Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleague for raising that very good question. It is one that I did not get to in my speech.
The costs of health care, of course, have gone up dramatically, as well, over these years. One thing I know from my 14 years in the Manitoba legislature is that the former premier of Manitoba, Mr. Doer, in about 2006, indicated that the Liberal government cuts to health care from the federal government to all provinces in Canada were huge. However, in Manitoba, they amounted to $252 million in 1995 dollars.
If one extrapolates that to today's money, 28 years later, one can see the damage of the cuts made in those early days by the Liberal government. They decimated health care across the whole country of Canada and left all these provinces with a huge drain on their financial budgets. The government basically off-loaded huge percentages of support for hospitals and nurses and doctors in all our provinces.
I would say that the transfers are more important than ever in health care. However, it is certainly a detriment to the province's abilities to be able to maintain and increase the services we have.
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Uqaqtittiji, I have read the budget implementation act, and I see that there is going to be, in the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, a Canada health transfer. The Province of Manitoba will get a substantial amount if this bill passes.
Manitoba was making cuts to health care services earlier this year. Could the member describe to his constituents what is wrong with the Canada health transfer and the substantial increase that the Province of Manitoba will get so that it can deliver health care services?
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague could not be more wrong. That is the most ridiculous statement I have ever heard in the House, or one of them.
Particularly, he is saying that farmers are the cause of food going up. The government has put the carbon tax on all the inputs for all the industries in Canada.
The profits that he is talking about are coming right out of the pockets of the individuals that he is trying to say are saving the country. They are building the food, trying to keep crime down and providing industries with jobs. These are the companies that are providing jobs in Canada. They are also the ones that have to bear the government's taxation, and they are the ones that provide the government with billions and billions of tax dollars.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to repeat a question that I posed a little bit earlier, which was artfully dodged by the respondent.
Yes, there is a price on pollution, and it has added to the price of gasoline at the pump. However, in spite of all that, the oil companies have racked up an impressive $38.3 billion in profits, all coming straight out of the pockets of Canadians, straight off their after-tax income.
Would the member not agree that if he is talking about inflation, and if we know that food and big oil are the largest contributors to inflation, their profits are really the issue here, not anything that the government has done?
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-47, the budget implementation act, this evening.
Canadians are facing a cost of living crisis; there is no doubt about that. Food, housing and fuel are all costing more these days. The more the Prime Minister spends, the more everything costs. Of course, even his finance minister has pronounced that the spending has driven inflation up. At a time when Canadians are already feeling the pressure of inflation on their personal finances, the Liberals' budget is adding $67 billion in new inflationary spending. These inflationary deficits are contributing to record-high food, housing and fuel costs, and I will briefly touch on the situation of each of these items.
The cost of food is at record levels. “Canada's Food Price Report 2023” predicts that a family of four will spend up to $1,065 more on food this year. That puts food-price inflation at a 40-year high, with costs pushing 20% of Canadians to skip meals because they cannot afford to eat. This is why the use of food banks has increased so dramatically. One in five Canadians says that they will likely need to get meals from a food bank this year; in fact, perhaps it will be longer than that in the future.
Some of the federal spending that has contributed to this inflation was the spending that took place during COVID. There was $500 billion that was spent or budgeted by the government and put into the hands of Canadians and out into the economy. Much of that was needed for things like housing, putting food on the table and keeping warm in our cold climate, but the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer came out and said that 40% of that, or $200 billion of the $500 billion, had nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Therefore, 1.5 million Canadians are eating at food banks and one in five is skipping breakfast, lunch or dinner, because they cannot afford the cost of food. High home prices have left nine out of 10 young people who do not own a home believing that they will never own a home, and it is not just teens or people in their early twenties but many who are much older than that. The down payment needed to buy a house has doubled from $22,000 to $45,000. Mortgage payments for a new house doubled from $1,400 a month to over $3,100. If high interest rates and inflation continue, by 2026, Canadians may end up paying an additional $30,000 to $40,000 in interest per year on their mortgages.
Then there are the high fuel costs, which are made worse by the Liberal carbon taxes. There is not just one carbon tax; now, there are two. With the Prime Minister bringing in a second, hidden carbon tax, the cost of gas, groceries and home heating will only continue to climb. The first carbon tax did not succeed in reducing emissions. The second one will not either, but it will still make life more expensive. The independent Parliamentary Budget Officer has indicated that the second carbon tax will cost the average Canadian household an extra $573 a year without any rebate. Families in some provinces will face costs as high as $1,517. Combined, these two carbon taxes will cost some Canadian families up to $4,000 each year. This is an extra 61¢ for every litre of gasoline, with 37¢ a litre from the first carbon tax, 17¢ per litre from the second and another 7¢ accounting for the sales tax applied to the carbon tax.
