- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Lac-Saint-Louis
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $123,581.21
- Government Page
- Nov/22/22 3:04:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Canadian representatives at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference worked hard with developed and developing countries to come to an agreement that every country could buy into.
Yesterday we heard the Conservatives mislead the House on global carbon pricing.
Can the Minister of Environment and Climate Change set the record straight?
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- Apr/26/22 3:30:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to dedicate my speech today to Tania Woroby, now retired from teaching, but who taught me my first economics class ever when I was in CEGEP in Montreal. Ms. Woroby had a gift for explaining economics with crystalline clarity.
A good economics professor can play a crucial role, as I am sure the members for Joliette and Mirabel would agree.
How would Ms. Woroby have graded the official opposition's response to the budget? She would have probably awarded them low marks for their partial analysis of the state of the economy. However, like a kind and patient teacher, she would perhaps have allowed them to rewrite the mid-term.
There is a real economy and a money economy, as I learned in Ms. Woroby's class, and yes, they are connected, but the Conservatives insist on ignoring what is going on in the real economy. They focus solely on monetary policy, which seems misplaced since the government does not control monetary policy, something the Prime Minister has tried over and over again to explain in the simplest terms.
The Great Depression highlighted the potential impacts of catastrophic events in the real economy. In the Great Depression, we saw the collapse of agriculture, the hangover from industrial overproduction, the rise of trade protectionism and a general crisis of confidence, something Keynes incorporated in his analysis under the rubric “animal spirits”. All these factors combined calamitously to sink the economy against the backdrop of a shrinking money supply tied to widespread bank failures. The money supply is always the backdrop, but contrary to what the Conservatives believe, the money supply is not the main driving force behind economic activity.
As Andrew Coyne put it in a recent column, inflation is not “too much money chasing too few goods”. Rather, the price of a good or service rises when demand outstrips supply. For example, if the price of oranges goes up because of a frost in Florida that killed the crop, that is not inflation. It is a price signal that oranges are in short supply relative to demand, a gap the free market will move to fill by offering more economical substitutes.
Quantitative easing, or “unconventional monetary measures” as it has been called, did not unleash inflation in the United States between 2009 and 2015 when the Federal Reserve used it in response to the 2008 financial crisis, because the state of demand in the real economy was weak, deflationary even. What quantitative easing did was save the international financial order. Quantitative easing has been front and centre during this pandemic, but this is not what has fuelled inflation. As Ian Lee, a professor of economics at Carleton University, says, “Over the last two years people realized there's some things they don’t need as badly or as much as they thought they needed.”
What is more, those who received COVID benefits did not spend more. They essentially borrowed less and saved more. Canadian household savings rates rose during the pandemic, and much of the savings are still in personal bank accounts. Bank deposits have grown by an average of around $12,000 per household compared with prepandemic trends. Also worth mentioning is that consumers are expected to use their credit cards less in 2022 in favour of instead using cash. According to Nicole McKnight of finder.com, “Three times as many people said they would either stop using their credit card or use it less often, than those who said they would use it more.” None of this suggests a credit-driven spending spree linked to inflation.
Quantitative easing is not the same thing as creating cash. It is not printing money, as the member for Carleton likes to tell us. Quantitative easing creates chartered bank reserves that are held at the Bank of Canada. These can be turned into loans, but this does not happen automatically. It happens only if there are profitable lending opportunities, including to businesses that want to expand capacity, something that actually mitigates inflationary pressure.
As global chief economist for Manulife Investment Management Frances Donald has said, “For the past 40 or 50 years, we've tended to view the economy through a demand-side lens. What is so unique about this [period today] is that it's the greatest supply side shock since the 1970s.” In others words, to quote economist Armine Yalnizyan, “This is pandemic economics. The regular rules may not apply.”
We have been living in a trade globalized world for the past two decades, with global supply chains built around just-in-time delivery and thin inventories that, if they had been more robust, could have better absorbed COVID supply shocks. When confronted by lockdowns at major ports and factories, the global just-in-time delivery system simply snapped.
Pandemic economics is mostly about capacity constraints, and demand shifting from services like travel and restaurant meals to goods, mostly ordered online, and not about too much money chasing too few goods. We are talking about fewer semiconductors for cars and washing machines, the halt in housing construction for weeks, if not months, at a time during the lockdowns and even capacity limits in the oil and gas sector following a downsizing of its workforce in response to a precipitous drop in economic activity caused by the pandemic. Of course, there is a war in Ukraine that has created uncertainty in energy markets causing prices to rise, which has in turn raised the cost of food production, among other things.
