44th Parl. 1st Sess.
January 31, 2024 02:00PM
- Jan/31/24 3:10:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, affordability is a major concern for all Canadians. To support them and ensure that help is available, the Minister of Finance presented the fall economic statement.
Can the Prime Minister remind the House of the important measures contained in the fall economic statement and why the House needs to adopt them quickly?
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- Jan/31/24 6:00:20 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the fall economic statement is a continuation of government budgets and policies from the past that reinforce the importance of Canada's middle class and those aspiring to be a part of it, and build in many support programs to assist individuals in many different ways, whether it is the Canada child benefit or the dental care benefit.
I am wondering if my colleague could provide his thoughts in regard to why it is so important that we move forward with a dental plan.
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- Jan/31/24 6:01:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as government, we have taken so many measures over the last eight years and more to encourage more Canadians to participate in economic activity. For example, there is the Canada child benefit, the early learning and child care program. These help to improve women's participation in the economic workforce.
The recent dental care benefit ensures the health of many low-income Canadians and the senior citizens of our country. It contributes to the economic health of Canada.
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- Jan/31/24 6:01:51 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague spent most of his speech talking about the fact that Canada should be a world leader in building a low-carbon economy.
Unfortunately, this economic statement's proposed approach to reducing Canada's carbon emissions is very weak. Canada is the laughingstock of the G7 due to its low environmental ambitions and, worse, poor environmental performance.
The question I have for my colleague deals with housing. In the economic statement there is an entire chapter on housing, and yet it contains nothing of substance, except for the part on cutting the GST, but we know that is not going to do much to solve the housing crisis.
What can this economic statement do? When will the government understand that there is an urgency to build affordable and social housing?
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- Jan/31/24 6:03:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, related to the economic measures in this bill, it is no secret that the massive profits we are seeing in some corporate sectors and the high food price inflation Canadians are facing are directly linked. We have heard the Minister of Industry express many times in the House and out in the public that he is disappointed with grocery CEOs who have seen their profits and profit margins double since 2019.
I would just like to know when the Liberal Party is going to get serious on this, tackle the corporate greed and make sure that food prices start to go down for Canadians so they can afford to feed their families.
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Madam Speaker, I am glad to rise on behalf of the residents and businesses of Barrie—Innisfil to speak to Bill C-59, the fall economic statement.
When my four kids were growing up, there was a TV show with Barney, the purple dinosaur, and the lyrics of one of its famous songs went:
If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops Oh, what a rain that would be!
If we were to listen to the Liberals debating the fall economic statement, or anything to do with their economic policy, we would think that Canadians had never had it any better and that things are rosy across the land. I can tell members that, after spending the last six weeks in Barrie—Innisfil speaking to residents and businesses, things are dire right now. They are dire for many reasons for a lot of families, and I will focus on what I heard from my residents and the businesses of Barrie—Innisfil over the last six weeks. In fact, I have been hearing from them for a long time because many of the economic policies that the government has implemented have disproportionately affected Barrie—Innisfil residents and businesses in a way that many may never recover from.
The first thing I will focus on is the carbon tax. We live an hour north of Toronto and do not have access to mass transit like they do in the city of Toronto. We have a Barrie transit system and a GO transit system that gets us where we need to go for special events in Toronto, for example, or from point A to point B in Barrie. However, the difficulty for many people who live in Barrie is that they drive, so they are being impacted by the cost of the carbon tax on their gas bills as they go to work, visit family and take their kids to hockey.
In many cases, hockey does not just happen in Barrie, but all over Ontario. I know that first-hand from having two kids who played AAA hockey. My wife and I often talk about the circumstance where she would be in Belleville and I would be in Peterborough, separately, each with one of our kids playing hockey, and the impact the carbon tax would have had on us as a family at that time. We could barely afford to put our kids in hockey then. I cannot imagine what families are going through right now having to pay the carbon tax on their fuel and everything else, such as heating, whether that is residential or for a business.
I had a bill sent to me today from a local business owner, who runs a restaurant, and his carbon tax, just last month, was $1,431. Members can assume for a second that this restaurant works off of 10% margins. They would have to sell an extra 14,000 dollars' worth of goods or services just to pay for the carbon tax. The fact is that the carbon tax is going to quadruple, so they would have to pay more. Certainly, the business would not get any of that back in a rebate.
