44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 5, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I am sure it will come as no surprise that I totally disagree with what the member is saying. He is making it very clear that he is in opposition to this legislation. For clarification purposes, does the member intend to vote against this legislation?
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Madam Speaker, I first want to congratulate the member. I know his daughter was elected to the Manitoba legislature this week as the only Liberal in a legislature of 57 seats. Nevertheless, I congratulate his daughter.
What I am against is a government bringing legislation to make Canadians believe it is doing something when it is not. This bill is called the affordable housing and groceries act, but it has nothing to do with making groceries and housing more affordable as—
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- Oct/5/23 12:51:44 p.m.
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We will continue with questions and comments.
The hon. member for Drummond.
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Madam Speaker, I always find it interesting to listen to my Conservative colleagues bash the Liberal government—rightly so most of the time, and I am not suggesting that they are not good at it. However, rarely do we hear anything in the Conservatives' speeches other than criticism of the government's inaction or misdeeds. Rarely do we hear them come up with concrete solutions. There is $900 million of housing money sitting in Ottawa's coffers. It is earmarked for Quebec City to address the housing shortage.
Does my Conservative colleague agree that the federal government should hurry up and release this money unconditionally so that we can find housing for people who do not have a roof over their head and build housing to alleviate the crisis that is currently raging in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada?
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Madam Speaker, I agree with my colleague that tangible and effective action needs to take place now more than ever to get housing built. This bill would not do that. An amendment to the Competition Act would not get houses built. While a 5% reduction on the GST is something that I could get my head around supporting, the reality is that it is not going to solve the housing crisis and get the millions of houses built that we need by 2030.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for bringing up the Manitoba election. It gives me a chance to congratulate Wab Kinew as the new premier of Manitoba. He is the first indigenous premier in our country.
My colleague talked about a sham and sheer propaganda. Let us talk about that when it comes to housing. He did not talk about the 30% corporatization of the housing market that is driving up market forces. He did not talk about the profiteering that is taking place and that the free-market approach has not worked. In fact, he did not talk about the Greenbelt scandal in Ontario.
What are the federal Conservatives going to do differently than the Doug Ford Conservatives to ensure we do not have another Greenbelt scandal? They talk about selling off public lands and public buildings. What are they going to do to ensure that it does not end up in the pockets of developers? Public lands belong in public hands.
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Madam Speaker, if that member had his way, every single house and apartment building in Canada would be owned by the government. We know that government across the country is the worst landlord of them all.
I believe in the private sector building houses. That is the way it has been done throughout our history. In the 1970s, the federal government brought in, for example, the MURB program that incentivized hundreds of thousands of homes to be built. We are not going to do it the socialist way. We are going to leverage the free market to get homes built in our country.
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Madam Speaker, I was prompted to put my hand up to ask a question when the member said that the current Liberal government was responsible for inflation. I hope the hon. member will take this question in the spirit in which it is intended, which is non-partisan.
I am plenty angry with the Liberal government and the Prime Minister for many things, but I do not think it is reasonable to say that the Prime Minister is responsible for Putin invading Ukraine, for climate crises around the world that have impacted accessibility and the cost of various food stuffs, for supply chain disruptions all around the world or for the post-pandemic impacts on food production. There are multiple reasons why we are facing rising prices and they are not exclusively within Canada.
I would like the member to reconsider—
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- Oct/5/23 12:56:09 p.m.
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I have to give the hon. member the opportunity to answer.
The hon. member for Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley.
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Madam Speaker, a simple Google search by her about economists and quantitative easing increasing the money supply will confirm to her what economists have been saying for a long time, which is that increasing the money supply by $600 billion has diluted the value of our currency and that is primarily driving inflation in Canada.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today with respect to Bill C-56, an act to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Competition Act, and I will get into those two components.
It has been an interesting debate in the House, hearing various land barons talk about affordable living for other people who have to rent from them. However, the mixture of our market right now has brought us to this situation. That mixture of the market was abandoned by then Paul Martin, when we lost our housing initiatives. Since then, the recovery process has been brutal and that lack of stock has led to the problems we have right now in a free-market system.
