- Member of Parliament
- Liberal
- Lac-Saint-Louis
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $123,581.21
- Government Page
- May/31/24 1:42:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I do not agree that the current government has not taken the environment in general, and climate change more specifically, seriously. Of all the governments in the history of Canada, ours is the one that has put forth the most ambitious and most multi-faceted environmental policies, including in the area of climate change. We fought all the way to the Supreme Court to protect an Environmental Assessment Act that we revamped in 2016 so that we could take into account emissions from projects when they are being evaluated. We went all the way to the Supreme Court so that we could gain jurisdiction and defend our policy of putting a price on carbon. Therefore we have really, I think, put our money where our mouth is.
As far as the military is concerned, over the last few years it has done a remarkable job helping us address domestic emergencies, whether it was the pandemic or helping with firefighting and so on. I am very proud of the members of our military, and I know they will be there when they are needed.
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- Mar/21/24 1:55:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is true that inflation poses a challenge to Canadians. Food inflation poses a challenge to Canadians. However, study after study, rigorous analysis after rigorous analysis, by competent economists has shown that the contribution of the price of carbon pollution to food inflation is negligible. One figure that I read was that it contributes 0.15% to food inflation; that is to the increase in the price of food.
In fact, an interesting point was brought up at the environment committee the other day by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment, the member for Milton. He said that many food bank operators were quite worried about what would happen if the price on carbon were repealed, because the impact would be such that those who would go to the food banks would lose the Canada carbon rebate. They are quite worried. I have not heard of any food bank operator, quite frankly, calling for the repeal of the price on carbon.
What is impacting food inflation? It is something called the war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine caused the international energy crisis to spike. It caused grain prices to spike. What is Ukraine called? It is called the bread basket of Europe. The war has constrained its supply of grain, putting upward pressure on food prices.
Why do the Conservatives never talk about that? I will tell members why. They are very sheepish when it comes to Ukraine because they are ashamed. They are ashamed that they did not support the Canada-Ukraine free trade act, an act that would permit Ukraine to enter into the European Union, the economic union. What the Conservatives also—
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- Feb/1/24 11:09:51 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, before I begin my speech, I would like to point out that I believe there is an error in the wording of the motion. The motion calls on the Liberal government to cancel the April 1, 2024, carbon tax increase.
However, there is no carbon tax. It is actually a price on pollution. I believe that both the House and Canadians are being misled on this issue.
Why is it not a tax? For it to be a tax, the government would have to put the money into its coffers with a view to spending it on programs or investing it in the future of Canadians.
That is not what the price on pollution does. With the price on pollution, the government is only an intermediary, because the proceeds are returned to Canadians. It is a price mechanism, something that the Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman endorsed as an economic measure for fighting pollution.
How does this mechanism work in terms of carbon pricing? It is very interesting. It involves a little bit of magic. When a consumer goes to spend money and sees that the price is perhaps a little higher, they are not thinking about the quarterly deposit they will receive from the Government of Canada in their chequing account as compensation. They just look at the price and decide that, since it is a bit more expensive, they will consume a little less. That saves them money in the short term, and then, on January 1, April 1 and so forth, they realize that money has been deposited in their bank account.
They will feel doubly lucky, because they saved money at the pump and also got money from the government. That is how carbon pricing works, and it is the key to its effectiveness as a measure for fighting pollution, especially greenhouse gas emissions.
What is very frustrating about this debate, in addition to the fact that it is the same debate over and over again based on a very symbolic and superficial understanding of what the price on pollution is, are these flimsy conclusions that the official opposition wishes to draw about the impact of the price on pollution on inflation and, more specifically, on food prices. However, rigorous academic study after rigorous academic study has pointed to the fact that the impact of the price on pollution on food prices is extremely small.
