- 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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moved that the bill be read the third time and passed.
She said: Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to rise to speak to my private member's bill, Bill C-228, today at third reading. It was successfully passed as amended at the finance committee. Bill C-228 is centred on pension protection, working to prevent the loss of pensions for employees whose companies have declared bankruptcy.
Canadians deserve to know that the contributions they have made their whole lives will result in a secure financial future for themselves and their families, but the last few years have shown us that security can disappear in a moment. My bill would remedy this issue.
The bill would do three things. First, it would require that an annual report on the solvency of pension funds be tabled here in the House of Commons for greater transparency and oversight. Second, it would provide a mechanism to transfer funds into a pension fund to restore it to solvency. Finally, in the case of bankruptcy, pensions would be paid out ahead of large creditors and executive bonuses. The acceptance so far by this Parliament and the good work that has been done on the bill by all parties show that there is a common spirit and desire to improve pension security for Canadians. For that, the House has my sincere thanks.
Over the last 10 years, efforts by many parties and senators have been put forward to introduce bills to improve pension protection in Canada. I cherry-picked from all the ideas that were previously supported in the House and put them together in Bill C-228. Learning from both the numerous cases of company collapse and the various pension protection bills that came before to improve pension protection in a way we can all live with is my goal here today.
To put things in context, I want to point out that there have been far too many cases of businesses that have declared bankruptcy to the great detriment of their own employees.
Nortel Networks declared bankruptcy in 2009, leaving 200,000 Canadians to fend for themselves when it came to their pensions. An article published in the Financial Post in 2016 entitled “The big lesson from Nortel Networks: Pension plans aren't a guarantee” gave a detailed account of the battle waged by these employees as they tried to recover even part of their share of Nortel's assets, which were estimated at $7.3 billion. Legal and consulting fees totalled over $1.9 billion, which further reduced the amount these former employees were seeking.
According to CBC, at the end of 2016, former Nortel employees were pleased with the agreement they reached under which they would get a payout of 40¢ on the dollar. That was an improvement over the 10¢ on the dollar they were initially offered.
However, in 2020, the employees lost out again when the Ontario pension benefits guarantee fund managed to reclaim some $200 million from monies allocated to pensioners in Nortel's bankruptcy proceedings.
In all, the whole mess with Nortel turned into a more than 11-year battle for former employees who failed several times while simply trying to obtain the financial security to which they were entitled. That is just one example.
Sears Canada is another infamous case and perhaps one of the most well known. Between 2005 and 2013, Sears Canada paid more than $3 billion in dividends to shareholders, even as it was operating at a loss and its pension plan was underfunded by about $133 million. In 2017, Sears Canada declared bankruptcy after attempting to restructure. During the restructuring, Sears Canada faced heavy criticism for giving retention bonuses to 43 executives and senior managers, but it did not plan to offer severance to laid-off employees. Allegedly, the bonuses were intended to maintain the morale of senior staff at the cost of providing necessary funds for the company's pension plan, leaving more than 17,000 pensioners cheated of their full pensions.
Sears pensioners learned their pensions were going to be cut by 30%. Seventy-two-year-old Ron Husk of Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, told the CBC that the cut caused his monthly pension payment to drop by $450. Many said they would have to go back to work in sales, in their seventies. Pensioners in Ontario fared marginally better because of the provincial mechanism that protects the first $1,500 of a pensioner's payment, but it made little difference overall. In today's era of extreme inflation, it is helping even less.
Looking back further, when the T. Eaton Company folded in 1999, the vast majority of its 24,500 employees were terminated without being paid termination pay and severance pay, as well as other amounts owed to them. All employee and retiree health and other benefits were cancelled. In the end, the liquidator released payments to employees and retirees of just 53.7 cents on the dollar. There are several other noted cases where courts have ruled in favour of creditors and lenders over pensioners, including Indalex, Stelco and Grant Forest Products among others.