On top of that, in communities like Windsor, Tecumseh and Essex around my riding, a lot of building has taken place, but they have been more affluent homes, more on the higher end of the market for the profit margins to be higher. That has been one of the problems. We have lost co-operative and other types of housing units that really should have been built during that time frame. Therefore, even when we have had an increase in housing stock, it has not led to the things we want.
Today, at least we are trying to do something with respect to it. It is not a great bill, but it is something coming forward on which we have some unanimity in the House of Commons. The GST is something that even the Conservatives think the they could agree with, which is ironic, because the Conservatives, going back in history, brought in the GST under Brian Mulroney and brought in the HST under Stephen Harper. In fact, we are still paying for that. When the HST was brought in, the government had to grease a couple of provinces to come on board and we had to borrow billions of dollars, on which we are still paying interest.
I have an updated Parliamentary Budget Office paper and also a House of Commons Library of Parliament paper, which is updated every year to show how much interest we are paying from Harper bringing in the HST, and borrowing billions of dollars. We borrowed billions of dollars to bring in a new tax on Canadians.
Therefore, when the Conservatives talk about taxation, they need to keep their history in check. It is good that they are owning up to the GST issue and these regressive taxes that have been put on Canadians. We even had an election at one point in time when the Liberals and Conservatives talked about getting rid of the GST. We can see it still has not happened in the fullness of time, but at least in this instance we are going to support the waiving of the GST tax for new builds. There is a problem, though, that we have to monitor. Are those savings going to be passed on to consumers who are renters and to other people in the market purchasing those homes.
There need to be real incentives to build those homes. To this day, many people enjoy what is called “wartime housing”. After the Second World War, smaller units, with two to three bedrooms, were built and these were affordable for veterans. Those units now have had additional components built on to them or they have stayed the same. They are still very much part of a good market for many people, including in my riding where we have had a lot of veterans, some who served most recently in Afghanistan and other theatres. Windsor, Ontario has always done its part, going back to the War of 1812. We even contributed support for all kinds of different wars and conflicts, and for peace. We still have housing stock from World War II that has never been followed up on, which is a real issue with regard to our veterans, but thank goodness those housing units are there.
I would point out the new residential rebate, which is important. It is probably going to have to get through the Senate, so we are looking at more delays. When we are looking at an opportunity to get something done, we are probably looking at the new year for this. We have a housing crisis right now, so the response of this chamber is at least a modest improvement. However, not everybody in this chamber is willing to support this bill and get it done as quickly as possible. Therefore, we are going to continue to inflate the problem because the bill is going to take some time to get through.
The other component in the bill is the amendment to the Competition Act, which is really important. As I mentioned in a previous debate, the Competition Act needs massive updating. I am really pleased that my leader, the member for Burnaby South, has tabled legislation to fix the Competition Act in some respects.
This bill is going to have a few components too. It would “establish a framework for the Minister of Industry to direct the Commissioner of Competition to conduct an inquiry into the state of competition in a market”, which is important; “permit the Competition Tribunal to make certain orders...to an agreement or arrangement...to prevent or lessen competition; and repeal the exception in section 96 of the Act involving efficiency gains brought about by mergers.” The last one is a bit more technical, but basically the “efficiency gains” argument is really outdated in Canada.
We can prove that it would be less competition if there were a merger, and the Competition Bureau can prove that as well, but at the same time the merger can go ahead at the expense of people just because there would be a better profit margin. Therefore, we need to get rid of that altogether.
One thing that is really interesting about the situation we have right now is that both Conservative and Liberal governments have constantly allowed mergers to take place, resulting in the loss of Canadian jobs. We had the Lowe's takeover of Rona. We have seen where that has backfired. Some of the Rona stores are now being reopened.
Target took over Zellers, and then Target closed all its stores. By the way, at the time of the takeover, Zellers was the only department store making money and had benefits for its workers. The workers were paid about 12% more than other department stores. It was a Canadian-owned operation. The Liberal government allowed the takeover to take place. We lost all those stores. Target closed in Canada and moved back, south of the border. It was a complete and utter disaster.
There have been others. We watched Future Shop be taken over by Best Buy. Now there is a lack of competition now in the electronics sector. Future Shop was a Canadian icon store, gone. Now we have the Best Buy option and Amazon online, and very little competition.
I could go on and on about some of the different things that have been allowed to be taken over, basically leading to a lack of competition.