Energy prices may be about to stabilize. According to an article in the New York Times on April 12 referring to the impact of world oil prices on U.S. inflation:
...it now appears that the world oil market overshot in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.... President Biden's million-barrel-a-day release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve makes up for much of the shortfall [in Russian oil supplies]. As of this morning, [on April 12], crude oil prices were barely above their pre-Ukraine level, and the wholesale price of gasoline was down about 60 cents a gallon from its peak last month.
Then there are the impacts of climate change on agriculture. To quote from a CTV article from this past January:
A recent NASA study noted that global agriculture is facing a new climate reality and with the interconnectedness of the global food system, impacts in even one region's breadbasket will be felt worldwide.
According to Canada's Food Price Report, in 2021, Canada experienced climate change-related adverse weather effects, such as severe wildfires in British Columbia and drought conditions in the Prairies, that affected the prices of meat and bakery products.
Finally, there are the all-too-familiar labour supply constraints, including shortages of port workers and drivers, who are so vital to a functioning supply chain. Here in Canada, the pandemic depressed immigration levels in 2020 and forced hundreds of thousands of women out of the workforce. That is why we are investing in immigration and child care.
To see the impact of supply-side inflation, one needs only to dissect the components of the consumer price index. The main components of a rising CPI, in February 2022 relative to February 2021, were transportation, at 8.4%; food, at 6.5%; and shelter, at 6.6%. That is not to be confused with the cost of housing, but includes mortgage interest, property taxes, fuel and electricity. If we take energy and food out of the equation, the inflation rate in February was only 3.9%. When we looked at the inflation figures for March, we saw that the price of gasoline, year to year, went up about 40%. While mortgage interest, household operating costs, rent and furnishings are included in the basket of goods that make up the CPI, home prices are not. This is because homes are capital assets.
Bidding wars have driven home prices to unprecedented levels, due in part to people moving away from core areas, shortages of new supply and cheap mortgages, clearly. However, house-asset inflation does not squeeze disposable income the same way that a rising CPI does, though it creates intergenerational inequality and this is a problem. That is why the budget is addressing housing supply and housing affordability. Independently, of course, the Bank of Canada is addressing interest rates and the cost of mortgages.
Monetary policy, however, can dramatically suppress economic activity. It can cause great misery for a great many. We can think of the Federal Reserve's actions during the first Reagan administration, when former Fed chairman Paul Volcker wrung inflation out of the U.S. economy through an aggressive, tight money policy that created a deep recession.
The question for the official opposition is this: What should the Bank of Canada have done at the start of COVID-19? Should it have suffocated the economy during a global pandemic and created deflation worthy of the Great Depression, in the process destroying production capacity in a way that would have comprised economic growth across future generations? Also, what should the Bank of Canada do now that it is not already doing? Should the bank go even harder on raising interest rates, to the point of provoking house price deflation and a deep recession? Would that bring down the international price of oil and food, or would these remain a problem, especially for the larger number of Canadians suddenly thrown out of work? Would a more aggressive interest rate policy resolve supply chain issues? No, and that is why our budget is taking aim at the supply chain problem.
These are some of the questions that the official opposition needs to answer. They are answers that Canadians would like to hear.
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- Mar/3/22 4:03:13 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands.
Courage has a home country, and that country is Ukraine. Courage has a people, and that people is the Ukrainian people. Ukrainians’ resilience is legendary and once again in full view today. Ukraine is the world’s inspiration and its strength, the strength to join forces against Vladimir Putin.
The Ukrainian people survived Stalin, the Nazi occupation and the yoke of communism. They are invincible. Today, Vladimir Putin’s forces are meeting with the ferocious resistance of a deeply proud, intrepid people whose love for freedom and for their history, culture and democracy is unconditional.
The collective response to this blatant, unprovoked and highly reprehensible offensive has so far been exemplary. Like all of us, I hope that it will be effective and decisive, that Putin and his friends will clearly fail, and that other dictators considering the same course of action will understand the risks and consequences of doing so.
I must point out that this response is not a simple affair. It is complex, a daunting challenge. It is based on the unprecedented collaboration of a large number of countries that instantly saw in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a threat to democracy and freedom around the world, to international security.
It is a multi-pronged response, namely diplomatic, humanitarian, economic, financial and even logistical, in terms of the procurement of military equipment. There is also the cybersecurity component to counteract cyber-attacks, the new weapons of war, as well as the other components taking place in real time, such as the growing refugee crisis the conflict has caused.
We have seen a complex, coordinated response to the greatest threat to global security since World War II, a response designed to show a concrete and undisputable resolve against a dictator and to suffocate the Russian economy. That said, the greatest threat or challenge to effective decision-making is the oversimplification of the issues at hand. I wonder if today's motion does not fall into the trap of oversimplification.
