44th Parl. 1st Sess.
January 29, 2024 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Terrebonne.
Before I begin, I want to wish you, Madam Speaker, and all my colleagues, a happy new year. This is the first opportunity we have had to do so. I also wish a happy new year to everyone in Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia.
I would like to mention that today I am wearing a small green square, like many other members, because January 29 is the National Day of Remembrance of the Quebec City Mosque Attack and Action Against Islamophobia. This small gesture is made in support of the families and loved ones of the victims of the Quebec City mosque attack.
We are here to debate Bill C‑59, which seeks to implement the budget. This bill can be described as an omnibus bill. It is a bit of a hodgepodge. There is a tremendous amount of items in there that affect many different topics. Today, I will be talking about the environment, housing, pregnancy, vaping, business transfers, psychotherapy and tax havens. Why will I be focusing on all these topics? It is because Bill C‑59 addresses them all and many more, but these are the ones that interest me the most.
When I was in my riding over the holidays, I kept hearing the same thing when I met with constituents. Based on what I was told, people sometimes get the impression that they have no idea what we do in Ottawa or what measures we are working on. When they listen to the radio and watch television, they hear slogans from the different parties geared to the next election. The election is not due for another year and a half. In the meantime, we have work to do as parliamentarians, as elected members. That is what people elected us for.
There are bills that are currently before Parliament, including this economic statement. I think that we need to analyze them. Even though it may be a rather tedious job, we need to analyze everything in the bill and determine what is good and what is not so good. Obviously, as with any omnibus bill, there are some things that are good and some that are less good, and we need to strike a balance between the two.
Unfortunately, there are two key measures in Bill C‑59 that make it impossible for the Bloc Québécois to support it. Because of those two measures, we cannot vote in favour of the bill, despite the fact that, as I was saying, it does contain some good and important measures, although some of them could use a bit of tweaking. Quite simply, voting in favour of the bill would fly in the face of our party's values and those of Quebeckers. I am talking about our environmental values and the importance that we place on protecting the jurisdictions of the provinces and Quebec. What poses a problem for us is the measures that the government describes as environmental, which I would say are more pseudo-environmental, and one of the housing measures.
I want to start with these two measures. First, the government is offering a total of $30.3 billion in subsidies, in the form of tax credits, primarily to oil companies. This means that taxpayers will be paying oil companies to try and pollute less. That is essentially my understanding of the tax credits that are being offered.
As for the second measure I was talking about, the government is going to create a federal department of municipal affairs. A similar department already exists in Quebec and the provinces, and it manages municipal affairs. The federal government has decided to legislate in this area and create a department of housing, infrastructure and communities. This means more interference, more disputes and more delays. Why is it taking so long for Quebec and the federal government to agree on certain projects? It is because the federal government wants to impose conditions, and that delays the process. I fail to see how creating another department will help facilitate that process.
Let us begin with the much-discussed tax credits for oil companies. Quite frankly, they do not need any handouts. According to the Centre for Future Work, the oil and gas extraction sector has raked in record profits in recent years, to the tune of roughly $38 billion over three years. Everyone heard me correctly. I said the government wanted to add another $30 billion to that $38 billion, as though they needed it. When I look at those astronomical amounts, I think about all the other areas where the federal government could invest money, for example to help people cope with the rising cost of living.
It is being reported that roughly 70% of shareholders in the oil and gas sector are foreign. In other words, that money is going to leave the country. In the last two budgets, the government announced its plans to introduce no fewer than six tax credits largely for oil companies. According to information and figures provided by the Department of Finance, these investments will total a whopping $83 billion by 2035.
People talk about the climate crisis and say that we need to do more to fight it. This government's solution is to give the oil companies more money to create more pollution. I have a hard time following that logic.
This bill will amend the Income Tax Act by creating two tax credits. The first is a tax credit for investments in clean technology. We are talking about a $17.8-billion investment in clean technology. That sounds promising and desirable, but on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the tax credit is tailor-made for increased bitumen extraction and gas exports.
The oil sands are essentially tar mixed with soil. Extracting it is energy-intensive. Hot water or steam has to be injected into the ground to liquefy the tar, which then floats on polluted water to be recovered. Oil companies currently use gas to heat this water.
