- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- North Island—Powell River
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 65%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $145,542.18
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I want to thank my two colleagues who spoke before me. I really appreciated both of their interpretations of this particular bill and the meaning that it has.
I am here today to speak to our leader's bill, Bill C-352, which talks about amending the Competition Act and the Competition Tribunal Act to increase competition and lower prices for Canadians.
My husband's culture is the most northern Coast Salish in Canada. Their nation is Homalco. One of the things that they and their teachings are very clear in is that greed is actually considered a profound illness. If a member of their community shows greed in holding on to wealth, there is a lot of work done to help that person not be in that place of greed. The reason they feel this is an important issue is that the core value of their community is “together we are stronger”. If somebody is suffering, then it is a weight upon all of us to make sure that we lift that person up and support them in the way that they need to be supported.
Unfortunately, that is not the system that we currently see in Canada. I think most Canadians know the reality that the system is rigged to support the very, very wealthy, the one per cent people of Canada. We see this not just in Canada but also in many other countries. We know it is extremely unfair. What bothers me the most about how our system is rigged right now is that the wage earnings of everyday Canadians continue to be stagnant, while the very wealthy are seeing huge increases in their wage earnings and their incomes. We have seen this in a lot of statistics. This tells us that everyday Canadians are going to continue to struggle, because the greed in this country is out of control. That is where we are.
We can look at what is happening in our grocery stores right now, where people are really struggling to be able to afford the basic things they need to feed their families and to be treated with dignity. I bring this up a lot in this House, but I think there should be a bar of dignity in this country. I believe that fits in with the teachings from the Homalco people. They understand that everybody deserves dignity. If somebody has a strength or a weakness, they find a way to celebrate what is good and strong. They find ways to support and love through those weak moments. We are not seeing that right now. We are seeing a lot of people who are doing everything right. They are following the rules that they think are fair. They see themselves falling further and further behind. That makes me think of a lot of young people, who are worried about the fact that they may not be able to afford a home or to ever have a livable wage that will give them the ability to build the things in their life that they want to build.
As we look at this system and acknowledge that it is rigged, the worst thing that we can do is to say we should just not have a system to address that. I like to believe the best of people. I tend to be a fairly trusting person. I believe in the essential good in everyone. However, I also know that, if there is a system that does not keep engaging and making sure that things are fair, there are people who would turn that system to feed themselves at the expense of other people. That is what we have right now.
We are watching people like Galen Weston walk away with multimillion-dollar raises while the workers at Loblaws cannot even afford to buy groceries at the store they work in. We are seeing more people struggling to pay for basic groceries, but we are also seeing much higher outcomes and profits for these grocery stores. It is frustrating that we can see this out-of-touch Liberal Party that calls them in and says to them nicely, “Can you stop raising your prices? It's really hurting the Canadian consumer”. That is talk, but it does not actually say that it is not fair and there is going to be something put into place that makes it fair.
Then we have the corporate-controlled Conservatives. They, quite honestly, have 50% of their governing body as lobbyists for greedy CEOs. That is whom they are talking to. That is their leadership. That is who is helping them plot their own course, moving forward. This worries me, because it means that everyday people doing everything right are continuing to be marginalized because our systems do not hold those folks to account.
What would this bill do? The first thing it would do is increase penalties for price fixing. We all know about this. We know sometimes prices are fixed and consumers are paying way more than they should. When I look at this, it reminds me of the reality that Loblaws recently tried to decide that instead of selling almost-expired food at 50% off, it was going to take only 30% off. It is nickel-and-diming people who are struggling and doing their best every day to get by, and taking away every opportunity for something they can afford.
The other thing the bill would do is help smaller grocery stores by protecting them against anti-competitive tactics from bigger players. Let us be honest. We all know this, especially people in small businesses. When there is a player in town that is a really big corporation with tons of resources, it can undermine them really easily. We need something in place that keeps things on a level playing field.
We also know that businesses that are within a certain radius of a big grocery store and offer a lower price for the consumer are told they cannot do it, because it is anti-competitive. What happens is that those businesses have to raise their prices, even though they could give it to somebody at a lower price. That is wrong, and it is those big corporate giants coming for people who work hard, care about their community and try to make things affordable, and taking away their ability to do that. The bill would fix that.
The bill would also give the Competition Bureau more powers to crack down on abuse like price gouging consumers. This is a real thing. The Conservatives will tell us it is all just about the carbon tax, but when we look at the stats, which I will get to a little later, we see a huge amount of corporate profits made in the last little while. Even with taxes going up, these corporations are still drawing in way more than they did back in 2020. That worries me and tells me they are using this opportunity to mislead Canadians and tell them they need to pay more, even when they do not need to. That is because we do not have strong enough anti-competition laws in this country.
