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House Hansard - 302

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 18, 2024 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24
Mr. Mark Gerretsen (Kingston and the Islands, Lib.)
  • Apr/18/24 10:09:10 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will summarize the next petition. This petition is on behalf of individuals who work for National Defence, in particular, those in the Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services. I have met with these petitioners prior to their assembling this petition, and they draw attention to some very important observations—
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Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24
Mr. Adam Chambers (Simcoe North, CPC)
  • Apr/18/24 5:01:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in this space on behalf of the people of Simcoe North. To those watching at home, “hello, Alice”. Before I start my comments today on the budget, I just want to take a moment, with the Chair's indulgence, to make a tribute a former staff member in my office who passed away a couple of weeks ago. Diane Bell had been a staff member of mine since I was elected. She was a fabulous woman, the first person I talked to in my circle of friends when I decided to run for office. She was a wonderful human; she cared a lot about kids and her small communities. In fact, the mayor of Ramara said, “On the school board, when there was a busing issue, she was always there for the kids.... She was a very strong advocate for the small schools in Ramara, that they don't get closed and that they stay open.” To her husband, Rob, and her son, John, I want to say that we are going to miss Diane very much. We look forward to celebrating her life on the weekend with all her friends and family. On the budget, it is a shell game of accounting, and I will get back to that later. However, one of the smartest people I worked with was named Fabrice, and he said that we cannot make a house bigger by thinning the walls. That is exactly what the government is trying to do. It has no vision and no plan. It is at the end of all its ideas, and to grow the economy, or make the house bigger, it is resorting to thinning the walls. I looked through the budget very carefully. Everyone says we are in a productivity crisis. The government acknowledges it. I went through the budget, and there is no GDP per capita chart. We are in a productivity crisis, and the government does not care to tell Canadians how we are doing in GDP per capita. One of my mentors, Hugh Moncrieff, said that what gets measured, gets done. Obviously, the government does not care about making Canadians wealthier every year. I do not expect anyone to just take my word for it. Let us go to some experts. Don Drummond, a former senior civil servant and a very smart man, said that he would grade this budget as a D, but that it is very close to an F. He said, “I actually thought given the lead-up there were going to be more tax gimmicks”. Maybe we dodged that a bit, but he would leave it on a D. Bill Morneau said, “This was very clearly something that while I was there, we resisted.” He was referring to the capital gains changes. He said, “We resisted it for a very specific reason: [We were] concerned about the growth of the country”. Robert Asselin, another very smart individual and someone who has written a lot about fiscal policy and government spending, said, “I'm worried the government is overspending again, in a pre-election setup, [with] higher interest rates and debt servicing cost being very high already and rising fast”. Andrew Coyne of The Globe and Mail wrote, Indeed, there is not a single measure in the budget aimed at boosting investment generally.... Having spread itself so thin, budget after budget, on less urgent matters, the government finds itself without the capacity to act on the two or three things that really demand its attention. Assuming it even had any intention of doing so [in the first place]. Sahir Khan says the government is high on “aspiration” and low on “perspiration”. I could not agree more. Let us talk about a few measures in the budget. On housing, the government wants to increase demand measures by helping individuals take more money out of their RRSP. It is also helping wealthy developers. I am surprised to learn that my NDP colleagues will be supporting the budget, because the only people who can max out their RRSPs are very wealthy individuals. The NDP is going to end up voting for a budget that supports the most wealthy in the country and wealthy developers, except that the government vastly under-delivered on its disability benefit. Let us talk a little about the accounting tricks, shall we? The Bank of Canada has been losing money, lots of money, billions and billions of dollars a year. Last year the government told us it was a few billion dollars. This year, we do not actually know. The government is trying to hide that from Canadians; it does not actually disclose it in the budget. It actually buries it in another line with the Canada mortgage bond program and consolidates the two together. The truth is that interest rates have not come down, because government spending has gone up. Therefore, Bank of Canada losses are higher this year than the government thought they would be last year. I want to spend a minute on the capital gains trick, an accounting facade. The government expects it will get $7 billion in new revenues because of those who transact between now and January 25. This is very convenient. It sets a date in the future to change the capital gains tax, it forces a bunch of people to transact, and it gets a bunch of revenue that goes to the bottom line. If the government did not get that revenue, it would be offside its debt-to-GDP ratio and missing its other fiscal anchor, which is the commitment to keep the budget deficit below $40 billion. There is a big risk to the fiscal framework just sitting there in that budget if people decide not to transact, if for some reason they think a future government might change its mind or if the government has made the wrong assumptions on how many people will transact. Let us talk about extra money for the Canada Revenue Agency, with $336 million over two years and another $180 million to write cheques to small businesses for the carbon credit rebate. I have a lot of faith and confidence in the people at CRA, who work hard, but there is something wrong over there or in the system of government. Let us take the bare trust fiasco. On the very last day, it reversed its decision after all these taxpayers hired accountants, did the paperwork and spent thousands of dollars. The people at CRA are doing a great job, but the agency, the CRA itself, does not need more money; it needs to be visited by a proctologist. We need to figure out why we continually have implementation problems. The government's idea is to give the CRA more to do. People are not waiting on hold long enough, so let us give it more programs to deliver. The government has a massive capacity problem. It does not need to find more things to try to do, it actually needs to be better at doing what it is supposed to do. We need to make government simpler, not bigger. The hon. colleague before me talked about the rural top-up. It appears that some individuals in Simcoe North are not getting the rural top-up. We are investigating this, but it makes absolutely no sense. While we are on “what makes no sense”, there is not a single country in the world except Canada that has raised taxes on energy over this inflationary period. For some reason, the government wants to make energy more expensive when people are having a problem paying their bills. It absolutely boggles the mind. It leaves one bewildered. On the capital gains tax, the government wants us to believe there is a pool of people, the one percenters, and they are the same one per cent and are the worst people ever, except guess what: That one per cent changes every year, because people end up in the top 1% or 10% for various reasons. They might sell a business, or something might happen; they might come into some extra money. They are not the same ugly people; the top 25% are not the same nasty, money hungry, greedy people. They change from year to year. We need to be careful about how far we try to squeeze people before they start leaving this country. I look forward to the questions from my colleagues and from the NDP members, who might be able to enlighten us on how they can vote for a budget that is going to help wealthy individuals save more money for their RRSP for a home but not for the disabilities benefit.
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