- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sarnia—Lambton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $118,419.33
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I am rising today to express my serious concerns about Bill C-50. This bill is called the sustainable jobs act, which is typical of what Liberals do. They pick a name that sounds good. Who does not like sustainable jobs? I like sustainable jobs. I think all Canadians want sustainable jobs. It sounds really good, but the problem is that in this bill there is no plan to create sustainable jobs. This is a plan to get a plan.
The bill outlines how the Liberals are going to put together a council. Based on past behaviour, I suggest that it would be highly paid Liberal insiders who will get these jobs and advise on what the plan ought to be. As to the timeline of when they are going to come up with what the plan ought to be, it be should by 2025, coincidentally just after the next election.
The Liberals do not have a plan. Nothing says there is no plan like a bill that is introduced to get a plan. That is the first thing.
The second thing is the Liberals have another role, a secretariat, that is going to do some coordination, with another highly paid Liberal insider when they get the plan. The problem is that is it; that is all. It is a plan to get a plan, with some principles that are motherhood and apple pie and that we would all agree on, such as well-paying jobs, caring about the environment and the need to respect labour, all of these good things. They are all motherhood and apple pie, but the bill does not have a specific action that is going to help.
On the other hand, it is going to hurt. The analysts of the government have said that Bill C-50 would kill 170,000 direct Canadian jobs, would displace 450,000 workers directly and indirectly working in the energy sector and would risk the livelihoods of 2.7 million Canadians across all provinces. The bill would destroy as many as 2.7 million jobs when there is not a single action in it to create any sustainable jobs at all. That is a problem.
The other thing is that it is going to cost a lot of money. Right now the energy sector provides 10% of Canada's GDP and pays over $20 billion in taxes to all levels of government every year. Last year, $48 billion in royalties and taxes were contributed by the energy sector. This bill purports to get rid of that by eliminating the sector.
We can look at other places in the world that have come up with a sustainable jobs plan and are starting to implement it, Scotland being one example. If we took the cost per person of its plan and did the equivalent thing here, it would cost $37.2 billion. The Liberals are taking away as much as $48 billion and adding a cost of another $37 billion. If we do the math, they are increasing by greater than $70 billion the loss to the Canadian economy.
I do not know why the Liberal government cannot learn the lesson when countless people can, like former Liberal John Manley, who said that when it runs these huge deficits, it is putting a foot on the inflationary gas pedal, which is causing the Bank of Canada to put its foot on the brake with higher interest rates. This raises the cost of mortgages. Canadians are suffering from coast to coast, so definitely not only is the bill not going to create jobs, but it will come with a huge cost.
It is not like this is the first time there has been an attack on oil and gas and the energy sector. This has been a continual theme from the time I got elected in 2015. Let us start with the tanker ban, Bill C-48, to keep Canadian oil from getting out there when everybody else's ships are out there full of oil. Then we had Bill C-55, which created marine protected areas so we could do no oil and gas development there. Then there was Bill C-69, the “no more pipelines” bill, which was just called unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. All of these things were intended to be a war against creating oil and gas projects.
There is evidence. When the Liberals took power, there were 18 LNG projects on the books and there were four pipelines. Zero pipelines have been built and all the LNG projects but one are cancelled. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, our friends in Germany were going to give us $59 billion to replace their Russian oil and coal with our green LNG. The Prime Minister said there was no business case, so Australia took that deal.
Then Japan came up with a similar deal and again we would not take the deal, so Saudi Arabia took it. Then came France and the Netherlands. There were all these opportunities for Canada to be a leader, supplanting higher-carbon fuels with our green LNG, the most responsibly produced product in the world with the best human rights record, but again the Liberal government refused. Instead, it is focused on its own ideology and things that it wants to do that continue to destroy the economy.
We can talk about the electric vehicle mandates. That was another great idea. Let us give away $31 billion to create 3,000 jobs. For those who can do the math, if we just gave each of those 3,000 people $10 million, they would never have to work again and there would not be any footprint. There is a total misunderstanding of how to create a growing economy.