Now, we know that the official opposition has no respect for the Bank of Canada and that it would like to take the Bank of Canada under its wing and dictate monetary policy, but it is an incredibly credible institution filled with some of the best economists in this country. What does the Bank of Canada say about the supposed link between the price on carbon and inflation? It says that the price on carbon contributes about 0.15 % to inflation overall.
The University of Calgary, is not, I might add for anyone who does not follow schools of thought and academic life in this country, what I would call a hotbed of socialism. What did the University of Calgary say about the supposed link between the price on carbon and food inflation? University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe estimates that the price on carbon I will call it, because I do not want to mislead people as it is not a tax, is responsible for less than 1% of grocery price increases. How did Professor Tombe come to that conclusion? Did he just pull a number out of the air the way the official opposition likes to do? No. He used a Statistics Canada modelling program. Again, we have some of the country's greatest econometric experts working at Statistics Canada, like we do at the Bank of Canada. I do not know if the official opposition members are calling into question the integrity and expertise of Statistics Canada, maybe they are, but I would say that the Statistics Canada modelling program is a credible instrument and that is what Professor Tombe was using.
He goes on to say that in Alberta, because this is very much focused in many ways on Alberta and the oil industry, the price on carbon has increased prices by about 0.3%, which is 30¢ on a $100 bill, in Manitoba it is 0.9% and in Ontario it is 0.4%. These are credible, rigorous academic studies. However, we do not get any of that from the official opposition; rather, we get this kind of false logic, like the shin bone is attached to the knee bone and the knee bone is attached to the thigh bone, etc. It starts with the idea that there is a price on carbon, which means it is going to cost more to drive a truck, or this and that, and eventually it is going to show up on the shelves. The fact of the matter is that is not real logic founded on a rigorous analysis.
The other point I would like to make is that the price of food has gone up. However, according to credible news media like CTV News, and an article posted on its website, there are a number of factors that are contributing to the high price of food.
The first is climate change. Devastating wildfires continue to rage across Canada, destroying forests and farmland. Let us use a bit of simplistic logic that maybe the official opposition can understand. If farmland is destroyed, what happens to the supply of food? It goes down. The Leader of the Opposition thinks of himself as a wonderful and great economist, but what happens when the supply of food goes down and the demand stays the same? What happens to the price? It goes up. That is the number one cause of rising food prices. It is basic logic.
The really interesting thing is that greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector are not regulated. There is no price on carbon on greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector. As a matter of fact, a lot of people have been writing to me saying that we have to price greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural lands, but we have not done that.
What is another aspect that is causing challenges to the supply of food? Can members guess what Ukraine has been called? It has been called the breadbasket of Europe. I think it is going through some tough times, which may be limiting the supply of wheat from that part of the world. Again, if we constrain supply in the face of a demand that is stable or even increasing, we get higher prices.
I do not know why the leader of the official opposition does not click into that. It is basic economics 101. Therefore, we have to look at these other causes. The price on carbon is not the cause of all the woes around the world and we have to stop saying that.
What the members of the official opposition like to do, over and again, through these opposition day motions is build straw men, which they then demolish on social media while pretending to be heroes. That is all this is about. It is all about social media hits.
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- Dec/5/23 2:00:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, President Zelenskyy gets it, the Prime Minister gets it, the countries of the European Union get it and Milton Friedman got it. A price on carbon is not just good environmental policy that will be responsible for up to one-third of Canada's emission reductions by 2030, but it is also good trade policy, especially for a trading nation such as Canada.
All member states of the European Union are part of the EU emissions trading system. Ukraine prices carbon too, because it wants to integrate into the EU market. The EU is implementing its carbon border adjustment tariff, which will penalize goods from countries that do not price carbon.
Why does the Leader of the Opposition want to shut Canadian companies out of the European market? Where is the common sense in that? Why does the Leader of the Opposition not get it? Canadians get it. They get that he is just not worth the risk.
