- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- Timmins—James Bay
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 63%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $134,227.44
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- Dec/14/23 1:18:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it was a question that was raised as my colleague from Burnaby had attempted unanimous consent to bring forward documents about fundraisers done by the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle. I had noticed a pattern of increasing prices for what he was charging, such as $175 for a dinner and shooting and, back by popular demand, cigar and scotch tasting, a great chance to chat with fellow Conservatives while sampling fine scotches and cigars, and of course shooting guns. That was our former Speaker, being very partisan.
I am concerned about the inflationary aspects because the price of his fundraising dinners as a former Speaker certainly jumped up to be pretty high in price.
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- Dec/14/23 1:04:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am trying to raise questions about the Conservatives' use of inflation to jump up prices for tickets when the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle was Speaker and holding fundraisers. There was a dramatic increase, and that needs to be explained. Were those global figures? Was it the Liberals, or was it the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle who—
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- Dec/14/23 1:03:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have great respect for my colleague, who is almost from the north, but not quite.
The problem is that the Conservatives pretend that inflation just happened. I am looking at inflationary jumps that have happened for some time. For example, when the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle was Speaker, he held fundraisers for $125 a plate, including cigars, but four years on, it was $175 a plate with cigars. This is a huge inflationary jump—
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Madam Speaker, one of the really important things for Canada is to position ourselves right now in response to the climate crisis, but also to the massive investments that Joe Biden is putting into the Inflation Reduction Act. The American president has said that within nine years 67% of all vehicles are going to be EV, which is going to lead to a lot of stranded assets for those who are still betting on oil and gas. We do have this TMX pipeline that has cost us over $30 billion. The total charges on that will go to the taxpayer, who will have to pay for 78% of every barrel of unrefined bitumen.
I want to ask my hon. colleague, given the fact that the U.S., China and Europe are moving so dramatically far in advance on digital and clean technology, why does the government continue to pay for TMX, leaving the threat of serious stranded assets in the oil and gas sector?
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Madam Speaker, it is a great honour to rise in the House and discuss what the Conservative Party has put out as its key platform for dealing with inflation: cryptocurrency. It is a really good opportunity to look at what the Conservative leader has as an economic vision. It is perfect that it is happening here just after the weekend, when FTX, the crypto exchange site, collapsed, destroying 32 billion dollars' worth of savings in 48 hours. That is a record for a complete financial collapse. Could we say that money was vaporized?
If we look at what we have offered as New Democrats for responding to inflation, we put forward the need to get children dental care. The Conservative leader, whose kids get their own dental care paid for by the taxpayer, opposed that and said all that money to help children would vaporize. We talked about doubling the GST tax credit. The Conservatives were against it. They said that money would vaporize because of inflation. Of course, there was our work to get rent support for low-income housing, and the Conservatives were dead set against that. They said inflation would vaporize it. What did the leader of the Conservative Party offer as his one solution for fighting inflation? It was Ponzi schemes and cryptocurrency.
The Conservatives had a two-part strategy. One was to spin cryptocurrency as something we could buy a shawarma with and put our life savings into. The second part of the Conservative strategy is even more important to look at. It was his full-on attack on the basic principle of having financial regulations to keep people from being scammed.
I really appreciate the member for Calgary Nose Hill for bringing forward legislation that talks about the need for legislation. She has rightly pointed out that if we do not have regulation, this dark money system could easily be a forum for money laundering and terrorist financing. Who else would want to have a financial system with no checks and balances so we cannot trace where the money goes?
I appreciate that there are members of the Conservative Party who are not in the thrall of whack-job economics. Unfortunately, her leader is a complete devout believer in whack-job economics, because he is dead set against this principle of regulation. He said, “Canada needs less financial control for politicians and bankers and more financial freedom for the people.” He has referred to financial regulations as “cobwebs” that need to be blown away. Of course, he has his other great folk devil, the gatekeepers. We have to attack the gatekeepers, which is why he wants to get rid of the Bank of Canada. It is a full-on attack of basic regulations.
The reason we have these so-called cobwebs is that time and time again we have seen hard-working people's savings wiped out by flim-flam artists: Bre-X, Bernie Madoff, junk bonds and the derivative market that destroyed the savings of millions of people. They would love this leader of the Conservative Party. They would embrace him. They embrace the notion of freedom as the freedom to swindle, the freedom to hustle and the freedom to rob people of their savings.