In Manitoba, the second Liberal carbon tax will cost the average household an additional $611 a year, bringing the full cost of the two carbon taxes to $2,101 by 2030. That is asking a lot from Manitoba families at a time when costs are already skyrocketing. It should not come as a surprise that the Parliamentary Budget Officer confirmed that this tax will shrink our economy. Families should not be left to struggle under the weight of the reckless Liberal approach, particularly after the pandemic that they have just been faced with.
That is why Conservatives are fighting to make life more affordable for families and pressing for two key things. First, the Prime Minister must give us a plan to end the inflationary deficits and spending and to bring down inflation and interest rates. Second, the Prime Minister must cancel his carbon tax hikes. Canadians are struggling, and acting on these proposals could help bring real relief to those struggling to make ends meet.
I have a parallel that I just want to refer to. When I was in the Manitoba legislature, we went through the years of Mr. Doer from 2000 to 2009, when he left. They were probably the best economic years in Manitoba's history. Mr. Selinger took over as premier from then until 2015, and those were very high-spending years. The province increased the provincial sales tax again. It increased the tax by 1%, but the province was debating whether it should be 2%.
Today, the Prime Minister's spending provides a great parallel to what happened in Manitoba, with the most high-spending NDP premier we ever had. This means that, today, we have the most high-spending Prime Minister we have ever had. Therefore, I would say we have already elected the first New Democratic prime minister in Canadian history, and he is the member for Papineau; it is ironic that he is in a coalition with the NDP to do it.
In order to deliver results for Canadians, Conservatives are bringing forward many amendments to the budget bill, and I hope all parties will recognize the importance of supporting these amendments to support all of our fellow Canadians who are struggling right now. The reality is that Canada's federal debt for the 2023-24 fiscal year is predicted to reach $1.22 trillion, as some of my colleagues have already said today. That is almost $81,000 for every household in Canada. The Prime Minister has added more debt than all the other prime ministers combined and has no plan to balance the budget or to control his inflationary deficits, which are driving up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay.
There are consequences to the government's actions, and we are seeing them now, as inflation erodes the spending power of our families, friends and neighbours. Conservatives have advocated for a plan to make Canada work for the people who work. Their paycheques should not be diminished because of their government's inflationary spending. Nobody wants to spend more and get less, but that is what inflation does. Instead, people's hard work should pay off. Every dollar they earn should be able to cover the costs of their everyday needs and, as often as possible, the extra things they enjoy, such as a weekend away, a night with friends or just something special for the kids.
One's ability to buy a home should not be diminished because of the government's inflationary spending. The Liberals' one-size-fits-all plan for mortgage development does not work in every area of Canada. Home ownership should not be only for the wealthy, but the way prices are going under the current government, it is hard for many who want to enter the housing market to make their dream a reality. By removing the government gatekeepers to free up land and speed up building permits, the government could have made a real difference in the lives of those who are looking to own a home.
I want to switch gears for a moment to talk about another important theme, and that is public safety. Again, in the budget, the Liberal government has failed to lay out a meaningful plan to respond to public safety issues in Canada. We are facing a 32% rise in violent crime since 2015. As my colleague, the member for Kildonan—St. Paul, has appropriately noted, 32% is not just a number. It represents 124,000 more very serious violent crime incidents that have impacted innocent Canadians across the country.
We want to bring home a nation that works for the people who do the work, bring home lower prices and powerful paycheques, and bring homes that people can afford. That is what we stand for on this side of the House, and we will keep fighting for that.
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Mr. Speaker, I would note that New Democrats are quite firm in our belief that as we look at the record profits that oil and gas companies have been enjoying, we do not think that oil and gas companies should be able to walk away with that money and pay it out in dividends to their shareholders or squirrel it away in international tax havens, but that instead there should be an appropriate tax applied to oil and gas companies.
We, of course, have also been open to the idea of having some kind of a public utility board that would regulate the price of oil and gas. We recognize that long before the carbon tax, a long weekend was enough reason for oil and gas companies to jack up the price of oil and gas. We think that Canadians ought to be just as concerned about the advantage that those companies are taking of Canadians in their basic pricing structure; never mind what is added in tax.