The other thing the bill would do is stop mergers that decrease competition and hurt Canadians. We have just seen this, with Rogers taking over Shaw. Rogers promised it would not raise its prices, and what did it do? It just recently raised prices.
One of the things about Canada that concerns me is that we do not ever see a government, whether it be Liberal or Conservative, take on this real issue of competition and make sure that when people are getting scammed, it does something about it. Governments are just too nice, because they know where their money comes from. That is what I will say in this House. It is shocking.
Right now, there are five companies for grocery stores: Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro, Costco and Walmart. They dominate. There are little ones every once in a while, and in B.C. we lost some of those small grocery stores, which have been picked up by Sobeys. This is shocking. It means those five just talk to each other and decide how much they want to get out of a certain area. There are no more little grocery stores on the corner, doing their best to keep the costs down. The big grocery stores can just wipe them out.
That is what is happening in this country, and the consumers are paying. The people who work the hardest are paying the most. A person who is making $250,000 a year is not going to care if the grocery store prices go up, but someone who is making only $20,000 or $30,000, and there are a lot of seniors living on that amount in this country, is certainly going to feel it. They are going to be making terrible, terrible decisions that no Canadian with any ounce of dignity here could see taken.
I want to remind everybody that margins generally increase by one to two percentage points. This is where it has been at. Now we are seeing huge increases. We know that the three largest grocery stores combined, Loblaws, Sobeys and Metro, in 2022 made more than $3.6 billion in profits. While everyday Canadians are suffering, the reality is that we do not have a system that is going to be making it fair for everyday Canadians.
I hope everybody in this House supports this bill, so we can make things fair for Canadians, because they certainly deserve it when they are doing everything right.
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Mr. Speaker, I am very honoured every day to stand up in the House. Today, we are talking about the fall economic statement. Before I talk about that, I just want to take a moment at the beginning of my speech to recognize that the bodies of indigenous women have been found in Winnipeg and an alleged Winnipeg serial killer has been identified.
I think collectively in the House, and hopefully across all of Canada, we are sitting with the deep horror of that reality and what that means for all of us. It is shameful that we live in a country that still does not value indigenous women and girls and our LGBT community. We see it demonstrated repeatedly. I hope all of us are carrying this in our hearts and that we continue to carry it in our hearts and our minds every day until this stops.
Coming back to the fall economic statement, I want to talk about some of the concerns I have around this economic statement. We are all hearing from constituents who are struggling every day to afford the basic necessities in their lives. We hear about the increasing use of food banks. We also hear from so many families who are eating substantially less. Parents are acting like good parents and are not eating as much so their children can go to bed with full bellies. That is something that we should all be listening to.
We know that inflation is certainly a part of the problem. However, we also know that greed is a huge part of the problem as well. In my community, I hear from a lot of indigenous elders and they consistently tell me that greed is an illness. They have a lot of traditional ways of dealing with greed, because it is seen as a sickness that will hurt our communities at large. I wish that, in this place, we could also see it as a sickness that needs moderation. It needs systems in place to stop it.
We know that Loblaws has seen record profits. It is profit like it has not seen in well over five years. It is profit that is so substantial that we hear it is making $1 million extra a day. That concerns me greatly. As we are having this discussion, it is important that we recognize that this fall economic statement does not really substantively address that issue and I hope that it will soon.
We know that the Canadians for Tax Fairness have said that the costs from inflation are more than what is passed on to consumers. That means that inflation is passed on to consumers but more is added. In my opinion, that is simply greed. We need to address that issue so that we hold the people who sell us our food accountable.
I remember a constituent once told me, “Rachel, we are not consumers; we are Canadians.” Every day when I am in the House, I really try to remind myself of that as we look at our systems and recognize some of the challenges in them.
I also did not see a substantial enough increase for housing. I know that on November 25 in my riding in Campbell River, there was a conversation on housing. Many representatives from communities throughout my region were participating. I heard again and again, like I do so often, that housing is simply a crisis. If someone has a fixed income or a low income, it is getting harder to find a place to live. A lot of people are living outside. There is a lot of snow in my area, which is fairly rare, but it is having a huge impact.
We also know that a lot of seniors are couch surfing. When I get calls from people in their eighties who are moving from friend's house to friend's house and sleeping on couches, it just means there is something substantively wrong in this country. I want to remind Canadians that the federal government really has not been part of the housing strategy in this country since 1992. I appreciate that the government has put some money into it, but if we leave a wound festering like that for so long, it is really hard to fix it. That is what we are seeing here.
I want to thank the Campbell River Community Foundation and the Campbell River and District Coalition to End Homelessness for all of their work on this particular file. We heard from small communities and indigenous communities. They are left out. The federal funding is not working. Indigenous communities are not getting the supports they need from the government and it needs to be better.