What do I mean when I say that this motion may fall prey to oversimplification? While clauses (a) and (b) are definitely worth repeating, they are well understood and supported by all in this House. In other words, we all condemn Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation in no uncertain terms for what it has done. We stand four square behind the Ukrainian people, an extraordinarily courageous people fighting for the universal values of democracy and freedom against a shameless tyrant who has joined the hall of infamy, a room he shares with the bloody dictators of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Meanwhile section (c) of the motion is vague. What measures is the opposition talking about to ensure that new natural gas pipelines could be built to tidewater in the east? Are we talking about weakening the environmental assessment process that was recently modernized to obtain public and stakeholder buy-in to allow projects such as pipelines to be built across the diverse political landscape of this country and withstand the inevitable court challenges from opponents? Are we talking about creating a pipeline Crown corporation? Are we talking about the public financing of pipelines or about governments underwriting the private financial risks of pipeline builders? Are we suggesting suppressing provincial permitting processes?
Also, I find that part (c) of the motion abstracts from context, both present and future contexts. The present context is necessarily focused on helping the Ukrainian people under attack today through military aid, humanitarian support and air tight sanctions that are bringing to bear the heaviest financial and economic consequences on Putin's Russia and its oligarchs.
The present context is also necessarily focused on immediate energy needs. We know that natural gas accounts for 40% of the EU supply and Russian crude oil accounts for 25% of the EU's supply of crude oil. Fortunately, EU countries have a cushion in terms of oil reserves and 20 European Union countries are members of the International Energy Agency. They are thus obliged to hold at least 90 days of oil reserves. Fortunately, summer is coming and energy demand will fall.
As we speak, governments are working together to direct new supply to the European Union. As President Biden said in his state of the union address, the U.S. will be making supplies from the strategic oil reserves it has available. In fact, 30 other countries, including Canada, are joining the U.S. to release 60 million barrels of oil to stabilize the global energy market.
How else is the motion perhaps simplistic and therefore not immediately helpful? It gives the impression that building a pipeline is a fairly simple thing to do, but pipelines cannot be built in a day. They are not a tap we turn on and off. They are massive, financially and logistically complex, time-consuming enterprises. In addition to construction, there is, as I have mentioned, the environmental assessment process and the related efforts to obtain the agreement of communities along pipeline routes. We are past the days when projects could go ahead without environmental assessments, when the public, including indigenous peoples, could summarily be circumvented.
Finally, the Conservative motion abstracts from the longer term context, which involves numerous other dimensions. These dimensions include the fight against climate change, which is well under way, especially in Europe where efforts have been ongoing for years. Kadri Simson, the European Union Energy Commissioner, is quoted as saying that the strategy is ultimately “boosting renewables and energy efficiency as fast as technically possible”.
Like Canada, the EU's plan is to become carbon neutral by 2050. European countries intend to, like Canada, synchronize electricity grids, among other things. Germany's very recent apparent reversal on building nuclear power plants points to what the future of energy in Europe might look like, a mix of non-emitting sources of power.
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- Jan/31/22 1:56:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is precisely why we needed a national climate adaptation strategy. However, I will mention that billions of dollars have been invested in infrastructure, and that work obviously has to occur with the provinces to identify where the work needs to be done.
Our government is there to invest in infrastructure. We have been there to invest in infrastructure for a number of years, and we will continue to do so as per the throne speech.
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- Jan/31/22 1:46:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by acknowledging that I am rising on the traditional unceded territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin people.
I would also like to thank the voters of Lac-Saint-Louis for sending me back to the nation's capital to be their voice and represent them once again and also help them in their dealings with the federal government. I would like to acknowledge that my staff play a very important role in that regard. They do a magnificent job that reflects well on my office and me as a parliamentarian and a candidate in the election.
I am particularly pleased to be standing here today, January 31, on the Hill in person.
I remember that around 2002 or 2003 I was on the Hill not as an elected representative, but in another capacity. One of the central debates at the time was whether we should ratify the Kyoto protocol. At the time, there was concern about global warming, but there was an even greater debate on whether climate change existed. Fortunately, more and more voices acknowledged that climate change is real, but at the time we were focusing a lot on global warming and not so much on climate change and unstable climate. We were not focusing so much on the impacts of unstable climate, flood and drought. Dr. Jim Bruce, an expert in water policy in this country, who was already honing in on one of the truths about climate change, which has become a self-evident truth: the link between climate change and water, between climate change and drought and flooding.