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- Nov/28/23 4:50:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the Bank of Canada has said that the price on carbon is not contributing in any significant way to food inflation. Now, I do not know, maybe the hon. member does not accept studies and analyses by the Bank of Canada as legitimate academic studies. I know his leader does not think much of the Bank of Canada and puts the blame of everything on the shoulders of the Bank of Canada.
There is a price on carbon. It is being added to the cost of things. The point is that it is not responsible for the biggest chunk of the rise in food prices.
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- Nov/28/23 4:39:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, here we are having another debate on carbon pricing. It feels like the only thing we talk about here in the House is carbon pricing. Some claim that it is a “carbon tax”.
I know all about taxes. Taxes generate revenues that the government pockets. In the case of the price on carbon, all revenues, all the funds generated are returned to individuals or, in some cases, to businesses to allow them to invest in the transition to a clean economy.
I have been sitting here, day after day, listening to what I consider to be a false narrative on the price on carbon. First of all, it has been given an incorrect name. It is not a carbon tax. A tax is something that generates revenues that go to the government coffers. When one talks about a price on carbon, and this is the beauty of it, as it is extremely effective, all of the monies received from the price of carbon are returned to Canadians or Canadian businesses. As a matter of fact, if the price on carbon were removed, the climate action incentive payment would disappear and a vast majority of Canadians would be worse off. We do not hear that truth from the Conservative Party.
What we hear is what my former colleague and Canadian hero and hockey great Ken Dryden used to call “truthiness”. Truthiness is something that sounds true, but it is just not true. Day after day, we are treated to a simplistic but false chain of causation that the Conservatives trot out. It sounds true and anyone listening would say, “Yes, that sounds very logical”, but the chain breaks all along the length of it if one spends any time thinking about what is being said.
Every day in question period, it sounds like the ankle bone is connected to the shin bone, which is connected to the knee bone, which is connected to the thigh bone, except they say, “If one has a price on carbon, it costs a trucker a little more to ship. That means the distributor has to pay a little bit more, and that means that the retailer pays a little bit more, and then Canadians pay a little bit more.”
That is not how it works at all. As a matter of fact, studies, and we know that the Conservative opposition is not keen on academic studies or rigorous studies of any kind, have shown that the price on carbon contributes very little, an minuscule or infinitesimal amount, to the food price inflation. Although we would not want to let academic studies get in the way of a good “truthy” argument coming from the other side.
I think the Conservative Party is using the price on carbon as a red herring. I get very frustrated when constituents write to me and say, “Please take the price on carbon off”, and I write back to say, “Sir, madam, the price on carbon does not apply in Quebec.” Quebec has been pricing carbon since 2007, and B.C. has been pricing carbon since 2008. It does not apply in Quebec.
I have had other people come to me, and I guess they listen to Conservative propaganda because they say, “Where is my climate action incentive payment?” I have to say to them, “Sir, madam, I am sorry. You do not get the climate action incentive payment because you do not pay the price on carbon.” They write back and thank me for explaining it to them. They did not realize. That is a bit of the job of a member of Parliament, which is to explain the facts about government policy and why government policy is the desired policy.
I have talked about this before in the House, but I will mention it again. The Leader of the Opposition fancies himself to be a great monetarist economist in the tradition of the Chicago school of economics, the school that was made famous by Milton Friedman. However, Milton Friedman thought that the price on carbon was a wonderfully simple and effective policy instrument for pricing pollution. It is what we call an externality, which is something that is not priced and is therefore not reflected in the market, so it leads to a greater use of something that is not necessarily a societal good, which is what the price on carbon is really all about.
We can keep talking about this, I am sure, until the cows come home, and I am prepared to stand up in the House over and over again to set the record straight about the price on carbon. However, let us face it, we are going through an affordability crisis in Canada and around the world, as a matter of fact. Fortunately, in Canada we have one of the developed world's lowest inflation rates. As I said, the challenges remain, but I think we have to look at the international context and see where we fit within it.