Many families are showing me their gas bills, as I have asked them to, and they are saying the same thing, which is that they are not getting back in total what they are paying for gas, for natural gas or for groceries. They are not getting back from the carbon rebate, as the government claims, an equal amount to what they are paying in the carbon tax. In fact, the Parliamentary Budget Officer spoke about exactly that. Many more families are getting less back in the rebate than they are paying in carbon tax, and it is disproportionately affecting low-income Canadians. Many of them are in my riding of Barrie—Innisfil.
I have, as we all have, sent out newsletters and mailers, and we have the ability to ask a question on the back of a mailer. There has been no other issue that I received more responses on than the issue of the carbon tax. The question was simple: Do you support the carbon tax?
I can say that, out of the hundreds of responses I got back from Barrie—Innisfil residents and businesses, 82.5% said that they do not support the carbon tax, 15% said they did, and 2.5% had no response. This was out of the hundreds of responses that were sent back. Also, there was an option to give comments, and here are some of the responses:
“What are they doing with the tax?” asked D.B. in Barrie. Another said, “I would be interested about what improvement our carbon tax collected has made on the climate change so far.”
We have already heard, through various reports, that our emissions have not been reduced significantly, save and except during COVID. That stands to reason because nobody was driving or doing anything at that time. The economy was effectively shut down.
We need to do much more to stop climate change, but I do not believe that the carbon tax in Canada is doing anything to change it.
H. H. in Innisfil wrote, “The carbon tax on home heating is unfair”, while another said, “Don't believe it effectively encourages less fuel consumption”.
D. Morrison from Barrie wrote, “The Government has no idea what goes on in the real country for the average person.” Another constituent wrote, “I pay 62% of my pension in tax. It is obvious to me that this money is not being spent in my best interest”.
Now we hear that the government, because it feels that it has a narrative problem with respect to the carbon tax, is effectively going to try to put lipstick on a pig. It is going to change that narrative. It is going to try to advertise it in a way that more people understand it.
I can tell members that people do understand. They understand when they see their gas bill, go to the grocery store and put gas in their car that the carbon tax is costing them more. When we tax the farmer who produces the food, the shipper who moves the food, the producers and wholesalers who look after the food for distribution and the grocery stores, who ends up paying more? It is the consumer. How bad is it in this country? There are two million people using food banks.
I had an opportunity last week to visit the Barrie Food Bank. It told me that its utilization was 150% greater in December than it was the December before. It is seeing people using the food bank like it has never seen before. It is multi-generational as well. Families are coming in utilizing the food bank as though it were a grocery store because they cannot afford to buy food.
I was also at the Innisfil food bank. What precipitated my visit, in addition to donating $1,312.50 as a result of some fundraising that we did specifically for the food bank, was an email from its director, who wrote:
I finished the yearly report for the Innisfil Food Bank so am sharing some of the stats here. We have seen an overall increase of 29% over the course of the year. The majority (43%) of our visitors attended the food bank between 2 and 5 times this past year. 24% of our clients came 6-12 times/year. Our busiest months were October (our highest ever) and January (which is pretty standard). Over 55% of our people are supporting dependants.
The food bank's increase is consistent, or even less, than what we are seeing across the country, and there again is that multi-generational use. The email continues:
We are seeing an increase in multi-generational homes. This means that someone is supporting both children and parents or grandparents are supporting their own kids but also their grandkids.
This is in a G7 country where we are supposed to have abundance, where people are not just simply supposed to scrape by, but have the dignity of work, producing a paycheque and providing for their family. That is sadly not happening.
What we have seen with this fall economic statement is the government commit to another $20 billion in spending with no fiscal guardrails. We have debt and deficit increasing like we have never seen before in this country. Interest rates are continually at a level where they become unaffordable.
The other thing I heard about was the impact of mortgage rates and how it is affecting Barrie—Innisfil homeowners.
I was doing the Salvation Army kettle in Stroud. I had a self-employed person come up to me who said their bank would not provide them with a mortgage. That person had to go to a secondary lender, not at 4% or 5%, but at 9%, and will be at risk of losing their home. Mortgages are up for renewal for 900,000 homes in this country over the next three years, and as a result of the fiscal policy of the government, many are at risk.
Conservatives are going to be focused on four things in this session of Parliament: axing the tax; building homes; making sure we help the government fix the budget, with suggestions that are going to do that; and stopping crime. There is only one alternative to govern in this country, and that is Canada's Conservatives, so we can have common sense for everyone and restore common sense and decency for people in this country.
