the child care provider at home got sick, that would often mean scrambling the night before, or the morning of, to try to find replacement care. I think that one of the advantages of investing in not-for-profit centre spaces is that they do provide a degree of reliability that one cannot always get when it is one person in their home trying to provide care. It is still a valuable service, and I was grateful to be able to avail myself of that as a parent, and my wife was grateful, but we have also really appreciated the reliability that has come with transitioning to centre-based care.
Why is it that we need public investment in child care? Again, I think we have personalized the issue well enough. The fact of the matter is that, for a lot of parents, what they earn when they go to work is not enough to be able to pay a child care rate that is sufficient to pay people what they need in order to be able to make a living as an early child care educator. It is a classic case of market failure. If it were not, then at some point over the last 40, 50 or 60 years, we would have seen very successful businesses crop up to meet demand, but demand is not being met. It has been chronically unmet because there is a structural problem in the child care market, which is that too many parents cannot make enough money going to work to be able to pay fees that provide enough salary to attract, train and retain qualified early child care educators. That is really why it has been so important for so long for government to get involved.
Of course, provincial governments across the country have gotten involved in various ways. Quebec is, I think, the best example of organized publicly funded care. It is still not perfect, but it is certainly the best that is available in Canada. I come from a province, Manitoba, that has had a lot of investment over the years by NDP governments, frankly, in child care, and we enjoy the second-lowest child care rates in the country. We are one of very few provinces to have a pension plan available for early childhood educators. That was true even before this latest round of bilateral deals, which is not, by any stretch, to say that Manitoba is some kind of child care paradise. It is hard to find a space. It is still a big expense for families. It is hard to attract and retain workers in the field. All those problems still persist, despite being in a province that, on the numbers, is functioning relatively better than some other places in the country in terms of affordability and accessibility.
We need public investment in child care because the market is not satisfying persistent, long-standing demand. Not only that, but that demand for child care comes with a number of other problems for the larger economy, and that is why I heard some members earlier tonight reference studies that have been done. I have read similar studies. They show the economic activity generated by allowing those parents who want to go into the workforce to do so, by governments investing in child care, making more spaces available and making them more accessible by making them more affordable. Women, predominantly, without any kind of government subsidy for the rate they pay, cannot make enough at work to justify paying child care costs and still have something left over at the end of the day.
The amount of extra economic activity that generates would more than pay for the program. It is an important part of satisfying the demands we constantly hear from employers who are saying they need access to more workers. This is how we do it.
One of the ways we do it is by ensuring that the parents who do want to work can go ahead, get a job and know they will be able to get a spot at a rate that empowers them to go to work, take home enough of their paycheque after child care fees, and know it is worthwhile for them to do that.
It is not that these recent deals are a panacea. They do not fix all the problems. It is just a good start to something the government should have been doing decades ago.
I remember when I first ran for office in 2015. I was very proud to run on the idea of a national child care strategy. I watched as Conservatives dismissed the idea out of hand. They said it was not the business of government to be supporting child care or funding child care. Liberals, frankly, ran against it too. They said the provinces would never agree. It was just a pipe dream, it was silly NDP thinking. I am glad to see the thinking around that has changed.
I know we are debating this particular legislation and not just resting on our laurels with the bilateral deals that were signed because of the supply and confidence agreement that the NDP has with the government. It is a CASA item. There is a reason it is there.
It is because we did not want this to be a five-year experiment that would get truncated. We wanted this to be the first five years of an ongoing commitment to building up a child care system that adequately provides for the Canadian workforce so everyone who wants to go out, get a job and provide for their family, but needs child care to be able to do it, will be able to access a space. We are not there yet. We are not even close to there yet.
I know Conservatives would like to say that somehow the New Democrats are pretending that everybody has a spot now. It could not be further from the truth. We are very aware of the problems. Incidentally, I do not know how Conservatives could be blaming this legislation for the current state of affairs. It has not even passed yet. The bilateral deals were only signed about 12 months ago.
The idea that somehow this approach is to blame for the shortage of child care spaces is just a farce for anyone who is paying attention. This approach has not got off the ground yet. I do not want to just see this get off the ground as some kind of five-year trial period, and then the federal government wipes its hands and walks away.
What I want, and why this legislation is so important, is to see this as the first five years of an indefinite program that continues to deliver spaces for Canadian workers on an ongoing basis, not just for the workers' sake, but also for the employers' sake and for the sake of their families.
Yes, there is still a shortage of space. There will continue to be a shortage of spaces for a long time because we cannot just snap our fingers and create a child care system overnight, just as we cannot snap our fingers and create enough housing overnight to meet the demand that is out there.
It is why it is so important that we not waste time debating the value of having a strategy at all and jump full on into talking about what kind of strategy we should have. It is fair game for the Conservatives to disagree with certain elements of the strategy.
For my part, I think it is really important to emphasize non-profit care. Why is that? It is because what I do not want to take hold is the corporate model of child care. There are a few reasons for that.
One is that I think we will get better value for money if we are not already starting out from the point of view that 10% or more of the public dollars that we spend on child care are going to have to go to paying corporate profits. When we look at the corporate track record in long-term care and we compare it to non-profit long-term care, what we see is an appreciable difference in the nature of the care provided. We get better care at non-profit, long-term care centres.
I believe that the same incentive structure that is there for for-profit, long-term care centres to cut corners will also exist for for-profit child care centres to cut corners, and that is why it is important that we put an emphasis on not-for-profit care.
I have more to say, but unfortunately my time is up. Hopefully I will get to more of this in the question and comment portion.
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Madam Speaker, I certainly share that concern. As members have referenced already, we saw in 2006 that when the Conservatives had the opportunity to upend child care agreements that had been signed with the provinces, they did not hesitate for a moment; they went ahead and ripped those up. Then they instituted the $100 a month for parents, which presumably was the model they endorsed to create the kind of choice they are talking about tonight. However, we saw that this was not sufficient, and that was at a time when $100 a month went a lot further than it does now. That was not conducive to creating the kind of child care system we need in order to meet demand.
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Madam Speaker, I would remind the member that the vaccine mandates that put ECE workers out of work in Ontario were done by the Conservative government of Doug Ford. I would encourage her to contact her colleagues in the Conservative government there to talk about what kind of redress might be available for ECE workers who had to leave their job as a result of Conservative-imposed vaccine mandates in Ontario.
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Madam Speaker, there are two things I would say.
One is that the Harper government did do that with $100 a month, but it did not create the kinds of spaces that are required to meet demand, both for the sake of Canadian working families and for employers who want to see more workers available in the labour market.
I would add that one of the biggest beneficiaries of the child care program is actually employers. The New Democrats have been arguing for some time that Canada should not have a bottom-of-the-barrel corporate tax rate of 15%. We are quite open to the idea of having a higher corporate tax rate and ensuring that it is the employers who will be benefiting from having more workers available in the economy who are helping to pay for these child care investments.
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