I want to highlight a couple of things with regard to the grocery store retail industry, which is another part of what are fighting for. This is going to help in that situation as well.
The CEOs of the grocery stores came before the industry committee and we questioned them. Unbelievably, on the same day, all three of the major chains cut their hero pay, which was paid during the pandemic, on the very same day. There are still issues out there.
Right now in the retail sector, several different things are taking place. In fact, we can look at some of the media stories coming out. Global and Mike Drolet did a good piece on theft in the retail market, how it was changing, how some stores were closing, not only in the United States but in other places, also potentially here, and the way that stores looked at and handled some things.
I bring this up because it is not a victimless crime. It raises the price of all groceries, with respect to theft and the types of behaviour taking place. Also, the same workers, who were the heroes during the pandemic, have to face increased and complicated situations at the workplace, either defending the products, feeling that they are compromised or having confrontations with customers. What is taking place is very important; it is a culture change.
We can look at the obvious things these grocery store chains have done in the past, such as fixing the price of bread, an important staple for children going to school and for families to survive. They colluded, like the robber barons of the past, to fix the price of bread. There was not only a lack of competition, but there was a coordinated approach on one of the basic human staples, increasing prices for Canadians. What happened? The grocery store chains got a slap on the wrist because of current competition issues.
The government responded by saying that it brought the CEOs in and asked them to at least hold the prices, to hold the line. What a garbage stance that is from the government.
Let us go back in history and look at some of the things that have taken place. Even the Liberal government had issues with its own in calling for corporate tax cut reductions until recently. In fact, some of the former Liberal leadership said that it did not cut taxes fast enough. That was their competition.
These grocery store icons, which enjoy monopolies in Canada, had a reduction of corporate tax at that time. At the same time, these CEOs with big pays were fixing the price of bread. There are other types of malfeasance going on with regard to their operations. They have also been known, as I mentioned, to actually push their workers the hardest and, frankly, in some of the most despicable ways possible.
All three of the grocery store chains cancelled hero pay at the same time. Not only does that stink to high heaven, it tells us the disdain they have for their workers. They had no shame in this whatsoever. There was no shame whatsoever when they were in front of the committee, saying that this was just the way they did business, that it was okay.
This bill is a modest improvement. As members in the House, we have the control to get something done on the GST with regard to housing, as well as on increased competition in Canada. Between the grocery retailers, the telcos and others, we need competition and we need it now.
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Madam Speaker, I really appreciate the comments and advocacy for additional affordable housing resources. I served for several decades as a municipal councillor and looked to higher levels of government for increased spending. It did not come from the province for two decades, it certainly did not come from the federal government for the 26 years that I was a member of city council. It was not until this government arrived and created a national housing strategy that we have seen record investment.
While I take the criticism that we can always do more, it is important to emphasize that we have made investments in municipalities across the country. We have invested a lot in Windsor-Essex through the co-investment fund. That was a $90-million investment. The rapid housing initiative was a $20-million investment.
Everyone gets up and bemoans the fact that we need to do more for housing. I completely get it, but there needs to be some recognition of what the government has done with regard to making historic investments, investments we have not seen since the 1980s. I want to make sure that member is aware of the investments that we have made in Windsor-Essex and other mid- to large-sized municipalities, including rural areas across the country.
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Madam Speaker, absolutely. This is my eighth Parliament and every government has done some good work on different things. There is no doubt about it. I could run off a list, whether they have been Conservative majority or minority governments or Liberal majority or minority governments. Good things have taken place in every budget, so there are some good things happening.
I appreciate the member's work on city council. I served for one and a half terms on city council. What we have to recognize, though, right now, is that the Paul Martin administration at the time basically broke down the process where we had regular, routine funding for the not-for-profit and housing markets. That has led to systemic problems. That is what New Democrats are going for.
I do appreciate that there things happening, and that is why we support this legislation.
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Madam Speaker, I share with my neighbour and friend concern about the impact of the cost of groceries on Canadians.
Rather than an excess profit tax on retailers, if we were to wipe out the profit entirely of the retailers for the moment, it would take the price of a bag of groceries from $25 down to $24. Is that sufficiently low for Canadian consumers if that is the only solution being proposed or, if that is not low enough for Canadians, what other solutions would he acknowledge? Higher interest rates are impacting the food value chain and the carbon tax is impacting the food chain. What other solutions would he have?