There is a larger conversation to be had about how we get fair pricing for oil and gas. I think that the Conservatives' kind of monolithic focus on the carbon tax obscures a lot of ways that Canadians are getting screwed at the pump by oil and gas companies themselves in order to outsize their profits.
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Mr. Speaker, I had a lot to say about the previous speech on royal titles, but I will focus on the subject matter of the speech that was just given.
In terms of this issue of carbon taxes being a market mechanism or whether it is a market thing or not, I think the important point is that of course they involve the possibility of incentives and training and they recognize those realities, but fundamentally they are taxes that require Canadians to pay more. They are intentionally driving up the price of gas and the commodities that have gas as an input, making those things more expensive in an effort to incentivize changes in behaviour. The fact that the carbon tax increases prices for Canadians is not a bug; that is actually the intention of the policy.
I wonder if the member would just acknowledge that in his and the NDP's support of this policy, they are seeking to promote the increase in gas prices, that they want higher gas prices and that this is why they support a carbon tax.
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Mr. Speaker, I certainly think that carbon pricing is one piece of the puzzle. It is meant to be a kind of market tool.
Putting a price on carbon gives companies an incentive to come up with more ways to try to get carbon out of their supply chains so that they can offer a more competitive price. Folks will be more likely to buy those cheaper products, so companies that have a lower carbon supply chain are rewarded. That is the idea. It was not originally a left-wing idea; it was a kind of right-wing idea, designed by folks who are on the political right but who nevertheless accept the reality of climate change.
I would remind my Conservative colleagues that the oil and gas industry in Alberta was built with a lot of public funds and a lot of upfront public investment. In fact, a lot of public investment continues to go to the industry, which is why we know that if we want to shift the economy somewhere else, that too will require a lot of public investment.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the speech from my colleague from the New Democratic Party.
For most of the evening, we have been hearing some pretty fanciful stuff with respect to climate change and the efforts by previous prime minister Brian Mulroney to abate acid rain, which was historic and so important. However, the way that this former prime minister worked to deal with the issues of the time have been stretched a little bit. Of course, he and the president of the day, George Bush, used things like cap and trade and changes in products used to produce electricity.
I note that my colleague's home province is Manitoba, which generates almost all of its electricity through renewable resources like hydro and wind. Most of the members who are so against carbon pricing are from provinces that still generate a lot of their electricity from coal and natural gas, like Saskatchewan and Alberta. Currently over 80% of the power from those provinces is from fossil fuels.
Perhaps the member from the NDP could comment on how carbon pricing is an effective measure to move provinces toward using renewable resources to generate electricity.
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Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise to speak to Bill C-47 at report stage.
I want to share some reflections, particularly about the process the bill has undergone in its journey in the House of Commons and some of the debate that has arisen today on the subject of the bill. I apologize that the thoughts are not in any particular order, but there are some things that are nevertheless worth noting about the bill.
If you were to listen to the debate today and you were a Canadian who had not studied the bill, you might be under the impression that the recent increase in the carbon tax is somehow in this bill. It is important to say that it is not. There has been a fair bit of confusion around that, given the focus of the debate.
You might also think that a lot of the major spending items the government committed to in its budget are in this bill, or you might even think that this bill is the budget itself, given the nature of some of the conversation that has been had around the bill.
It is important to distinguish between the budget itself, which was already debated and voted on in this House some time ago, and budget implementation bills, which do not always legislate commitments from the most recent budget. In fact, sometimes they go back to previous budgets, but effectively, when the government is ready to move on some previous budget commitments and there is legislative work that needs doing, this is what we see in the budget implementation bills. There are some items from the most recent budget in this bill. There are some items from previous budgets in this bill.
One of the things that is important to emphasize is that as far as spending authority goes—that is, this bill giving permission to government to spend taxpayer money—there is not anywhere near the level of spending in this bill that some have said there is. For instance, even in respect of the dental program, this bill does not authorize the money for the dental program. It does have some legislative measures to facilitate the program, ultimately, once it is ready to be operationalized, like better sharing of information between government departments so that they can that ensure people who are making claims under the program are properly eligible.
In other words, there are some provisions designed to ensure eligibility up front and to move away from the attestation system, which is something Conservatives have said they do not like, and that there should be upfront checks of eligibility so people do not mistakenly receive benefits that then need to be clawed back. That is something this legislation seeks to do.
