44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 17, 2023 10:00AM
- Oct/17/23 10:08:33 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition on behalf of Canadians who are calling the attention of the government to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. It has warned repeatedly that rising temperatures over the next two decades will bring widespread devastation and extreme weather.
The petitioners are calling on the Government of Canada to move forward immediately with bold emissions caps for the oil and gas sector that are comprehensive in scope and realistic in achieving the necessary targets that Canada has set to reduce emissions by 2030.
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- Oct/17/23 12:07:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague's speech, in particular when he was talking about how Conservatives are being muzzled by their leader. He is absolutely right.
A take-note debate occurred in this House in early September, and we were discussing a Canadian citizen who may have potentially been murdered by a foreign government. The Conservatives chose to be absolutely silent. They did not stand and give one speech, other than their House leader speaking for five minutes at the beginning. They did not ask a single question the whole time.
Then, about a week later, there were protests on the streets in front of this building regarding the LGBTQ movement, and once again the Conservatives were told not to speak. As a matter of fact, a leaked email from their leadership told MPs not to make any comment on it whatsoever.
What does that say to the member about the “freedom” the Leader of the Opposition purports to express to the country?
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- Oct/17/23 12:22:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I know the member was talking about inflation. What we have seen and what we know with the numbers that have come out today is that the only sector of the economy that continues to experience significant growth in terms of inflation and indeed is pushing up the inflation numbers is the transportation sector. I wonder if the member can comment on how she sees the government bringing in policy that will help to decrease inflation, specifically in the transportation sector.
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- Oct/17/23 12:37:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I know that before this member, the member for King—Vaughan made the comment that only Conservatives know how to bring in a balanced budget. I am assuming this member thinks the same thing.
An hon. member: That's right.
Mr. Mark Gerretsen: Madam Speaker, she just yelled that I am right.
The unfortunate thing for her is that no Conservative has ever done it, not in Brian Mulroney's time and not in Stephen Harper's time. Let me correct that record. It is true that Stephen Harper had two surpluses in the beginning, but those came off the heels of Paul Martin's budgets. The only prime ministers since 1970 to actually run a surplus, a balance or have no deficit have been Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. There is absolutely no historical record that would suggest that Conservatives actually have the know-how to do that.
Could the member please inform the House as to exactly how Conservatives would do that, and without the rhetoric of bringing down interest rates to lower inflation?
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- Oct/17/23 1:37:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to participate in today's opposition motion debate. I first want to congratulate the Conservatives on bringing forward a motion that is not directly associated with the issue they have been bringing forward time after time in the House. Now, we get to talk about something a bit different, although I do have great concern with the premise of the motion they have brought forward. The “whereas” clauses and the assertions they have made are, I think, wholly inaccurate, and I look forward to explaining that in the next 10 minutes or so.
This country certainly took on a lot of debt in order to support Canadians from coast to coast during the pandemic, and we have certainly had to take on our fair share to do that, much of which was unanimously approved by the House, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic. However, it is always important to look at things in terms of context. Obviously, debt is significantly affected by GDP, the amount a country is able to produce in terms of economic activity, because that is exactly what will end up supporting that debt. When we talk about the debt in this country and when we look at the debt-to-GDP ratio, Canada is actually doing quite well.
As a matter of fact, if we look at our debt-to-GDP ratio, we are at 14%. Some people might ask whether that is good or bad. That is fair, because I do not think everybody is an economist and knows the default answer to that, but let us compare that 14% in Canada to the percentage for our G7 partners. France is at 99%. Germany is at 47%. Italy is at 129%. Japan is at 161%. Probably the two most comparable to us, the U.K. and the United States, are at 95% and 96%. When we talk about our debt levels, it is extremely important to compare where we stand on them to the position of our G7 counterparts, our most comparable economies in the world. In that regard, we are in an extremely good position.
I would add that I will be sharing my time with the member for Kings—Hants today.
That is very important for context. I know that Conservatives, including this lot here, like to come into the House and routinely tell us about how theirs is the only party that knows how to introduce a balanced budget. They may want to go ahead and cheer and clap now, because usually they do that when I try to pay them a compliment, before I add the “but”.
It is really important to consider this: Conservatives will tell us that they know how to balance budgets, but if we look back to—
An hon. member: We do.
Mr. Mark Gerretsen: Madam Speaker, they said “we do”. They will then have to explain the following facts to me and why they did the following. Since 1990, there have been only two prime ministers who have significantly added a surplus or balanced a budget. They were Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. This is interesting, because Conservatives will always say that Stephen Harper balanced budgets, but no, he did not, and Brian Mulroney never had a single balanced budget. Stephen Harper did not really either, and I will explain why. The first two budgets Stephen Harper brought into Parliament were on the heels of Paul Martin's surpluses that he had been running for years. The Conservatives certainly squandered those surpluses and went into a deficit position very quickly.
Of course, Conservatives also like to tell us, and I have heard it already this morning, that they left the fiscal state of this country in great shape in 2015 with the last budget they presented in a last-ditch effort to get Canadians to vote them into office one more time. They brought forward a “balanced budget”, and for the purposes of Hansard, I should say I am putting “balanced budget” in quotes, but they did it on the backs of veterans by closing Veterans Affairs offices. They sold off our shares of GM at the time at bargain prices in order to get that off their balance sheet. They did a whole host of things in order to portray the illusion that they had balanced the budget, when they really had not. They did it at the expense of Canadians and the investments the government had on behalf of Canadians.