However, the industry would rather export its gas than use it to extract oil. That is timely, since there is a new liquefied natural gas terminal being built on the coast of British Columbia. It is a gateway to Asia. TC Energy has almost completed the Coastal GasLink pipeline and the Shell and LNG Canada liquefied natural gas terminal should be operational in about a year. The only thing left is to make more gas available for export and that is where the clean technology investment tax credit comes in.
Under Bill C‑59 the oil companies would be paid to buy small nuclear reactors. That nuclear energy, which would replace the gas they are currently using, would allow them to extract more bitumen and make more gas available for export, all at taxpayers' expense. I am not going to get into that today, but we have already talked about how small nuclear reactors are not such a good idea, for various reasons.
Yes, the tax credit can be used for other purposes, such as a real transition to renewable energy. Some good examples are in the manufacturing sector, including the use of biomass by paper mills and the development of carbon-neutral aluminum. I think that would be a good way to use this tax credit. However, given the enormity of the investments needed for the oil companies to use nuclear energy to extract more bitumen, we can expect the oil companies to pocket most of the profits.
As for the second tax credit, the one for carbon capture, utilization and storage, we are talking about an investment of $12.5 billion. Since I have only two minutes left, I will unfortunately not have time to talk about the positive aspects. That is too bad, because I really wanted to explain to my constituents all the little measures I mentioned at the beginning. I will therefore continue to talk about the tax credit for carbon capture, utilization and storage, because I find it quite interesting that the government is touting this as an environmental measure when, once again, the government is merely helping the oil companies perhaps pollute a little less. Rather than accelerating the transition to renewable energy, the government would rather help them in that way. Oddly enough, this tax credit is only available to businesses in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.
Carbon capture and storage is an experimental technology through which big polluters would recover some of the carbon dioxide that they emit and store it underground, usually in old empty oil wells. That is a key element of the oil companies' and the government's pseudo-environmental strategy, even though the International Energy Agency, which is part of the OECD, believes that countries would be making a serious mistake if they were to make carbon capture the focus of their environmental strategy. The International Energy Agency believes that such technology is smoke and mirrors, that it is as of yet unproven and that, if it were to one day be used on an industrial scale, it would produce only marginal results at an exorbitant cost.
Even knowing all that, the federal government wants to move forward with this technology. Why? To pander to the oil companies, of course. Independent media outlet The Narwhal released a document obtained though the Access to Information Act that shows that Suncor helped to write the government's environmental policy, particularly the section on carbon capture found in Bill C‑59. In December, we learned that the government met with oil and gas lobbies at least 2,000 times between 2022 and 2023.
That shows just how involved the oil companies are in writing the Liberal government's strategies. This will do nothing to help Quebeckers and Canadians fight the climate crisis. That is why we will be voting against this bill.
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Madam Speaker, I am quite pleased to rise today to speak to this latest budget implementation act by the government.
I have been listening closely to the debate, so I would like to start by offering some comments on it so far. Then I am going to talk a bit more about the bill.
I had occasion to ask the Conservative leader not long ago here in the House about the problem of inflation that Canadians are experiencing. We know they are experiencing it, as we all are. When we go into a grocery store, we see the rising prices. We know people are struggling to stay in their homes. We see it on the street in our communities. We see more people pitching tents in order to have a roof over their head at night, such as it is. We hear stories, unfortunately, of cities focusing their energy on clearing out encampments of people with nowhere to go instead of trying to figure out how to create better homes that provide more warmth and support in a challenging winter. We are hearing about it from constituents, for instance, who are having to choose to cut pills or pay the rent. There are all sorts of ways in which this really difficult economic time is affecting Canadians, so the question for us here in Parliament is what to do about it.
Certainly, the Conservative leader has a lot of opinions on that. My question earlier was why, when he talks about inflation and the hardship that Canadians are experiencing, he does not mention whether it is just in Canada. There have been some incredible studies here in Canada saying that price increases over and above the increase in costs for large corporations are responsible for 25% or more of the inflation that Canadians have experienced, so I want to be really clear that those are not price increases. We know that, particularly, a lot of small and medium-sized businesses in our communities are experiencing higher costs and have to pass them on to their consumers. Even some big corporations are experiencing higher input costs, and some of that gets passed on to consumers. However, we are talking about price increases that go above and beyond that increase in costs.