To quote Dr. Jim Bruce, “If climate change is a shark, water is its teeth. Like a fish that doesn’t notice the shark until it feels its sharp bite, humans will first feel the effects of climate change through water.” In other words, a climate crisis is a water crisis. Dr. Jim Bruce was the first director of Environment Canada's Centre for Inland Waters and he, along with a handful of other renowned Canadian water experts at Environment Canada at the time, were very much pioneers in this area. I speak of people like Frank Quinn and Ralph Pentland. Ralph Pentland was a director in water planning and management at Environment Canada for 13 years and helped negotiate many of the Canada-U.S. agreements and federal-provincial agreements around water. He was the primary author of the 1987 federal water policy.
If ever we need proof of a causal link between climate change and water security, recent history has obliged. In the last decade, Alberta has seen massive flooding in places like Calgary, while the Fort McMurray wildfires were themselves a manifestation of drought. In B.C. this past summer, a heat dome killed more than 600 people and caused mass evacuations. Excess heat melted mountain snow and ice, causing record flooding, the melting of permafrost and the collapsing of roads in the north. In the south, water evaporated too quickly as mountain glaciers melted, leading to insufficient water supplies and rising food prices as livestock herds were culled due to lack of water and feed, an example of non-money supply-related inflation.
Of course, we saw the disastrous results of excessive rain in British Columbia, which brings me to the topic of atmospheric rivers. An atmospheric river is a large narrow stream of water vapour that travels through the sky, can stretch 1,600 kilometres long and more than 640 kilometres wide and, on average, carries an amount of water equivalent to 25 Mississippi rivers. According to a 2013 report co-produced by B.C.'s environment ministry, atmospheric rivers typically form in eight oceanic regions around the world, some closer to continental coasts than others. One of those regions is just off North America's western coast and can produce between one dozen to two dozen such rivers in the sky per year. As the rivers cross from ocean to land, particularly into mountainous regions like the B.C. coast, the water vapour condenses into precipitation, sometimes dumping a month's worth of rain or snow in a matter of days.
This brings me to Dr. John Pomeroy from the University of Saskatchewan, a hydrologist, Canada research chair in water resources and climate change, and associate director of the Global Water Futures program, the largest university-led water research program in the world. It is right here in Canada, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Dr. Pomeroy has been dedicated to developing better flood forecasting computer models and bringing these models into disaster warning systems. He is convinced that we need to “build state-of-the art water prediction and management systems” and that doing so requires federal leadership. More specifically, we need a national system of flood prediction inspired by, but not necessarily identical to, what exists in the U.S. I say not identical to because we are a different kind of federation with different jurisdictional realities and considerations.
I agree with Dr. Pomeroy. We need to develop federally managed models in collaboration with the provinces and universities that focus on river basins for use by the provinces, cities, first nations and industrial users like hydroelectric utilities.
In 2013, according to Dr. Pomeroy, there were already test models in Europe able to suggest a large flood would hit Calgary on the precise day it did. This prediction was made two weeks before the flood happened. Much like in Alberta, B.C. was unable to correctly forecast that this year’s floods would be major ones until roads were already washed out and casualties had occurred. The Americans apparently did much better with their system. Global Water Futures will be working on improving the U.S. system in a major collaboration now being developed. Global Water Futures has the science and technical capability to build a national flood forecasting system here in Canada, with the help of the provinces, municipalities and indigenous communities.
This bring me to the throne speech. As I said at the very beginning, the climate crisis is a water crisis. We will need infrastructure to adapt to the impacts of climate change on water, infrastructure like dams and reservoirs that can hold water when it arrives too early in the spring until the agricultural season starts, when the water is actually needed for irrigation. The throne speech commits the government to creating Canada’s first-ever national climate adaptation strategy and to establishing the Canada water agency as a locus of freshwater expertise and policy coordination.
The throne speech needs to be seen in juxtaposition with water-related Liberal platform commitments. The platform committed that a re-elected Liberal government would “complete our work with provinces and territories to develop flood maps for higher-risk areas in the next three years.” It is vital that this work be done by governments rather than by private sector insurance companies, which obviously have a different interest. The platform also committed our re-elected Liberal government to create a “nation-wide flood ready portal so that Canadians have the information they need to make decisions on where and how to build their homes and communities, and how they can protect their homes and communities from flood risk.”
In the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency and private companies like ClimateCheck have flood-risk maps, where a user plugs in an address and gets a flood-risk assessment. We will need flood and drought protection infrastructure, but also insurance. CBC’s Marketplace says, “six to 10 per cent of Canadian homes are currently uninsurable due to flooding and that estimate could go up as more insurance companies update their risk assessments to account for the rising threat of climate change.” That is why the Liberal platform committed a re-elected Liberal government to creating a “low-cost national flood insurance program to protect homeowners who are at high risk of flooding and don’t have adequate insurance protection.”
In conclusion, our government is committed not only to combatting climate change, but also to preparing for and protecting against the impacts of climate change, which, as Dr. Bruce said, are manifested in the water cycle.
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