The leader of the Conservative Party was promoting crypto, but then we found out he was an investor in crypto. I think that is really telling because with a Ponzi scheme, we only get our money back if we sucker other rubes into put their money in too. We had the leader of the Conservative Party using his platform to tell Canadians who were worried about their savings to invest in crypto. He thought, “This is where I'm going to get my money back.” That is highly irresponsible, because who pays the price when $32 billion just vaporizes? It is not Goldman Sachs. It is not Jeff Bezos. It is ordinary working-class and middle-class people who are afraid they do not have enough savings.
I met many people who were investing in crypto because they were guaranteed that it was going to give them the kind of return on investment they could not get anywhere else. They trusted the leader of the Conservative Party.
Of course, he explained what his financial knowledge was: He stays up late into the night watching YouTube videos. I stay up late into the night watching YouTube videos too. I love watching old Motown videos. When I have to fix my toilet, YouTube is a great place to learn how to fix my toilet. However, one thing I learned from the pandemic is that just because buddy with a baseball cap sitting in his mother's basement claims he is an expert on immunology and vaccinations does not mean YouTube is a good place to get medical advice.
What we have learned is the leader of the Conservative Party stays up late into the night learning economics. It is not really too bright to trust the leader of the Conservative Party when he gets his economic vision from YouTube. He is saying he is going to get rid of regulations, he is going to get rid of the Bank of Canada and he is going to get rid of all the cobwebs that have protected people from financial scams year in, year out.
That takes us to the collapse of FTX. There were a lot of of dodgy crypto sites, but this was supposed to be the good one. This was a really good one, apparently. It was set up in the Bahamas, of course, because there is almost no regulation there. They have very limited financial regulation and it is set up as a tax haven with no reporting obligations to anybody. It is like an opaque, financial black box. Is that not exactly what the leader of the Conservative Party thinks is good for getting people investing and believing in crypto?
FTX did not have a board of directors and was not under the oversight of any American regulators, such as the SEC or the CFTC. It is this black box run by a bunch of 20-year-olds who probably would love to party with the leader of the Conservative Party as they talk about crypto conspiracies. However, here is the thing: We found out that FTX also ran a hedge fund, so people were putting their savings into and trusting this black box with no accountability or regulatory oversight. It was moving anywhere from between $1 billion and $10 billion into this side hustle. That is why we have proper financial regulations.
It is really irresponsible for the leader of the Conservative Party to feed on the fears of people in a time of uncertainty by hustling a Ponzi scheme. That is what he was doing. He was saying to trust him on the Ponzi scheme because he was going to get rid of any regulation so people could not really tell what was happening, but that Ponzi scheme would be there for people whenever they needed it. It was not, and we have seen the results.
I am certainly pleased that the member for Calgary Nose Hill is one of the few Conservatives willing to stand up in the face of this party that has now committed to anti-science, anti-vaccination and anti-economics. The Conservatives feel that any kind of regulation on hustlers and swindlers is somehow an attack on freedom: It is the freedom we all enjoy to take our hard-earned savings and get hustled by some scam artist down in the Bahamas. That is not what we should be doing.
We have to have rules in place, we have to have oversight and we have to ask questions about a system that is supposed to be financial and is trading something that does not exist in order to have no financial tracking of it. If we have an ability to transfer money through sites without tracking, of course it is going to be where money is laundered and where criminal activities are. Is that the freedom the Conservative Party believes is so important to protect: the freedom of gunrunners and gangs to clean money through cryptocurrency? We need to shine a light on this practice.
For the people who lost $32 billion in savings in 48 hours, what kind of freedom do they get? Those are hard-working people who trusted this guy while he was standing there eating a shawarma and telling everyone this is the best thing to do. Their kids should not get dental care and should not get the GST, but what they should get is an investment in cryptocurrency with no oversight and they will be better off.
The Liberals are not clear on this either. Before crypto collapsed, they were thinking this was pretty good stuff too. In fact, I know the Liberals invested in cryptocurrency in the Deputy Prime Minister's riding. Before we start promoting these kinds of dodgy financial hustles, we need to ask what rules are in place to protect people and their savings and to have proper oversight. That is something the leader of the Conservative Party refuses to do and he needs to be accountable for it.
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- Oct/6/22 3:48:01 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as always it is a great honour to rise and speak on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay, particularly at this time of incredible uncertainty. We noticed and are very pleased to see the Russian army suffering defeats in Ukraine, but we are in a time of major global uncertainty. We are in a time of crisis in prices and crisis in supply chains. Workers are being told, with respect to their lack of ability to get higher wages, that if they somehow got a more level playing field, it would exacerbate the inflation crisis.