I also have concerns that we are not talking about GST on home heating. We know that this would help. It is not the biggest help, but put together with a lot of things, it would help hard-working people across this country be able to pay for their heat when we hit the cold season.
We still have not seen a meaningful windfall tax. That is such a gap. We need to have more structures in place. Again we will hear from the government on this, but it has not fixed the problem. It has done a few tweaks, but it has not taken that comprehensive look at the fact that people are making a lot of profit off the labour of Canadians and they are not paying their fair share. Ultrawealthy people are hiring accountants who can help them pay very little, but everyday people are paying all of their taxes. That is wrong and we have to fix it.
There are a few things that I am very much in support of in this bill as well. I was excited to read about the Canada recovery dividend. This is something that the NDP has been asking for. It is temporary and maybe we do not want temporary, but it is there. It is a one-time tax of 15% of taxable income over $1 billion, so it is getting at some of those profits. The other thing we know is that in this country a lot of corporations, after the pandemic, have done extremely well very quickly. In fact, many of them are making more profit than before the pandemic. We need to question that, we need to understand it and we need to make sure that they pay their fair share.
This dividend would also increase corporate income tax on banks and life insurance groups by 1.5%. That is getting some of that windfall tax and putting it back into the coffers. It is making sure that people in our communities get things like appropriate housing, dental care and a bit of support to help with their rent when they pay way more than 30% of their income on rent.
Those things will make a difference, but we also know that the Parliamentary Budget Officer has been very clear that if this Canada recovery dividend were put on big box stores and the oil and gas sector, we would see an increase of revenue to Canada of about $4.3 billion. We need to question this. Again, I keep coming back to this and the NDP will continue to keep coming back. When we see groups of people and big corporations making significant profits when other people cannot even feed their families and other people are living on the streets, Canada has an obligation to address this issue. Therefore, these are some steps in the right direction, but we still need to see more.
There is another thing that I am in support of and I am looking forward to seeing finally implemented. I know the NDP has been fighting and talking about this for many years. It is the removal of the federal portion of interest on student loans. We spend a lot of time in the House talking about young people and about the fact that they do not have enough to buy a house and that they are struggling, sometimes with several jobs in a very changing economy, to address the needs that they have and to have a future that they can believe in.
This is one step. It is not the only step that should be taken on behalf of young people. The federal government has to do more, but it is something that really would support a lot of young people and allow them not to have that burden. They go to school so that they can contribute to their community and to their country. If they have to spend all of their time trying to find a way to pay off their loans, then they do not get to do the things that will make all of us as Canadians a lot more substantive and healthy.
In closing, I want to say that I will be supporting this bill. I believe fundamentally in the fact that people need dental care, and I am really excited to see that come out the door. We know that we still have work. I am really excited to see next year that seniors finally get dental care. I do not know about the rest of the MPs in this place, but I have had a lot of seniors come to my door and talk about the fact that they cannot afford basic dental care and what the impact of that is in terms of their health and well-being.
I look forward to answering any questions.
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- May/16/22 2:29:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, gas prices are reaching record highs across the country, and costs are only expected to increase in the summer. Canadians are frustrated. After years of the pandemic, many had plans to travel across Canada to visit loved ones, but the high cost of gas is ending that dream. While Canadians are getting gouged at the pumps, big oil and gas are making record profits, and the Liberals are handing over more public money to support that profit. How about the Liberals be accountable to Canadians? When will the government make big oil and gas pay their fair share?
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- May/10/22 2:30:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, while Canadians are being gouged at the pump, big oil and gas continues to make record profits. Imperial Oil made its highest profit in 30 years, and today, media told us that Suncor Energy earnings are almost $3 billion. This is not just companies passing on their costs to consumers. This is companies making tremendous profit.
While everyday Canadians in this country pay more than their fair share, when is the government going to make those big companies pay theirs?
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- Mar/23/22 2:32:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, costs keep going up for housing, gas and groceries, and Canadians are struggling. People are hurting while the ultrarich continue to get richer. Yesterday, the members of the House voted on a proposed tax on the excess profits of oil companies, big box stores and banks that are getting richer off the backs of Canadians.
When will the government take leadership and tax those we need to tax and stop taxing Canadians?
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- Mar/21/22 4:37:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for that thoughtful question. I really appreciate it because one of the things I think is really important in this conversation is that the federal government has the tools in place to measure where wealth is extreme and where profits are coming in at high amounts.
The reality is we know that people living in Canada, everyday people, are seeing poverty grow. They are making decisions that I think Canada does not want them making. This is why we brought forward these additions. These are for folks who have been making a profit in excess of $1 billion. It is only fair that when one is making an excess of profit that we open up those doors and make sure that no one is left behind.
Unfortunately, we have systems that continuously leave some people behind. They think that crumbs, a little extra here and there, will make a difference. We need to see that bar of dignity rise. That is why we proposed this motion.
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