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's work on a lot of initiatives, including helping me with my private member's bill on Ojibway national urban park.
His riding also has a lot of greenhouses, does a lot of production for Canada and there is a lot of shipping. It is not enough to lower it that way. I believe there needs to be more work done.
The United States has antitrust legislation, where it can break up the monopolization. There has to be more work done on that in Canada because some of the grocery retail chains have also bought up many of the pharmacies. We have vertical integration in the industry, so we have even less competition than we saw in the past because other grocery retailers at the smaller levels are also getting absorbed into the vertical integration of basically three conglomerates.
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Madam Speaker, I would like my colleague to further explain how exempting rental housing developers from paying GST will address the crying need for affordability. How is this going to lower housing prices to help the middle class and the poorest get by?
Given that this was an NDP idea, from what I understand, can my colleague explain how this will address those needs?
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Madam Speaker, something I have some concern about, too, is whether the GST removed from new rental builds will help lower the cost of building the units at that time, but the key component to this would be the follow-up to make sure the savings are passed on to the people buying or renting those units in the future, not only in the short term but in the long term. Sadly, on some that were built, the savings did not get passed on.
For example, in the oil and gas industry, there has been a fight to remove or reduce the GST on some of the costs, but they are never passed onto the consumer, so it is an extra cash grab for corporate conglomerates.
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Madam Speaker, it is always an honour and a pleasure to speak in this place and to add my voice to debate. Today we are talking about Bill C-56, which if passed would amend the Excise Tax Act and implement a temporary 100% rebate on the GST portion for new purpose-built rental housing and amend the Competition Act to get rid of the efficiencies defence, which has been a handy loophole that has been used to let almost any corporate merger go ahead, no matter what it would do to consumer choice.
I want to talk mostly about the housing portion of this.
We are in a housing crisis. Too many Canadians cannot afford to live in their own country. For a long time, people thought of this as just a Vancouver and Toronto problem, but over the past eight years the affordability crisis has reached into every community in Canada. Even in my city, where the economy was devastated in 2015 and where real estate prices actually fell due to the government's implementation of an immediate attack on the energy industry, I am receiving emails from my constituents, who are demanding action on housing. I got an email from Kathy, who talked about her rent going very quickly from $1,600 to $1,800 to $2,200 per month, and that is more than half of her income. I know that every MP in this House is getting these kinds of emails. Rent has doubled, under the watch of the current government, across Canada.
I also get emails from people who believe they will never become homeowners. If someone is a young person today who did everything their thoughtful and nurturing parents told them to do, like studied hard and earnestly, worked hard, got a good education and entered the workforce in a profession or a skilled trade, they would now be earning a good income, which is probably higher than an average income for Canadians. This ambitious young person who might be a nurse, a welder, a lawyer, a teacher or an engineer should have the world at their feet. The promise of Canada for decades was that this young person could now go out and rent a place, save their money for a few years and buy a home before maybe settling down and starting a family, but this is no longer the reality.
How much money can a young person be expected to save in this current environment? What do they do when half their income is going to pay rent? What do they do about the food prices that constantly go up or the prices of gasoline and home heating that go up? The cost of everything due to the government's inflationary deficits and wasteful spending leaves a worker without the ability to save. It would take the typical worker most of their working life to save up for a down payment to buy a typical house, but that would be in vain anyway, because they would not qualify for the mortgage that they would then need to actually go ahead and purchase a typical home.
What are young people today coming out of school to do? Under the government, the country is becoming a place with two kinds of families: families that already own a home and families that may never. The only hope that young Canadians have of becoming homeowners now in most of Canada's large cities is, with help from their parents, if their parents happen to already own a home, the hope that their parents will have the ability and enough money that they can contribute to that large down payment and co-sign the loan. For everybody else, there is just an ever-increasing cycle of rents that rise with shrinking space and quality of accommodation.
The reason for this is quite simple. For years, the supply of houses has failed to keep up with demand. For eight years the government has ignored the failure of supply to keep up with demand. The government has piled on costs and taxes at the federal level to push up construction inputs and it has enabled municipal political allies, who never fail to be the voices of Nimbyism.