What New Democrats are calling for today is to focus in on where these inflationary problems are being driven. They are being driven by gouging by some very major and powerful corporate interests. On the oil sector, around the world there are questions being raised about the massive profits coming out of the pockets of ordinary consumers, who cannot even afford to heat their houses.
The other really disturbing issue we are seeing is the crisis in the affordability of food, and that is directly tied to the price gouging that has been under way throughout this crisis. What we are asking for is very straightforward. We are asking the Competition Bureau to launch an investigation into grocery chain practices, to increase the penalties for price fixing and to strengthen competition laws to prohibit these companies from abusing their dominant positions in the market, which exploit both consumers and agricultural producers.
We are also calling for the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food to look into this, because we want to make sure we are dealing with issues of fairness, as people are being gouged and cannot afford to pay their bills.
It is very interesting and indicative that we are debating this today, when the New Democratic motion on doubling the GST tax credit has received support from this House, because we came into this Parliament saying we were going to fight for people who are being left behind in this time of uncertainty.
We brought forward three major initiatives for the fall. First, the doubling of the GST tax credit will get money right back into the hands of people, families and seniors so they can buy their groceries. Second, for low-income renters, the $500 supplement is essential support at this time of gouging and particularly high housing prices. Third, of course, is the initiative the Liberals have now moved to agree with us on, which is a national dental care plan. If a person cannot afford to get their kids' teeth fixed, all other issues pale in comparison. A mother or a father who cannot afford to get their child's teeth fixed is in a situation that should not be allowed to happen.
My friends in the Conservative Party have been very much against these initiatives. I appreciate the flip-flop on the tax credit, but the word they have been using is that actual steps to help people in this crisis would somehow be “vaporized” by inflation, as though inflation is some kind of magic thing. I am interested in the term “vaporizing”, because the only thing I noticed that vaporized over the summer was the price of cryptocurrency after the leader of the Conservative Party told us that he gets his financial advice from a conspiracy blogger on YouTube.
I know they got a lot of their medical advice from anti-vax conspiracy bloggers on YouTube, but the idea that the leader of the Conservative Party was promoting cryptocurrency, which dropped 70% in value after he began promoting it, is something we should think about for a minute. I know a lot of working-class people in northern Ontario who do not have savings, who are insecure and who thought maybe crypto would be a way of allowing them to get some kind of savings. They listened to the Conservative leader. Seventy per cent of that value vaporized.
I will tell members what is not going to vaporize, which is getting that $500 cheque if someone is a low-income renter, or getting the $460 to $600 GST rebate so people can pay their rent. What is not going to vaporize is the hopes of children to get dental care. That is what New Democrats came to Parliament to do. It was to get results for people.
What we need to do is strip off a lot of the mythologies and misrepresentations on what is causing inflation. Now, I mentioned the Russian war at the beginning, and we know that has destabilized the situation globally, but when we drill down on the numbers in Canada, it becomes very clear that certain powerful interests are using the fears of inflation to drive up their profits and their corporate lines.
The CEO of Sobeys was paid $8.6 million in compensation this year. What does this guy do to deserve this? Groceries rose nearly 11% in that time. It is supposed to be inflationary growth that caused the 11% rise, but the profits we saw from Sobeys, Loblaws and Metro are much higher than the rate of inflation. The rates of wage earnings are much lower than the rate of inflation, so workers who got an increase this year did not contribute to inflation; it is the gouging that is going on. The CEO compensation at Loblaws was $5 million; at Metro it was $5 million, and at Sobeys it was $8.6 million.
I want to focus in a bit on the Weston family, on Galen Weston, living in his gated community. He was found guilty of price-fixing with respect to bread, for crying out loud. I want to thank Irene Breckon, a good northern Ontario woman from the mining town of Elliot Lake, who led the class action lawsuit. Does anyone think that Galen Weston is ever going to be punished for ripping off families with respect to bread? That is not what happens to the super rich. They get free gifts, for example, $12 million to fix Galen Weston's fridges.
My mom, and I am thinking of Loretta Lynn today, is a coal miner's daughter. I had to explain this to her. She called me to ask what was going on with the Liberal government fixing Galen Weston's fridges, and whether it would fix her fridge. I told her that I knew it was really not right and that we were trying to deal with it. Then she came home and told me about the grocery prices she is having to pay and asked about Galen Weston and all the money he is making. I told her not to worry, that we are going to make this right.