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- Jan/31/24 6:18:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I respect my colleague who just made a speech, so I am going to appeal to his intelligence.
Quebec already has its cap and trade system, and it works. We know that, by 2015, Quebec had reduced its emissions by 8.8% over 1990 levels. That means it is working.
If my colleague believes, first, that climate change exists—which is not a given in his party—second, that climate change must be fought, and third, that there are economic tools that work to lower carbon emissions, as demonstrated in Quebec, then why is he so opposed to economic tools that we know work?
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-59, the fall economic statement implementation act, 2023.
This legislation, which would deliver on key measures from our fall economic statement, would advance our plan to make life more affordable, build more homes faster and develop a cleaner economy that works for everyone.
This is the next step in our economic plan that, since 2015, has supported people in Halifax West and across the country through the Canada child benefit, enhanced benefits and pensions for seniors, stronger public health care and a Canada-wide system of affordable early learning and child care. These investments have helped bring us to today, when we have seen a strong recovery with a million more jobs in Canada than before the pandemic, a record number of working-age women in our labour force and, just last month, wages growing at the fastest pace in three years. In fact, wage growth has outpaced inflation for 11 consecutive months now, but we are not out of the economic woods yet.
Inflation is still high, higher than where we would like it to be. Elevated prices continue to put pressure on Canadian families. I hear about that every day from my constituents.
Over the past year, the federal government has taken more steps to make life more affordable for people in this country who need it.
It is no secret that we need to do much more.
This bill is part of that work.
There are a number of things I can talk about that Bill C-59 would do for Canadians. It would remove the GST and HST on counselling and psychotherapy services to make mental health care more affordable. It would extend employment insurance benefits to parents who adopt, better supporting those families.
Right now, adoptive parents are entitled to EI parental benefits, but not to the 15 weeks of maternity benefits.
It would create new, paid leave for federally regulated workers to support families who experience pregnancy loss.
A truly strong economy and labour force are built upon compassion and an understanding of the difficult situations some families encounter.
Bill C-59 would also introduce new measures to further our economic plan and continue supporting a strong middle class. It would achieve that by enshrining our suite of clean investment tax credits in law, all while providing businesses with an incentive to pay a prevailing union wage. That is huge.
This is the first time in Canada's history that investment tax credits are contingent upon such labour requirements.
Let us bring this back to my own community in Halifax West. The two things I hear about most these days, especially since we signed our transformative health care deal with Nova Scotia, are affordability at the grocery store and the need for more housing. This bill would introduce both.
On housing, Bill C-59 would remove the GST on new rental home construction for co-op housing, complementing the action we took in the fall and spurring new construction. Let us recall just how much we have done to increase housing supply over the last several months, because it is major. We are investing $1 billion more in affordable units like non-profit, co-op and public housing. We are helping build 30,000 more rental units by extending $15 billion in additional low-cost financing to builders. We are reforming the apartment construction loan program to offer low-cost loans to build more student housing on and off campus, a move that I know Dalhousie, Mount Saint Vincent and St. Mary's universities are all looking at closely.
We are launching a home design catalogue so pre-approved designs, including modulars, that can benefit Atlantic Canada specifically can be used to build more homes faster. We are funding 222 new units of public housing in Nova Scotia, the first expansion to our public housing stock in decades. We are unlocking 9,000 more units in HRM over the next decade by funding Halifax's housing action plan through our housing accelerator.
While Conservatives pick fights with elected mayors and councils, we work with them, providing the right incentives and getting major changes made so we can build homes faster in Canada. That is the way forward: collaboration.
We are going to get more homes built for Canadians, and we are also tackling the problem of high grocery prices head-on through a generational change to competition law in Canada. Bill C-59 is part of that. How is it? By amending the Competition Act and the Competition Tribunal Act, building on changes we have proposed in Bill C-56, we would help stabilize prices and improve consumer choice. This includes supporting Canadians' right to repair; further modernizing merger reviews; enhancing protections for consumers, workers and the environment, including improving the focus on worker impacts and competition analysis; empowering the commissioner of competition to review and crack down on a wide selection of anti-competitive collaborations; and broadening the reach of the law by enabling more private parties to bring cases before the Competition Tribunal and receive payment if they are successful.
I know I welcomed this week's news that the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry is calling on the Competition Bureau to use its new powers to take another look at the cost of groceries in Canada. This is how we crack down on tactics that big corporations use to raise costs for Canadians.