In the Indalex case, Indalex Limited obtained creditor protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, also known as the CCAA. The court authorized Indalex to obtain debtor in possession, or DIP, financing, which would provide the company with loans to continue operating its businesses during the restructuring period. These DIP lenders had superior priority over the existing debt, equity and other claims.
At a hearing for approval of this motion in 2008, two groups of pension claimants opposed this distribution, asserting that the assets equal to the funding deficiencies in the two defined-benefit pension plans administered by Indalex were deemed to be held in trust and should be given to the pension plans in priority over the DIP lenders. The CCAA court ruled in favour of the DIP lenders, not the pensioners. This decision was upheld and became a precedent for the Grant Forest Products case. Sadly, many other examples of workers who did not receive their full pensions exist.
There is no doubt that this has been a problem for a long time. The government needs to intervene by taking stringent measures to rectify this and protect Canadian workers.
I want to acknowledge the contribution of some of my House of Commons colleagues. Many MPs from all parties have come to see me to propose bills on this same topic.
Currently there is a requirement for an annual report on the solvency of a fund, but it goes to the superintendent of finance, and it is not clear what, if any, actions are taken. In fact from 2003 to 2020, there is evidence that companies continued to have insolvent pension funds. My bill would require this report to be tabled here for greater transparency and oversight. Currently the average federally managed fund is at 109% solvency, so it is a good time to implement the measures of this bill.
The second part of the bill is to allow companies with insolvent pension funds to transfer additional funds from other assets in the business into the pension fund, without tax implications, to make it solvent.
In October 2017 and again in 2020, the Bloc member for Manicouagan introduced her private member's bill, Bill C-253, which would amend the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and the CCAA. The bill would provide priority status for pensions in the event of bankruptcy proceedings. This bill ultimately made it to committee, but died on the Order Paper when the Liberals called the election. I have incorporated her bill here with some suggestions brought forward.
There was concern that implementing an immediate priority for pensions could have unintended consequences. The suggestion was to have the coming into force of the reporting on the insolvency of funds to happen immediately, along with a mechanism to top up the fund and restore it to solvency. However, it was recommended to have several years for companies to get their funds in order before implementing the priority part.
Five years was the period suggested originally in the bill, but there were stakeholders who preferred to see it be three years. At committee, we were able to come to a compromise of four years for the coming into force of the priority portion of the bill. I want to also acknowledge that the Liberal member for Whitby sponsored an e-petition on pension protection, supporting this very issue.
My bill has been reviewed by a variety of stakeholders, from the Canadian Labour Congress to financial institutions and many pension associations nationally, including the Canadian Federation of Pensioners and the Canadian Association of Retired Persons.
Bill VanGorder, the chief operating officer of CARP, offered this quote:
Most older Canadians have fixed incomes but face rising costs, growing inflation, an unpredictable economy and retirement savings that suffer as a result. The Canadian Association of Retired Persons...believes it is vital that the Federal Government protect pensioners by giving them “priority” status and creates a pension insurance program that insures 100% of pension liabilities. This proposal would go a long way in making that happen.
Some banks and large financial institutions have expressed their reluctance to me. They are concerned that, if pensioners are given priority, companies with insolvent funds will have to pay higher interest rates to obtain credit and will be less likely to apply for credit.
This is part of the reason why the implementation schedule should allow time for companies with insolvent funds to get their finances in order. I would like to point out that, if a company cannot restore the solvency of its fund within four years, it should indeed pay a higher interest rate to obtain credit because it really does present a higher risk.
In summary, this means reporting to Parliament on the solvency of funds for greater transparency so we can ensure actions are being taken to protect pensions, creating a mechanism to top up the funds to restore solvency, and, in the event of bankruptcy, ensuring that people who have worked their whole lives receive the pension they were promised.
An amendment was brought forward by the member for Elmwood—Transcona to include severance and termination pay at the same priority as pensions, ahead of secured creditors, and it was presented at finance committee. Indeed, discussions were held with all parties regarding this, and at second reading I said I would support this measure.