Then there is the clean electricity standard, another hugely divisive bill that was introduced by the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, clearly not understanding that where the Liberals want to go with all the electric vehicles, electricity and the grid would require building the equivalent of 19 nuclear facilities, like the one from Bruce Power. They cannot build anything, so I do not know where they get the idea that they are going to be successful in achieving that.
At the same time, they are ignoring the fact that only 7% of the public even wants an electric vehicle because the technology is not there. No one wants to be trapped in a snowstorm at -30°C because the batteries do not work. They catch fire. In addition to that, they do not have a very long range. Instead, the government decided to pick a winner and loser with the battery plants that are being built.
Now Toyota has come out with a solid-state battery, with a 1,275-kilometre range, that works at -20°C and does not catch fire. That will make our technology obsolete, with $31 billion after the fact. Maybe the Liberal government needs a few more engineers so that it can actually make science-, fact- and data-based decisions, but that is not what is happening today.
The Liberals continue to move ahead with the carbon tax and the second carbon tax, putting punishment on the backs of Canadians and achieving nothing. Emissions have gone up under the government. At the 2005 level, we were at 732 megatonnes. We needed to get to 519 and now we are at 819. They are not achieving their targets and keep putting bills like this in place, talking about sustainability, the environment and creating jobs. They are not actually achieving that.
Sarnia—Lambton has a huge oil and gas sector, but it knows how to do a transition and is doing a transition. It is creating good-paying, sustainable jobs like the ones at Origin Materials, a net-zero plastics plant in my riding. My riding has one of the largest solar facilities in North America. There is a whole bio-innovation centre that is growing different kinds of bio-facilities that are all either carbon sinks or carbon-neutral. These are the kinds of actual solutions and actions we need. That is not what is in Bill C-50. It is a plan to get a plan with nothing else. For that reason, I will not be supporting Bill C-50.
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Madam Speaker, I am very happy to be back in the House of Commons debating legislation. I will be sharing my time today with my friend, the member for Calgary Midnapore.
When I heard the minister talk about Bill C-35, it was like it was the panacea of child care. One can imagine my surprise when I looked at it. The agreements have already been made with all the provinces and territories, and the $6 billion for the $10-a-day child care has gone out the door, so why do we need this bill?
The bill says it would do a few things. It sets a vision out, but if we look at the vision, it is all common-sense stuff, like we want an early childhood learning system that should be diverse, flexible, accessible and affordable. That is not visionary; it is pretty simple. Then it sets out the government's commitment to long-term funding, which it has already signed up in the contracts. Again, why?
Then it sets out the principles that guide the ongoing federal investments. If we look at the details, it says we are going to go with what the provinces have said. However, it would establish a national advisory council on early learning and child care. Why do we need a national advisory council on early learning and child care, when there is such a council in every one of the provinces that we just signed contracts with? Is this just another opportunity to hire a bunch of Liberal insiders to do work that is already being done?
I want to be clear for members opposite who are always saying that the Conservatives do not support this bill. The Conservatives support child care. Let me start with my own experience. One can appreciate, for a chemical engineer flying around the world, with flights out of Sarnia leaving at six in the morning, how easy it would be to find somebody to take the kids at 5 a.m. What if the plane gets delayed, which of course never happens with Air Canada? What if I do not show up until 11 o'clock at night to pick up my kids? Who is going to want to be that child care provider for any length of time?
I had some amazing child care, some at home and some more public in nature, but I also had those bad experiences. There was the one who had her boyfriend over all the time while she was watching my kids. There was the one who was smoking pot while she was watching my kids. There was one who let the kids go swimming with the guy next door without accompanying them because she was watching soap operas. Then there was the day I showed up and my kid was eating cat food sitting on the stairs because she had not had lunch. I would certainly like to emphasize in this House that I really support good-quality child care, and it is not easy to come by.