I know that many will say this was so long ago, 10 years ago for Harper and even longer for Mulroney. Fine, let us just get back to this lot of Conservatives right here. All of them who are here today ran on Erin O'Toole's plan in the last election, and that plan was to run deficits for a minimum of 10 years. Here we have a group of Conservatives who are now coming into the House with a motion that says to develop a plan for a balanced budget by October 25 of this year, a week and a half from now. Meanwhile, they had no intention of doing so when they were running in the last election. They did not care when they were knocking on doors and presenting their plan to Canadians. The plan from Erin O'Toole and the Conservatives was to run deficits for at least 10 years. That is the reality of it.
This should be concerning to Canadians, because this is not the first time that we are seeing hypocrisy come out of the Conservatives. It is actually the second time. They also ran on a plan to introduce a price on pollution and to modify the existing price on pollution that this side of the House had. They ran on that, too.
This morning, somebody challenged them and asked a Conservative member why they ran on that. That Conservative member stood up and said, “I did not believe in it.” That is funny, because that is the second or third Conservative I have heard say they were not running on a price on pollution or a carbon tax. However, they had no problem going along with the plan during the election. They did not say a single word in opposition to it at the time. Now, suddenly, they come in here and think that the buzz phrase of the day is going to be “axe the tax”, and this would bring them into power. That is not the position that somebody who is aspiring to be the leader of this country should be taking, asking what buzzwords happen to work today that would get him into power.
I also find it very interesting when we talk about inflation specifically. Today we have seen that Statistics Canada has reported that the inflation in Canada has dropped to 3.8%. I should add that all the economists who were predicting this in advance of today said it would be anywhere between 3.8% and 4.2%. It ended up being on the lower end of that. Conservatives are laughing.
Maybe it is time to compare that. I did it earlier, and I can compare it again. Let us compare it to the G7 countries. Again, Canada and the United States are tied for second place in terms of the lowest inflation. I think it is extremely important when we talk about our comparative countries.
Canada is heading in the right direction when it comes to inflation, but interestingly enough, when we look at inflation and the different sectors of the economy, transportation is one of the only sectors of the economy contributing to inflation, and it is the biggest contributor. It is interesting because the member for King—Vaughan was up earlier, and I asked her what proposals she would have to reduce the inflationary impact around transportation. Of course, the exact answer that I think everybody in this room would have expected, and I certainly did when I asked the question, was to get rid of the carbon tax, because the carbon tax is contributing to inflation.
The reality of the situation is that the carbon tax is not contributing to inflation. Tiff Macklem, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, recently said that the overall impact of the carbon tax to inflation is 0.15%. I believe he was in Alberta at a Chamber of Commerce meeting. We could chalk that up to a rounding error. Now I know the default for my Conservative friends would be to jump up and say that they do not trust Tiff Macklem; they have already made their position on that very clear.
I have a whole list, and I will not bother reading it right now, of Conservative MPs who have stood up in this House and invoked the name of Tiff Macklem as the expert when he has all the right things that they want to say at the moment. They cannot pick and choose when they want to use somebody as an expert in the field.
It goes without saying for the rest of us in the House, other than Conservatives, that Tiff Macklem is an expert in this field. When he says that the carbon tax contributes 0.15%, I am sorry to the member for King—Vaughan, but getting rid of the carbon tax is not going to be helpful. It is not going to be the solution as it relates to inflation specifically.
Once again, we are confronted with a motion by Conservatives. All they are interested in is political games and cheap shots at the Prime Minister.
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- Oct/17/23 1:48:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, first of all, it is not a bill. It is a motion from the opposition calling on the government to, within 10 days, create a plan. It knows full well this motion is not going to pass. This is part of the politics of it. This is what we see from Conservatives time after time.
Based on what I have been listening to in this House, it does not appear that any political party is going to vote in favour of this, other than the Conservatives. They do not come into this room with an interest in trying to find consensus or build policy. If the member genuinely believes that, then I suggest he might want to take a lesson in the politics that his leader plays daily, because this is not the game that they are playing.
All they want to do is have a gotcha moment that they can put the government into. That is what they are doing, unlike some of the other parties in this House that genuinely come in here, although we have differences, and try to bring forward ideas on policies that we can work on together.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Oct/17/23 1:50:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, first of all, I would say that I have a really good feeling about the way that this federal government will be able to work with the new government, although not of the same political stripe, in her province. I have great faith in that.
Perhaps the member has not heard it, but in this House, from this spot, I have been very outspoken about the greed that I see, particularly within the grocery sector. If she has ideas, because I know the NDP has been talking about this quite a bit, I am all ears in listening to them.
I will just say one thing about something she said at the beginning of her question that I thought was very interesting: the Conservatives' non-common sense plan. It reminds me of another Conservative politician from Ontario, Mike Harris. He came up with the same slogan of the “common sense revolution”, and we know how that worked out. We know what that did to water throughout the province of Ontario and what ended up happening.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Oct/17/23 1:52:15 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not sure if this is a set-up, because the member recently watched a video that I did on this exact topic, but it is true.
The carbon tax last year, year over year, contributed two cents per litre on average. The profit margins, or the wholesale profits of the oil and gas sector, was 18¢. Where is the outrage from Conservatives when it comes to those wholesale profits, when they are nine times what the carbon tax is?
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