That is why we are in the House today. Across party lines, we need to start saying to these CEOs that they cannot use inflationary fears anymore to gouge working-class families that have no choice but to go to the grocery store and pay for the food they need for their children.
In our motion today we are not talking about the oil price gouging that is going on, but that has been one of the other massive drivers of inflation. At the beginning of October, when the price of a barrel of oil was $80, prices were still 13% higher than they were the last time the price of a barrel was that high. I am sure other people in the country know this too, but anyone in northern Ontario knows that the second a hurricane hits the southern Gulf coast the price of gas at our local pumps jumps up 30¢ overnight, but when everything is going fine that price does not come down. There is consistent gouging.
Members do not have to believe me. I know people think I am the wild New Democrat from northern Ontario, but I would say that my good friend the CEO of Shell agrees with me, because he is saying that the situation around the world is so unstable due to the gouging of the oil companies that this crisis can no longer be left to the markets. He says it is time we started to tax that windfall back.
We are not saying it is wrong to make profit. Profit is good. It is what drives industry. However, companies are gouging people over their fears of inflation and using the Russian war to pad their pockets. How are they padding them? Let us talk about the $52 billion in the second quarter of this year, which is an increase of 235%. That is the kind of gouging that is going on.
The United Nations, California, the EU and even President Biden are talking about the windfall tax that is necessary to pull some of that gouging back and restore it to ordinary Canadians. That is our job in the House of Commons, to stand up for the people who do not have a voice in the back rooms of power, who do not have the lobbyists and who do not have the Cayman Islands to hide their tax accounts. They have to go and feed their kids. They deserve dental care. They deserve an investigation into the gouging that is going on in the grocery stores right now.
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- Jun/17/22 11:04:55 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, food prices are going through the roof and working-class families are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. We know that Vladimir Putin's illegal war in Ukraine is driving fears of a global food shortage, but those fears are the perfect cover for the giant food conglomerates that are jacking up prices, not because of inflation but to gouge us.
Cargill's profits were up 64% in a single year. Loblaws' first-quarter profits are 40% higher than last year.
What is the government doing? The Liberals, remember, used taxpayers' money to fix Galen Weston's fridges while Loblaws was scamming us over the price of bread, and the Conservatives? Well, their would-be leader says to invest our savings in crypto-Ponzi schemes to beat inflation. I mean, a financial genius this guy is not.
What we are dealing with is not inflation but old-fashioned price gouging and corporate giants ripping off Canada's working class. The New Democrats say that it is time we took on these corporate giants and got this money into the pockets of working-class families.
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- May/17/22 10:42:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am very honoured to rise today as the member for Timmins—James Bay on this very important issue. We are dealing with two major crises right now. One is the question of affordability and the massive prices that people are paying at the pumps, at a time when we see big oil racking up record profits and gouging consumers at the pumps.
The fact is that Imperial Oil announced its best opening quarter in 30 years, with $1.17 billion in profits. Canadian Natural Resources doubled its year-over-year first-quarter results with a profit of $3.1 billion, and Suncor brought home $2.95 billion in quarter one, quadrupling last year's results of $800 million.
Where is all that money coming from? It is coming from Mr. and Mrs. Joe Average who go to work every day and are getting gouged at the pumps. We will never hear the Conservatives talking about price gouging. They have all kinds of theories about how unfair it is for big oil to make record profits while people cannot afford to go to work. It is the same as how the Conservatives are trying to talk about high grocery prices as some kind of Bank of Canada conspiracy on inflation, when, in fact, we learned that Loblaws made record profits this year. They are making money gouging Canadians.
At the same time, of course, big oil continues to get free money from the Canadian taxpayer. It refused to pay $256 million in taxes to municipalities in rural Alberta. It left an abandoned oil well cleanup of over a billion dollars: abandoned wells are leaking planet killers such as methane. It expects the public to pay for that. It is calling on the government to change the basic environmental regulations that protect the Athabasca River system, a fragile ecosystem, so that it can dump the toxic waters from tailings ponds. It never talks about the huge damage that it does from every barrel taken out of the oil sands or the amount of water that is contaminated and held in these tailings ponds, which are larger than the city of Vancouver, but it expects the public to assume those costs.
Of course, we see the $570 million for the methane cleanup. Methane is a planet killer. We all know that. This is something that big oil, with its record profits, could easily have handled, but no: It asked the public to pay to stop the leaking methane. What we saw from the Environment Commissioner's report was that this was used as a subsidy to increase production.