Eight years after making a promise on page 7 of their election platform in 2015, Liberals have now figured out there is a problem with access to housing in Canada and are rushing a bill in at the beginning of this fall session to bring about this campaign commitment they made on the elimination of GST on purpose-built rentals.
We see this time and time again. The government creates a problem, and in this case eight years of high taxes, deficits, increased bureaucracy and wasteful spending, leading to inflation, which has led to high interest rates, compounding the shortage of housing supply by making it more expensive, or impossible, for builders to build. Now it wants Parliament to rush through a bill that contains something it promised in the 2015 election and which it has just now gotten around to tabling in Parliament.
Something else happened. The opposition leader tabled the proposed building homes, not bureaucracy act, which also promises to cut the GST on purpose-built rental for construction of below-market rent. The Leader of the Opposition's bill also deals directly with the bureaucratic hurdles to home construction and municipalities that do not want to build new homes.
The Conservative plan is elegant in its simplicity. A Conservative government would make federal infrastructure money contingent on housing outcomes, not housing announcements but actual keys in doors. The Conservative plan would do so not by telling municipalities what to do, but simply by insisting they meet this national policy objective of ensuring that Canadians have a home to live in.
A Conservative government would not bully local councils, like the housing minister recently did in his letter to city council threatening to withhold federal money if city council did not take a particular position on a particular vote. That is not how the Conservative plan would work.
The Conservative plan takes no position on what municipalities do. We would leave that to elected officials, who are elected in their communities to decide how they achieve the objective of increased housing supply. Let us make no mistake, the Conservative government would tie and hold back infrastructure funding if municipalities failed to get keys in doors by increasing the amount of housing stock that is built in their communities. We are saying to municipalities to let the builders build, get on with making sure we have approvals and stand up to the powerful, vested interests that can always come up with a reason that a housing project or a neighbourhood development cannot be approved.
The bill we are debating today seems like it was forced on to the floor by the Liberals trying to catch up to the Conservatives, who already had a plan tabled.
The other part of the bill is actually also stolen directly from the member for Bay of Quinte, who had tabled a private member's bill to abolish the efficiencies defence. I do not have time to get into the efficiencies defence, but I certainly support abolishing it. I have supported it before. I supported my colleague, the member for Bay of Quinte. Also, the previous NDP speaker supports this, and he has talked about competition. I agree with him as well. It is long overdue.
The Rogers-Shaw merger debacle should have been enough to immediately table such legislation, but if a Conservative initiative like that private member's bill is enough to spur the government to action, so be it. That is fine. That is actually Parliament doing what it should, which is debating ideas. If the government sees an idea in two Conservative PMBs, and maybe even an NDP PMB, and wants to copy these ideas and table them as government legislation, great. Let us get it done.
Canadians do not care who tabled what. They just want it done. However, it is a lesson to those who maybe have cozied up and are in this unhealthy coalition with the government. They can be in opposition and still get things done, like tabling good legislation. Let us get good ideas on the table and let us get better policy for Canadians.
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Madam Speaker, that was a bit hard to listen to.
I was a municipal councillor in the 2008-09 recession, and municipalities individually begged the previous government for assistance on the affordable housing front. We witnessed our affordable housing wait-lists almost double, and so in Hamilton it went from 3,600 families and individuals to almost 6,200 or 6,400, if memory serves me right.
We also collectively asked, through FCM, for the previous government to assist municipalities. Guess who was part of the government? The Leader of the Opposition. This is not a case of playing catch-up, this is a case of making up for lost time. All the years the Conservatives were in government, they had no housing plan.
Now our government has come forward with a national housing strategy that responds to the concerns and requests from municipalities from across the country. Is the member aware of that?
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Madam Speaker, I am aware of a few things, including that the government has been in office for eight years and is only now being spurred on, kicking and screaming, by the opposition's plan, which has been tabled in this place, to implement something it promised to do in 2015. I know that in 2008, it did not cost $2,200 a month to rent a portion of a house in my riding. I know that in 2008, the mortgage payment on a typical home in Canada was not $3,600 a month. I spent 22 years in that industry. I know a bit about affordability and what people could qualify for then and now.
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