This legislation would reduce the excise tax increase that was going to be 6.3%, because it was tied to inflation through an automatic escalator, down to 2%. That is not a spending item. It is a reduction of government revenue, because it reduces a tax. It reduces a tax that Conservatives said they wanted to see reduced and takes on a tax increase that they thought was inappropriate in the circumstances. We agreed with that as New Democrats and we are glad to see that small brewers and small vineyards across Canada that are facing difficult times are not going to be hit with an outsized increase in the excise tax. However, that is only true if this legislation passes.
This legislation would also close a lot of loopholes in tax law and other law that is used by money launderers in order to avoid paying taxes and to mask their criminal activity. This bill would crack down on predatory lenders or payday loan places that are charging really inordinate amounts of interest. Canadians do not typically choose a payday loan centre as their first choice for banking. It is usually because they do not have a lot of options, and that is how they get there.
Somebody shared with me a statistic, and it was something like Canadians are 40% more likely to end up declaring bankruptcy if they just walk in the door of a payday loan place. There is clearly a close connection between payday lending and people on the financial margins. This bill seeks to do something about that by lowering the criminal rate of interest.
It also improves the Canada workers benefit, something that a colleague of mine on the finance committee likes to talk a lot about, which is the marginal effective tax rate for working-class Canadians and how it disincentivizes people to leave social assistance for work. That is his claim. He likes to reference the C.D. Howe Institute report to that effect. In fact, the changes to the Canada workers benefit would help reduce that marginal effective tax rate and make the transition from social assistance to employment easier.
The legislation also removes Russia and Belarus from a list of countries that get preferential tariffs for trading in Canada. In other words, it extends and strengthens sanctions that Canada has put in place since Russia's illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine. These are the things that are being held up. They are not being held up because there is another huge spend that goes along with them.
In fact, the biggest spending items in this bill were the doubling of the GST tax credit and $2 billion in health transfers to the provinces that was negotiated between the federal government and the provinces. That was by far the biggest direct spend in this legislation. With the consent and participation of the Conservatives, all parties in this House expedited another bill, Bill C-46, that had those spending items in it. There are now some coordinating amendments in this legislation to make sure we do not do the same thing twice.
The fact of the matter is that the biggest spending items, with the full participation and knowledge of the Conservatives, have already passed through the House of Commons. What is left are a number of administrative changes to set up the administrative infrastructure for the growth fund and some legal changes to facilitate the administration of a dental care program. This is not actually where the money is being authorized.
We would think that a former finance critic, which the leader of the Conservative Party is, would know that. We would think that the current finance critic might know that. Perhaps the finance critic for the Conservatives might have known that if he had bothered to show up much at committee during the Bill C-47 process, but apparently he had other things to do. He left it to other members of his caucus to hold down the fort while the finance committee was studying Bill C-47 to the extent that it did.
Of course, we did not do as much extensive study of that bill as I would have liked, because Conservatives chose to talk out the time we had. First they talked out the time we had for hearing witnesses. They did that in the lead-up to the Minister of Finance's appearance.
Was it on a grand principle? I am not sure. Did they have an important point? I think so. It is one that I supported on the record many times. I thought the minister should have committed to come for two hours. As it was, she came for an hour and 40 minutes, but she told us she would only come for an hour. I do not think that was helpful to the process. I think more forewarning by the minister about how long she was actually prepared to appear would have been more helpful.
In the end, it meant that the Conservatives chose to talk over all of the time that we would have had to hear from Canadians who are concerned and from stakeholders who represent various concerns.
Then there was an agreement at the committee to have a process to move to clause-by-clause study. It would have allowed us some time to debate the clauses and various amendments and subamendments. Instead, Conservatives chose to talk through that time as well. Then they said that they wanted to hear from witnesses after talking through all the time we had for witnesses. They say the agreement they signed on to with the Liberals to do clause-by-clause study provided for another 10 hours of witness testimony that they never got.
Did they raise it when we still had three or four days to hear from more witnesses and come to an understanding? No, they raised it afterward. All the time to hear from witnesses had elapsed, so they knew when they raised the issue that there was not going to be a positive outcome and that they were not going to get what they wanted, and then they repeated this kind of behaviour in the House.