The issue of affordability is one factor, but there is a much bigger factor facing us. We are the first generation in history to actually be in a position to decide whether our children have a future or whether we are going to continue to have cheap gas.
We talk about a climate emergency. It does not even come close to talking about the situation we are in. The UN has released its latest statement calling “a code red for humanity”. It claims “a damning indictment of failed global leadership” on the climate crisis. UN Secretary-General Guterres says that what we are looking at is “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.”
He says:
Nearly half of humanity is living in the danger zone—now. Many ecosystems are at the point of no return—now. Unchecked carbon pollution is forcing the world’s most vulnerable on a frog march to destruction—now.
There is nothing theoretical about this. The Economist, which is hardly a left-wing journal, says that we have to act quickly before time runs out. It gives us until 2025 to deal with peak oil. The International Energy Agency, another industry voice, says that given the emergency of the climate crisis, there cannot be any more new fossil fuel projects, yet what we see in the House, and what the Canadian people see, is that climate change denial is the fundamental cornerstone of Canadian economic policy and it is the fundamental cornerstone of the government.
We know that the Conservatives will ridicule any efforts on climate change. We hear them laughing when it is talked about. The issue is with the Liberals, though. The Liberals have made promises because Canadians want someone to do the right thing on the climate crisis. We are not seeing that.
We want to talk about a number of things that we need to break apart on the Liberals' arguments because they are perpetrating a scam on the Canadian people. The idea of net zero by 2050 is an absolute scam.
They went to COP26, where the Prime Minister and the environment minister claimed they would cap emissions. That certainly shocked everyone in Canada because they had not talked to anybody about this emissions cap. We are never going to see that emissions cap. It is not going to happen. Why is it not going to happen? The emissions cap is not going to happen because the Liberals are telling Canadians that they can increase oil production while getting to net zero.
It is a ridiculous proposition, and it is all based on the idea that they were somehow going to decarbonize the oil, but the problem with that is that it is not possible because what is coming out of the oil sands has one of the the highest carbon emissions prints on the planet. Year in and year out, despite all the promises to lower those emissions, it has not happened. A headline in The Wall Street Journal refers to it as among the “Dirtiest Oil” on the planet. Those are the facts.
We can look at the environment minister's latest big green plan, which he said was planned out based on the Canadian Energy Regulator's information. The Canadian Energy Regulator predicts that, under the government's plan, in 2050 the amount of oil that will be produced and burned will be the same as the amount of oil burned and produced in 2019.
Liberals are not moving off the carbon economy. In fact, as the Canadian Energy Regulator says, they are planning a massive increase of up to 1.2 million barrels a day. We have already seen this. We have seen Bay du Nord, with an extra 300,000 barrels a day. We see the money they are pumping into TMX for an extra 800,000 barrels a day.
This is not going to help Canadians at the pumps. This is for export. The Deputy Prime Minister made it clear that the primary objective of the government is the supremacy of the market, and the market is exporting Canada's oil and increasing exports to the world market, yet the Liberals claim they are going to get to net zero.
Here is the other part of the scam: Every barrel of oil exported does not count toward Canada's emissions. They are going to come up with some hoodoo numbers to say there are no emissions costs here, but right now, even without the increase of 1.2 million barrels per day, Canada's offshore oil export emissions are more than all of the emissions in every sector in Canada today.
The government says it is not efficient to actually target the full amount of emissions. The fact is that the planet does not care who burns the oil or where it gets burned. The government is committed to driving the oil agenda and giving big oil whatever they ask for to make that happen.
This leads me to the other issue I am very concerned about, which is the so-called “just transition”. It has been very depressing to sit at the hearings on the just transition and see where the government is going on this.
I come from in Northern Ontario where we have lived through unjust transitions. When 4,000 workers lost their jobs in the uranium mines, there was not an alternative. When we lost the entire silver and iron mining economy in Temiskaming, there was not an alternative. The transition then was brutal.
We have seen the economic possibilities. We have Calgary Economic Development and Edmonton Global talking about thousands of new jobs. We also have clean energy tech talking about a 50% increase in clean energy jobs. The problem is that, to get those jobs, we need investment, and the government continues to deliberately underinvest in the new economy, so it is leaving workers high and dry, and it is making vague promises about a transition, but that is not happening.
The clock is ticking. The government, Parliament, leaders in the provinces and our federal leaders are responsible to the next generation as we look at a situation of the planet overheating. The red lines are there, and we have the opportunity and the possibility to transform, but we just do not see the political will. That needs to be challenged.
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