Now, the government recognizes that we have an affordability crisis, and it is acting to help Canadians weather this crisis. Fortunately, we have seen the inflation rate come down recently, and this was predicted a couple of years ago. I wanted to wait and see because we want to see the reality, but many economists were telling us a year and a half to two years ago that, by this time, inflation would start to come down. In fact, it seems to be happening, but we will wait and see over the long term. In the meantime, the government is acting, and I will give members an example of one of the inflation relief measures that our government instituted to help Canadians weather the inflationary storm.
Budget 2023 introduced a new, one-time, targeted grocery rebate to provide inflation relief for 11 million Canadians and families who needed it most, which is over a quarter of the Canadian population. That is not peanuts. The grocery rebate provided $2.5 billion in targeted support, with eligible couples with two children receiving up to an extra $467 and single Canadians without children receiving up to an extra $234, which included single seniors. Now, the Conservatives may say that is not enough and does not really count, but they can tell that to somebody who is dealing with the high cost of food as a result of international developments, such as the war in Ukraine. I do not think it is something to sneeze at.
The government, of course, is doing other things. For example, it is addressing junk fees. Junk fees are taking a real bite out of Canadians' incomes, and they are having a disproportionate impact on lower-income Canadians. Through budget 2023, we announced our government's intention to work with regulatory agencies, provinces and territories to reduce junk fees for Canadians and continue to ensure that businesses are transparent with prices to help make life more affordable for Canadians.
At this point, I want to digress a little bit because we have noticed that the price of automobiles has been rising. It is not because of the price on carbon that the new car a person is leasing or buying has gone up a tremendous amount of money. I will explain why this has happened, and it is related to the pandemic. That is not a novel idea. On the other side of the House they seem to have forgotten the pandemic and the impacts of it, but there is a lot going on in the economy still today that is related to the pandemic. What happened in the pandemic with the sales of automobiles is that supply chains were interrupted for car dealers.
I was just getting going, but I am out of time, so I will stop there. Maybe some other day I will talk about why the price of cars has gone up, but it has nothing to do with the price on carbon.
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- Jun/21/23 9:39:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we often hear from the other side that the price on carbon is fuelling inflation. However, I look at reports of the Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem's appearance before the finance committee in February.
I will quote a newspaper article. In terms of the impact of the price on carbon on inflation, he said that, “prescribed annual increases to the price on carbon add about 0.1 percentage points to headline inflation.” That is not very much. Also, “He added later that scrapping the carbon tax completely would reduce inflation by half a percentage point in the year that it was done, but would not have any impact on inflation in future years.”
The idea of always coming back to the price on carbon as the culprit contributing to inflation is a bit misleading, really. It does not reflect the thoughts of the Bank of Canada's governor.
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- Jun/1/23 11:14:18 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, any kind of an analysis around environmental measures, including the price on carbon, must take into account the effects of doing nothing.
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- Jun/1/23 11:10:27 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I go back to the point that, unlike Milton Friedman's price on carbon model, ours includes a dividend to individual taxpayers, and that is what makes the price on carbon essentially a transfer. That is what I would say in response to the member's question.
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- Feb/7/23 4:20:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I read just yesterday that Canada is the only oil-producing nation that is bringing in a cap system on methane, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas. It is 30 times more powerful and damaging than carbon dioxide. As such, we are at the forefront, and we are putting in a cap. We are looking at doing so on methane. It is a challenge because we need to have the technology available that can really pinpoint where the methane is being released, and that is through satellite technology and so forth. There is still a lot of work to do in that area.
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- 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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- Sep/29/22 12:31:39 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, first of all, the price on carbon pollution does not apply in Quebec. Consequently, my colleague's constituents will not be affected by that measure, although they will benefit from the relief set out in Bill C-30. However, I want to put that aside for a moment.
The price on pollution adds an estimated 2.2¢ to every litre of gasoline, but, in any event, Canadians are compensated for that increase.
Does my colleague believe that this 2.2¢ increase has a greater impact on the price of gas than the war in Ukraine?
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