It is no excuse to say that they are simply passing on those costs, because they are not. If 25% or so of inflation is attributable to price increases above the additional costs, it means corporations are taking that 25% home in profits. When we look at the profits of oil and gas companies, which increased by 1000% from 2019 to 2021, as an example, those were not increases of passing on costs. Some increases contributed to inflation by being additional price increases just for the purpose of paying higher dividends to corporate shareholders and bigger wages to corporate executives. Therefore, how can the Conservative leader pretend to be serious about addressing the problem of inflation when he is completely silent about the corporate greed that is driving a quarter or more of that very inflation? I would submit that it is not possible. It is not credible.
I am proud to be part of an NDP caucus in which the leader is willing to name that problem here in the House of Commons and acknowledge that we will not have a solution to the inflation problem in Canada if big corporations continue to feel they can increase prices with impunity. That is a major driver of inflation and hardship for Canadians. I think it speaks to the electoral choices that Canadians have. We have a Conservative opposition here that would frame itself as an alternative to the Liberals. However, if we actually look at this blind spot, the corporate-controlled Conservatives are not willing to acknowledge it, or do not see it, whichever it is. I will not speak to the question of intention here, but I will just say that it is a blind spot, whether wilful or not. What this means is that, if they were in government themselves, they would continue to do what the current government does. They would be prone to saying that the problems will go away if we just trust the market to deal with them. They would refuse to acknowledge the role that unbridled corporate greed is playing in creating the economic problem that Canadians are facing today.
One example of the ways this has manifested with the current government is with respect to housing. The real meat of its housing proposal in the fall was all about “creating more room for the market to solve the housing crisis”.
I do not really think we are going to get market solutions to the housing crisis. I do not think that is a revelation. I do not think that is particularly controversial. I know that the market, since the federal government, in the mid-90s, stepped away from producing non-market housing, has had 30 years to solve our housing problems. Instead of solving them, it has created a crisis that is accelerating and getting worse.
Simply freeing up Crown land and handing it off to developers to do what they will is not going to solve the problem. The same motive of corporate greed has been driving this housing crisis for decades now and has become particularly acute in the last few years, and nothing about that basic structure will have changed if we are still just expecting market players to solve this crisis.
We heard at the finance committee, from home developers, financiers and real estate people, that the market is not going to solve this problem. That is not to say that we do not need more market housing. It is not to say that there would not be more housing built by the market; of course there will be. That is not where we need the attention of government, though. The attention of government has to be on the part that the market will not do and has not been doing, and that is non-market housing.
To say that we want to see the government focus specifically on non-market housing is not to discount the role of the market and market housing; it is just to say that the public policy attention of the government does not have to be there. In fact, the virtue of the market is supposed to be that the government does not have to get involved, so let them do their thing, but let us have the attention and the investment focus of our federal government be on addressing the very real problem of non-market housing, which has been neglected for 30 years and absolutely must return, in a significant way, in order for us to solve the housing crisis. It is a problem with the current government, and it will be a problem with any future Conservative government, because they share the same blind spot.
What are some of the other things we could do if we acknowledge the role that corporate greed is playing? That is where I think the NDP has played an important role in twisting the arm of the Liberal government to do some things, like a 2% share buyback fee, so that companies cannot just go ahead and, for various kinds of maximization of profit strategies for their shareholders or for the corporation itself, buy back shares as a way of transferring wealth to their shareholders without paying any tax at all.
It is of note, and something that New Democrats have been arguing for for a long time, well before this Parliament, that this legislation creates the possibility of implementing a digital services tax, which means a tax on the revenue of large, Internet-based companies, like Netflix and others, who, right now, are paying no tax in Canada at all. This does not make sense. They are not paying any corporate tax on the revenue that they raise in Canada. They get to walk it all out of the country for free.
That does not make sense, and it puts traditional broadcasters at a disadvantage. We are seeing the effects that is having on our media market and the ability to hire journalists and pay them to do the work that they do, which plays an important part. However much we may disagree sometimes with the way that news media outlets frame certain issues, their work is, nevertheless, important to a well-functioning democracy. The fact that their competitors have not had to pay any tax at all does a disservice not just to them but to Canadians, who rely on news content for the functioning of our democracy.