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Mr. Speaker, I will simply say that the presidencies of republics like the United States and France are not without cost. It is very expensive to have a big building like the Élysée Palace in Paris for the President. He is not a king, but there is a real cost.
The same things goes for the White House in the U.S. and all the other trappings that go with the presidency.
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Mr. Speaker, I am having a hard time getting a clear picture. We are currently looking at Bill C‑47 and the member is talking about clause 510. His party seems to want to delete it as an anti-monarchy gesture, but he seems to be in favour of this clause. I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the proposal being made on this monarchy issue.
Again, I see that there is a divide and a disconnect between the Liberal and Conservative members, who talk about the monarchy, and us, who simply want to abolish it. When we talk about the monarchy it is to say that it is archaic and costs the government money. To us, the issue of seniors calling for an increase in old age security is a priority. Also, we are short on housing and we need EI reform to take care of people who lose their job in a period of economic uncertainty. Again, I am feeling the difference between Quebec and the rest of Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, I, of course, came intending to talk about the Royal Style and Titles Act, and I was hoping for a question that would relate to that, but let me try answering this question, seeing as it was raised.
Speaking of having promised one thing and then going in a different direction, I cannot help but note that one of the most effective ways of capturing carbon is through reforestation. Of course, trees are composed largely of carbon. Wood is carbon. I cannot remember if it was in the last election or the one before, but the Prime Minister promised to plant two billion trees. He has produced less than one-tenth of 1% of that promise, despite the fact that a number of years have gone by.
If we are looking for concrete action to make this planet a greener place, a less carbon-intensive place, he is not setting a very good example.
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Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed the scholarly history lesson. I have enjoyed a lot of the speeches tonight. They have been quite wide-ranging. I heard a bootstrap argument about the agency to make more decisions about one's own economic future. I agree with that. However, I would note that it came from a member who would like for women to have fewer choices about their own reproductive futures. I also heard a comparison saying that $467 in support would never do anything to help a Canadian family but $330 was an extraordinary burden. There has been some difficulty on math.
I know that the member did not touch on carbon pricing tonight, but he did mention taxation. He said there is too much tax in Canada. I observed that in the last election, he, like all 338 MPs and candidates, ran on a carbon pricing scheme in one form or another. Oftentimes, people point to Brian Mulroney's ability to abate acid rain. I would point out that the Conservatives did that with cap and trade and a ban on burning certain types of coal. These are the types of advancements that come from really good government programs.
I will ask a question directly about the member's previous commitment to run on a carbon price. Where does he stand now on carbon pricing?
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I have to confess, Mr. Speaker, that I had come prepared to talk about the Royal Style and Titles Act, not about some of the other aspects of the budget bill.
I will make the general observation that in Canada, we do have a problem with too much taxation, not too little. I recognize the member's point that she feels this is frequently inequitable, and while I might disagree with her on some specifics, it is a good point that in Canada the welfare state increasingly is focused on taxing all of us, but very inequitably frequently, and then transferring that money to those who are politically connected and who are in a position to receive benefits from government funds. Therefore, in fact, it is not a distribution from the wealthy to the less wealthy, as it ought to be. On that point, the NDP, like its CCF predecessor, has a good general point.
On the specific questions she asked, I am less capable of giving an informed answer.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for that riveting history around clause 510 in the budget implementation act. I appreciated learning more information about that.
I was reflecting, when the member was sharing his speech, on some of the things he was not talking about. I am wondering if the member could talk about the important work of ensuring that the ultrarich and banks are paying what they owe. Currently, thanks to the work of the NDP, we are seeing in the budget the alternative minimum tax rate increasing from 15% to 20.5%, which would recoup over $3 billion in five years.
I am wondering if the member supports this work and why we never hear from the Conservatives about the importance of having the ultrarich and large corporations paying what they owe so that money can go where we need it most.
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Mr. Speaker, perhaps the hon. member who just inquired about the inclusion of the Royal Style and Titles Act in the bill will find my speech, which is on that very subject, to be helpful.
I thought I would start my remarks today by explaining, for the benefit of anyone who does not already know this, what an omnibus bill is and where such bills got their name. In the 19th century, the ancestors of today's diesel and electric municipal buses were horse-drawn coaches, typically with benches along both sides of the interior and sometimes with an exterior staircase to a further set of seats on the roof. They were typically crowded, uncomfortable and hot, and people with nothing in common were forced to sit or stand side by side and sometimes on each other's laps.