That said, it is clear that we are trying to echo the system that exists in Quebec. When I was on the status of women committee, we did many studies, and one of them was on unpaid care, with child care as a specific focus. We made recommendations to the government, and I will read what they said:
That the Government of Canada, in partnership with Quebec and the other provinces and territories, with the goal of ensuring that all families in Canada, regardless of geographic location or immigration status, have access to high-quality, affordable and inclusive childcare options, work to:
adequately and sustainably fund, through transfers to the provinces and territories with the rights to retraction with full compensation, an affordable and culturally appropriate national early learning and childcare system; and
ensure that this national system includes options for Canadians such as, sufficient public childcare spaces to meet demand, or sufficient financial support to Canadians who wish to care for their children at home.
That was in 2020, so it was not that long ago.
Absolutely, when it comes to wanting child care options, this is a place to start, but CUPE has said there is three times the need for spaces. Even if we look to the Quebec system, there is a two-year waiting list there. People who have family members who are already in the day care system in Quebec can get another kid in from their family, but new families cannot get in the door. What do they do?
In addition to what the government has put forward, there are going to be additional solutions needed. We have to have flexibility. When we think about this from a cost perspective, I have seen many studies that show that if we want more women in the workforce, we need to provide this kind of child care.
Let us say, according to the members who spoke previously, that we are giving $14,000 to each person as a subsidy for their child. After taxes, some of that goes back to the government. In addition to that, somebody is going out to work and they are paying taxes. There are ECE workers who are watching the children and they are paying taxes. Many studies have said this is a cost-neutral exercise that will result in more women in the workforce, and that is what we want.
However, we have to make sure we are flexible enough for those who work long hours, like nurses. My one daughter is a nurse and they have 12-hour shifts. Finding day care for that is not going to be covered by the current system the government has designed. There are many places where people prefer to have a grandmother or aunt watch the children. What is the financial incentive to make the system fairer there? I leave it to the government's creativity, but there is definitely something to be done there.
There was a promise a few years ago to make 42,000 child care spots available. I think that was a 2018 promise from the Liberals. I am not sure how many of those actually happened, but when I did the math and divided up 42,000 spots among 338 ridings, it sounded like fewer than 200 spaces per riding, which is nowhere near what was needed. Again, there is the problem of not having enough spaces.
There has been discussion about the labour shortages. There are definitely labour shortages in every business I am hearing from in my riding, but specifically with respect to ECE workers. I hired an ECE worker in 1989 or 1991, and I was paying $1,200 a month. Think about what that is in today's dollars and how much it would cost to pay them, but the pay for ECE workers is really not that good. A lot of them, although they get the training, do not end up staying in the business.
I think there is something to be done in terms of making the wage attractive enough to get those additional workers in the jobs. We see the same thing with PSWs in the health care system where the wages just are not good enough or the hours are not enough for somebody to live on. I definitely think there is something to be done there.
With respect to the actual bill, there are some suggested amendments that have come from associations. The Association of Alberta Childcare Entrepreneurs suggests it has a problem with the committee makeup of this national advisory committee, which I am not sure we really need. If we have one, we should have representation from both private child care centres and the not-for-profits in order to hear all the voices.
The Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario wants to make the bill more inclusive by deleting the reference in the bill to public and not-for-profit child care providers, so that we could have the flexibility that some of the members have indicated they would support. Different provinces are going to want to allow a combination of private and not-for-profit child care. I think that would be good.
Another thing missed in this bill is that not every day care is the same. Depending on the location, there are needs. For example, let us talk about food programs. There are some places where child care and day care are providing meals because that might be all the food these kids get. In the model that has been put forward, there is no allowance for that. Either those day care facilities are going to have to charge money on top of it, which goes against the whole point of this bill, or they are going to have to stop feeding the kids, which is the wrong answer.
At the same time, there is an administrative burden of applying for all of this funding, and people are already busy watching tiny, busy bodies, so they do not necessarily have the wherewithal for the complicated government applications. Something that could be looked at is to streamline those as well.
All in all, it is a step in the right direction. We need more child care so we can have more women in the workforce. This will certainly create a great number of spaces. I look forward to the government expanding in terms of flexibility and some of the other things I have outlined in my speech.
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