Is there more we need to do to act on these two top voter priorities? The answer is yes, absolutely.
On this side of the aisle, we are going to stay focused on them both, fully in solution mode.
All members will have the opportunity to take part in this work, and that starts by supporting Bill C‑59.
Let us support the swift passage of Bill C-59, and let us keep working together on solutions to the challenges Canadians are facing at this time.
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- Jan/31/24 6:47:24 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I listened attentively to the hon. member's speech and to his background in the financial sector.
On inflation and interest rates, many people in Canada seem to think they are the responsibility or shortcomings of the federal government. Does he not appreciate that the inflation rate is a global inflation rate? All the G7 countries are experiencing that. Interest rates are high in every single G7 country. Compared to many other G7 countries, our economic growth, including the latest numbers that came out yesterday or today, in the GDP growth rate shows that we will not go into a recession but are going to manage a soft landing.
Does he not agree that Canada is doing pretty well compared to our G7 partners in all metrics of the inflation rate, the interest rates and the economic growth that we are witnessing?
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- Jan/31/24 6:48:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I do not know what economic data he is looking at. When I look at shrinking GDP in Canada, shrinking GDP per capita, shrinking GDP across the board, real GDP, I am saying that it is the worst in the world. It is the worst among our competitor countries. We actually are doing worse economically. We are trying to cover that up by bringing more people into Canada, which of course will increase our GDP, but our GDP per capita is sinking like a rock as a result.
We are not doing well economically, and it is part of the financial fiction the government keeps putting forward. It is not working well. Interest rates are high in Canada. Interest rates are high in many places. This is partly because of financially failed experiments the government continues to push toward. If it does not think the carbon tax, the carbon contracts for difference, and everything else it is throwing at the wall in order to make everything more expensive in Canada are not having their own unique effect on inflation, then it is not watching the ball. It needs to do away with all this excess tax it is putting on the backs of Canadians.
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- Jan/31/24 9:01:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to participate in tonight's debate and to once again explain to my colleagues why we need to put a price on pollution.
I appreciate the opportunity to explain why a price on pollution is the right thing to do, not only for ourselves but also for our children.
When we consider all of the extreme weather events that have impacted Canada recently, it appears quite clear that the time for action is now. Just last year, as a result of climate change, Canadians had to deal with the catastrophic impacts of historic tornadoes, ice storms, wildfires, floods, etc. We could see the smoke right here in the chamber.
Of course, these severe events that are becoming more and more frequent also take a toll on our infrastructure. The truth is that we have to act now to prevent the situation from getting even worse. The good news is that we know what to do and how to do it.
The experts also agree that our approach, putting a price on pollution, is the best solution. It sends a clear message that pollution is not free. Pollution has a cost. Without a price on pollution, what incentive would there be to pollute less?
The best part of our plan is that in provinces where the federal fuel charge applies, we return the bulk of the proceeds from the price on carbon to Canadians. In fact, eight out of 10 households in these provinces are getting more money back through their quarterly climate action incentive payments than they pay as a result of our price on pollution. Under the government's plan, this means that a family of four living in one of these provinces can receive up to $1,500 while also fighting climate change.
At the same time, we understand that it continues to be a tough time financially for many Canadian families, as elevated global inflation is unfortunately still a reality. However, we can see that things are slowly getting better. Inflation is at 3.4%, down from its peak of 8.1%, and wage growth has now outpaced inflation for 11 months in a row.
In addition, private sector economists now project that Canada will avoid the recession that many people were expecting. The International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development are both forecasting that Canada will post the strongest growth in the G7 in 2025. Nevertheless, many Canadians still need help to make ends meet. That is why we are implementing new measures to make life more affordable.
As we made clear in our fall economic statement, our government continues to deliver an economic plan that supports a strong middle class, from building more homes faster to taking concrete action to help stabilize prices, make life more affordable and protect Canadians with mortgages. Let me give an example.
The government understands that Canadians are getting really frustrated with the price of groceries, and we want to give them some relief at the checkout. That is why we amended the Competition Act to enhance competition in the grocery sector. This will help bring down costs and ensure that Canadians have more choice in where they buy their groceries.
We also amended the Competition Act to empower the Competition Bureau to block collaborations that stifle competition and consumer choice, particularly in situations where large grocers prevent smaller competitors from establishing operations nearby. This will help save money for Canadians for other priorities.
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