We have been pushing the government already in Bill C-56, and now again in the budget implementation bill, to make meaningful changes to the Competition Act that would allow for the Competition Bureau to play a greater and more effective role in ensuring that big corporations are not using their market power and their market position to pull one over on Canadians, to make the economy less competitive, and to have those outsized, excess price increases that I was talking about earlier, which are a significant factor in driving inflation.
Another thing we can do is to be willing to let corporations know, to the extent that they want to invest in Canada and create jobs in Canada, particularly in the natural resources sector, that there is an expectation that they are going to create good union jobs here in Canada in order to do it. That is why I am very proud of the labour conditions that are attached to the investment tax credits. This legislation would implement those labour conditions for the companies that are investing, with the use of this tax credit in clean technology, in carbon capture and storage. I am not actually that happy to hear about that technology, because I do not think that is the basket we should be putting our eggs in when it comes to emissions reduction; it's technology that has not been proven at scale. However, this government is determined to move ahead, and we hear a lot of positive comments about carbon capture and storage from Conservatives as well. Again, it is another shared blind spot of these two parties, the Liberals and Conservatives.
Nevertheless, if that investment is going to be taking place in Canada, I want it to create good union jobs, and I want companies to know that they have to be paying the prevailing wage of the collective agreements in the trade union sector. That means those companies are not going to come in competing on who can pay Canadians the least to do that work. They are going to come in and have to compete on the things we want them to be competing on: How efficient is the technology? How efficient are they at building it? What are their production techniques? That is the way they should be competing. When they are earning a contract, it should be on that basis and not on the basis of how little they are prepared to pay their workers.
Too often, in Canada, we have accepted a situation where we are happy to have companies come in and compete on the cost of labour and have a competition about who can pay Canadians the least to do a job that deserves a fair wage, good benefits and a proper pension. I am very proud that with this legislation we are going to be implementing, for the first time ever, conditions on an investment tax break that centres workers in the middle of it and has an apprenticeship requirement. Sometimes it can be a challenge to employers to hire apprentices. I have been an apprentice myself, and when I walked on the job site the first day, I did not know what I was doing. That is what an apprenticeship is like; it is meant to teach people. It is not always a profit maximization strategy for the employer in the short term.
In the long term, employers with foresight see the value of passing on that training and knowledge and creating a workforce they can avail themselves of, but we know there are employers for whom that is not their strategy. They have a short-term focus and want to bring on the journeypeople. They want someone else to train apprentices, and then they want to poach them later.
However, these tax credits will say that we, as a country, value training the trades workforce of tomorrow, and that if companies want a tax break on the investment, they have to be part of a culture of building that workforce and creating good jobs for Canadians, not just for today but also into the future, giving them the tools they need in order to be able to do that.
We saw a Conservative government in Ontario use bankruptcy laws to shut down a post-secondary education institution. My colleague for Timmins—James Bay did a lot of work on raising awareness about what was wrong with that; it should never be done again. New Democrats have spearheaded the effort to get that done, and in this budget bill what we see is a provision that says that the bankruptcy and insolvency laws of Canada and the CCAA will not be able to be used again in the future to perpetrate that kind of nasty closure on a public institution. I am very proud of the work my colleagues have done on that, and it is something that I think ought to go forward.
I want to come back to the housing question, because it is an important one. I said earlier that I thought in the fall that the Liberals' focus was on market solutions and that that is not where the focus of the government really needs to be, certainly not to the exclusion of working on non-market solutions. In this bill, what do we see? Well, the only thing that is really happening on the housing front is the creation of a new department of housing infrastructure and communities, which is just merging two departments that already exist. This is not what we do in the face of a crisis. This is not an administrative crisis; it is not that people are not pushing enough paper. It is that there is not enough housing getting built, and changing the name of the department without prioritizing things like recapitalizing the coinvestment fund, one of the few federal funds that is actually building non-market housing, does not make sense. It does not make sense to prioritize shuffling the words in the department name around over advancing that funding.