However, it was ruled out of scope by the clerk and the chair of the finance committee. The committee then voted in the majority to overturn the ruling of the chair and add this amendment to the bill.
Subsequently, the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader asked for a Speaker's ruling to eliminate the amendment since it was out of scope. The Speaker did rule it out of scope, and that amendment does not appear in the bill.
I respect the decision of the Speaker, although I am disappointed that this addition did not go forward, since I think people should receive their severance in the case of bankruptcy. However, with the priority falling after secured creditors, preferred creditors and unsecured creditors, it is unlikely they will get it, which contravenes the law in many provinces. In Ontario, for example, the law is that people get a minimum of one week of salary for every year of service.
Other amendments at committee included the deletion of clause 6, which eliminated a mechanism to get third party insurance on the insolvent portion of a pension fund. No one seemed to think this was as brilliant an idea as I originally thought. Clause 7 was also deleted to clean up sections 8.1 and 8.2, which were holdovers from previous legislation.
I want to thank everyone who helped to improve my bill at committee, and for passing it there expediently to bring it to this stage.
In summary, I am now asking all members of the House and the Senate to work to get this bill over the finish line and truly improve pension security for Canadians. We are so close. Let this 44th Parliament be the one to ensure that Canadians are able to live with dignity into their golden years.
Our continued efforts will ensure that Canadians are able to support themselves and their families with the pensions they have worked over a lifetime to earn. Please vote to support Bill C-228.
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- Mar/24/22 1:27:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today. I will be splitting my time with the member for Peterborough—Kawartha.
I am glad to have an opportunity to speak to our Conservative motion, which reads:
That, given that Canada has one of the world's highest vaccination rates and every province across Canada has lifted or has a plan to lift vaccine mandates, the House call on the government to immediately lift all federal vaccine mandates in order to:
(a) protect the jobs of federally regulated employees;
(b) enable Canadians to travel unimpeded;
(c) ensure Canada's tourism industry recovery; and
(d) allow for the free flow of goods across the Canadian border.
Of course, before my colleagues across the way try to shame and attack me for various and sundry, let me give a full disclosure for the record. I have had my vaccinations and I have also had COVID-19 twice, once at the beginning of the pandemic and once at Christmastime. I also know quite a bit about science. I have been a chemical engineer for nearly 40 years, so I would like to approach this from a scientific point of view.
I will start by talking about the charter rights violations.
This government has trapped almost three million Canadians in the country. They cannot take a plane, they cannot take a train and they cannot cross at the land borders. There was a point in time when this would have been considered a reasonable measure, according to the medical health experts and the World Health Organization, because we were in the time of trying to control the transmission of the disease. However, with omicron, we are now at a place where the World Health Organization has said that omicron is everywhere. Therefore, these types of restrictions are no longer working, and that is the reason countries all over the world are opening up.
If we think about it, we have quite a high rate of vaccination in Canada, and those people can get and transmit COVID-19. I talked about having it myself. The Prime Minister had it. The member for Beauce had it. A lot of members in the House have had COVID-19, and we have all had our vaccines. Therefore, if we have almost 90% of those people going back and forth across the border, what is the additional risk of allowing another 10% of people who can get COVID-19 and transmit it from going back and forth across the border? There actually is no difference in risk from a science perspective. The government can no longer rely on section 1 of the charter, which allows it to temporarily infringe the charter rights of Canadians to freely come and go. That is one mandate that I would like to see dropped immediately.
The second thing I will talk about is the people who were fired for not being vaccinated.
First of all, I think this is just wrong on so many levels, but let us talk about it from a science perspective. Let us take a person who is a federal employee working from home who is vaccinated. What is the chance of that person spreading their germs to somebody in another building who is also working from home? The answer is, quite simply, there is zero risk. Now, if one is an unvaccinated federal worker who is working from home, what are the odds that this person is going to transfer their germs to somebody who is also working from home in another building? The answer from a science perspective is, again, there is zero risk, but those people were fired by this Liberal government. That is discriminatory. It is not based on science, and it is just one example of the many things this government has done to deliberately punish people who chose not to get vaccinated.