As a result of the endless comedic possibilities afforded by the numerous random and uncomfortably close encounters across otherwise impenetrable barriers of age, gender and social class that were created every day in the crowded interiors of rush-hour omnibuses, and even more on the overstuffed rooftop seats, omnibuses became a favourite subject for contemporary painters and cartoonists. Anyone who does a Google search for “omnibus” and “painting” will see what I mean.
It should come as no surprise, then, that when Victorians were searching for a word to describe enormous pieces of legislation that crammed many unrelated subjects into a single bill, the jostling and smelly omnibuses of their cities came to their minds. Today, more than a century has passed since the term “omnibus” has been replaced, at least when referring to means of transport, with the contraction “bus”, but the word “omnibus” survives, robust as ever, as a term for describing vast, multiheaded bills.
To say that Bill C-47, the budget implementation act, is an omnibus bill is to make an understatement. The bill is 681 clauses long, and if printed it runs to hundreds of pages. It is a bill that would make Marcel Proust green with envy. It is to legislation what Wagner's Ring cycle is to opera and what Gormenghast castle is to domestic architecture. It is what the SS Great Eastern was to shipping when it was launched in 1858: six times larger than any other vessel then afloat, and propelled forward by a bizarre combination of propeller, sails and two colossal paddle wheels.
Lost in the middle of this vast, ramshackle legislative edifice is clause 510, which would enact the royal style and titles act, 2023. It reads as follows:
The Parliament of Canada assents to the issue by His Majesty of His Royal Proclamation under the Great Seal of Canada establishing for Canada the following Royal Style and Titles:
Charles the Third, by the Grace of God King of Canada and His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth.
This provision really ought to have been enacted on its own as a stand-alone bill, as it involves no expenditure of public funds and therefore truly has no relationship whatsoever to the budget. If it had been enacted in such a manner, the debates in this place would have provided a record of the government's rationale for the royal style and titles act, 2023. The responses of the various opposition parties would have provided some useful feedback as to how the rest of us feel. However, since that is not to be, I thought I would make a few comments outlining my own observations on this matter.
The first thing to note is His Majesty's current title, which would be changed by this enactment. Currently, the king is titled “Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Canada and His other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith”. The new, shorter title would eliminate the reference to the United Kingdom and would remove the title “Defender of the Faith”.
I note that the current title was adopted in 1953 by the Parliament of Canada shortly after the accession to the throne of Her late Majesty, our much-loved Queen Elizabeth II. At the time, the goal was to have a title as close as possible to the one in use in the U.K. With that goal in mind, titles similar to the one that is still in use in Canada were adopted by parliaments throughout the Commonwealth. However, since that time, most Commonwealth realms have chosen to drop the reference to the United Kingdom and to eliminate the title “Defender of the Faith”.
In Australia, for example, the King is “King Charles the Third, by Grace of God King of Australia and his other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth”. To take another country whose name starts with “A”, in Antigua and Barbuda he is “Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Antigua and Barbuda and of His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth”. In Australia, this style dates to 1973. In Antigua and Barbuda, the title dates to 1982. In the Solomon Islands, the title was altered to something similar in 2013, and so on. Similar titles are used in over a dozen other independent Commonwealth countries.
Canada is merely bringing its title into conformity with the ones used in most of the other Commonwealth realms. In doing so, I think we keep with the spirit of the 1952 Commonwealth heads of government conference, at which assembled prime ministers agreed that there should be a non-binding but sincere effort to maintain a relatively uniform style for the monarch's titles in each of the different realms.
In Australia in 1973, the goal of removing the reference to the United Kingdom was to make it clear that the Queen's role as monarch was no longer simply a historical artifact of that country's colonial past and was most certainly not due to Australia retaining a subordinate relationship to Britain. Rather, her constitutional role was a consequence of her direct relationship with the Australian people, a relationship that was confirmed in a referendum 26 years later, when a majority of Australians in every one of the country's six states voted against becoming a republic.
This seems like a reasonable goal for Canada as well. Constitutionally speaking, we would remain a monarchy even if Britain chose to become a republic, and it is odd that our head of state does not have a title that reflects this reality. As a historical side note, it is worth observing that in the 1650s, when England did briefly become a republic under Oliver Cromwell, Newfoundland, which was then the only part of Canada under British rule, refused to abandon the Crown. David Kirke, Newfoundland's proprietary governor, was captured by a force sent from the American colonies and was forcibly repatriated to England, where he died in prison for his monarchist sentiments.