In the fall economic statement, the recapitalization that was much touted by the government as its action on the urgent housing crisis was back-loaded in the budget tables, meaning it will not be coming for another two years. This is particularly shameful when we consider that the territory of Nunavut alone has been asking, on an urgent basis, for $250 million to address the housing crisis that it is seeing and to meet the needs that the territorial government is being asked to respond to.
We did not see a mention in the fall economic statement, and there is nothing in the bill, around the Kivalliq hydro link, which is a project that will help deliver power into parts of Nunavut. I hope it will also be accompanied with more broadband access in order to set the stage for more economic development in parts of Nunavut, as well as to try to reduce the reliance in Nunavut on diesel in order to power communities instead of bringing hydro up or, in the long term, perhaps, being able to produce enough electricity in a sustainable way that it could become a seller and bring own-source revenues to Inuit communities in Nunavut. That is the kind of long-term infrastructure investment that would make a lot of sense and that we do not see.
Another important investment would be to upgrade the Cambridge Bay airport, which is an important hub for Nunavut. When we talk about Canada's sovereignty in the Arctic, we know that the best way to enhance it is to invest in the people who live there and provide them the tools and resources they need in order to have a strong economy, live in appropriate housing and have access to the services that people rightly expect in the 21st century.
Instead, the rumour we have been faced with now for at least a month on Parliament Hill, a little longer if we go back to early December, is that the government is contemplating deep cuts at Indigenous Services Canada. New Democrats certainly want to know more about what the government is contemplating and the effects it will have on first nations, Inuit and Métis communities across the country. It is an area of significant concern for us and something that is not addressed here but that we expect to see addressed in the budget in terms of what the government's plan is and how we are going to ensure that indigenous communities are not once again left holding the bag when a government decides it wants to save money and continue a culture of corporate tax cuts.
I want to come back to the question of the role that large corporations are playing in driving inflation. A report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer as recently as December 2021 said that just 1% of Canada's population owns and controls 25% of all of the wealth of the country, and the bottom 40% of income earners in Canada share just 1% of all of the wealth that is produced in Canada. If we think about it, that 25% number is 5% higher than it was at the turn of the century.
What has happened since the year 2000 is that the proportion of wealth controlled by the top 1% increased by those five percentage points. I do not mean it increased by 5%; I mean that it went from 20% of overall wealth to 25% of overall wealth. In the same time, the corporate tax rate came down from 28% to just 15% today.
We talk about Canadians feeling the squeeze and about the middle class being expected to pay more in taxes to make up for government spending, but the big hole in government revenue comes from the people in that 1%, who are walking away with that much more of Canada's overall wealth than they used to because they pay significantly less tax than they used to.
That is why people wonder why it is that government cannot have a robust housing strategy. We used to be able to do it, and we did it coming out of the war. Well, yes, the marginal tax rate that the richest Canadians paid coming out of the war was way higher than it is today, and the corporate tax rate was way higher than it is today. Those things provided the revenue to invest in the middle class that then became the foundation for economic prosperity that lasted for decades. The reason that economic prosperity is drying up and the middle class is feeling the heat so much is that successive Liberal and Conservative governments have let the people at the top off from having to pay their fair share.
That is what is making the difference in Canada. The fact that the Conservative leader will not name it means he will not fix it, and that is what Canadians need to know heading into the next election.
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- Jan/29/24 3:00:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in just two years, the Liberal-NDP Prime Minister has doubled the interest payments on his explosive debt. That is more tax dollars going to bankers, bondholders and his finance minister's Bay Street buddies than to health care. After eight years, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost or his waste, like the $35-billion Infrastructure Bank that has built zero projects, yet lined the pockets of Liberal cronies.
When will the Prime Minister cut the waste, cut the corruption, fix the budget to bring home lower prices and bring down inflation and interest rates?
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- Jan/29/24 3:02:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this government has been in power for eight years, and in that time, the debt has doubled, inflation has hit a new record and not one single budget has been balanced. The Bloc Québécois has given its full support to all of that.
We Conservatives will balance the budget. How? We will get rid of wasteful Liberal spending on things like ArriveCan and the unused $54 million. Will the Prime Minister take responsibility for this fiasco and hand over the reins to people with good sense?
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