I have had many people approach my office who wanted to get an exemption because they had a history of stroke or a history of heart and kidney problems or other comorbidities. Originally, many of them received exemptions from their doctors, but then the Royal College of Physicians overturned all of those exemptions and threatened the medical licences of doctors in this country if they wrote exemptions for anything other than an anaphylactic reaction to the first vaccine. That is the reason many people were not able to get their exemptions, but they still had valid reasons for not taking the vaccine. I would like to see the federal government hire back every person it fired who is working from home regardless of vaccination status.
Now all provinces have started to lift their mandates. Let us take Ontario, for example. We have vaccinated and unvaccinated people whose children are going to school without masks, who are going to malls, who are eating in restaurants and who are all breathing the same air, so it is ridiculous to think that we have to protect them in some way in other places when they are already exposed. That is why, for all these mandates that have to do with the requirements on planes and trains and keeping unvaccinated people out of that line, the science is not there. These people are already exposed to omicron, just like the vaccinated. Everybody can get it and transmit it, so that needs to go.
With respect to the things causing problems at the border, let us talk about ArriveCAN and the ability to input all of that stuff. Some people do not have cellphones. A lot of seniors are not computer literate. What is the increased risk of exposure to COVID‑19 if the federal government eliminated the need for ArriveCAN today? What is the difference? There is no scientific risk of increased COVID exposure related to an application. It can get rid of it today, and I suggest it does.
At the same time, I am very concerned about some of the privacy invasions that happened during the COVID‑19 pandemic. We have seen privacy issues that have been put forward to the Privacy Commissioner. We have also seen the digital tracking of Canadians. I am concerned about those things as well.
Some members may know that at the beginning, when we returned to this parliamentary session, I was quite passionately standing up for civil liberties. I had meetings with MPs who had their concerns. I happened to keep the paper with the list of things we wanted to see addressed, so I thought I would tick these off one at a time.
There was the elimination of the PCR test for vaxxed and asymptomatic people. I am glad to see that was removed. There was no scientific evidence that it was needed, so that went away. I talked about ArriveCAN and the rules at the border. With respect to those things as well, there is no scientific merit to keep them in place. They are not going to prevent the spread of omicron and need to go. There were the medical privacy violations. I just spoke about that one. Then there was trapping Canadians in their own country. I just spoke about that one. Finally, there was the firing of the unvaxxed, and I just spoke about that one.
I would like to share a little story. In my own riding of Sarnia—Lambton, Bluewater Health fired 18 medical workers and forced 300, under duress, to take the vaccine or lose their jobs. Four weeks after it did that, there was an outbreak of COVID‑19 among the vaccinated medical staff. What was accomplished? It was absolutely nothing but misery for the 18 families of the people who lost their jobs.
Keep in mind that these are health care workers who, from the beginning of the pandemic, were dealing with COVID on the front lines with their personal protective equipment. Nobody was vaccinated then and they were considered heroes. Then, fast-forward, they were fired. Really, they were the safer ones. They were getting rapid-tested every day and wearing their PPE, whereas the vaccinated ones who ended up having the outbreak were not. Therefore, we can see that all of these mandates are intended to discriminate and punish, but they are not based on science and they do not accomplish anything.
I do not think we need to talk about the provincial mandates. There are plenty enough at the federal level so we do not need to bring a lot of that in, but it is the same sort of thing. We need to look at the World Health Organization, which is recommending that we drop these mandates. We need to look at the other countries that have opened up. We need to look at the U.S., where 40 states have dropped all of their mandates. We need to look at the provinces, which have all dropped or are dropping their mandates.
The current government needs to get rid of these things immediately. We all want to work together. The people who are vulnerable will want to continue to protect themselves, and I support that, but at this point in time we need to learn to get on with our lives. We need to stop punishing people. We need to stop violating their charter rights.
Together, we will be better prepared for the next pandemic when it arrives.
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