Now let me turn to the subject of the title “Defender of the Faith”.
Famously, this title was given to King Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 in honour of the king's defence of the seven sacraments against the challenge that had been made four years earlier, when Martin Luther had published his 95 theses. A few years later, Henry too broke with the pope when he was unable to obtain a divorce, but he kept the title.
“Defender of the Faith” is a title that might be viewed by some people as being appropriate for the U.K., where the King is the nominal head of the established church, but there is no established church in Canada. Thanks to the efforts of two generations of pre-Confederation reformers, the last traces of an established church in this country were abolished by an act of the Parliament of the Province of Canada in 1854. From 1854 onward, even though our successive kings and queens have retained the title “Defender of the Faith”, it is solely because we were using the same titles used in the United Kingdom.
Ninety-nine years after the abolition of the established church, in 1953, the title was then adopted by statute for reasons I have already discussed. However, “Defender of the Faith” was by then an anachronism, and it was already controversial. Its departure from the King's title is welcome.
I note that the King himself is not enamoured of this title. The title "Defender of the Faith" implies a kind of religious uniformity that is out of step with our times. Frankly, state-sponsored religious uniformity was pretty undesirable in King Henry VIII's time too when viewed from our vantage point. In the 1500s, dissenting Christians were persecuted across Europe, the Inquisition was burning heretics at the stake in Spain and Jews were banned from living in England. In today's world, where the U.K., just as much as Canada, is home to robust communities of Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Buddhists, there is no such thing as “the faith”. It is worth noting that the current British Prime Minister is a Hindu.
It is for this reason that when he was still Prince of Wales, His Majesty speculated that a better title would be “Defender of Faith”, and I can also see merit in the title “Defender of all Faiths”. However, newfangled and novel titles would be inappropriate to include in a statute that is stuffed into a vast omnibus bill, with little opportunity for the kind of public discussion that would be needed to establish their legitimacy. Simply dropping the title seems the best solution of all.
My conclusion, therefore, is this: I will be voting against Bill C-47, but I do support the Royal Style and Titles Act, in clause 510.
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Mr. Speaker, what my colleague is talking about is not a priority for Quebeckers or Canadians. I think that their priority is the economy and the need for life to become more affordable.
I just really believe that Quebeckers and Canadians want to see politicians here in Parliament focused on how to make their lives more affordable and how to ensure that we grow better economies, so people have greater opportunities in the future to get into housing for the first time, as a first-time homebuyer, for example.
That is what people are looking for here. I may agree with her somewhat that a budget is probably not the right place for something like that. I also do not think it is the biggest priority facing Quebeckers and Canadians to be worried about that. We should be focused on the economy and making sure that we are making life more affordable for Canadians.
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Mr. Speaker, I agree with some aspects of my colleague's speech but disagree with others. That is the beauty of being human. We can agree and disagree while respecting each other.
That said, I would like to know the member's opinion on a surprise tucked away in the deepest recesses of the bill, in clause 510, on page 325, concerning the proclamation of Charles III as Canada's head of state.
If it is in the budget, does the member think that means that huge amounts of money will be spent on it? If there are no exorbitant amounts involved, why is it in the budget, in his opinion? Would it have been better to introduce this proclamation in a separate bill?
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Mr. Speaker, first, I would comment that only a Liberal would stand to say that increasing a tax, the carbon tax, is somehow going to be better for the economy. Only a Liberal would say that this is the way to a better economy, to tax people a bit more. That will solve all the problems that people face. That is the first thing that just astounds me, no matter how many times I hear it from that Liberal Party.
Secondly, to his question, certainly, there are a lot of opportunities. I want to point out very clearly that there is a need for oil and gas in this world for many years to come yet, and we need to make sure that Canadian oil and gas is being used rather than that from some foreign dictatorship.
There is obviously opportunity, as he has pointed out, in some of these new emerging sectors and technologies. The problem is that Liberals talk about putting money into things, but they also set themselves up as the gatekeepers. They make it so impossible for anyone to actually invest and do anything within any of these opportunities that Canada falls behind, as it has done with the opportunities we had in natural gas.
We could have been providing the needs of clean energy in Europe right now, to displace the Russian energy, but no. This government has set up all the roadblocks it could possibly put in the way, and that is what it will do again with everything else.
It continually makes itself the gatekeeper and makes it impossible to anyone to move ahead with these things.
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