- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
- Government Page
- Mar/22/23 9:25:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I do not think it would be too difficult to ask for. When the government brought in this escalator tax, inflation was pretty marginal. There was very little inflation, so it was only going up 1% or 2% per year. I would like to see something less drastic than just following inflation every year, because if it goes up 6%, that is drastic. What would be more important for these producers, especially the small producers, is to develop a fair sliding scale of excise tax payments that makes it easier for them to compete with the bigger players and especially the imports.
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- Mar/22/23 9:23:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will retract that, but it is good to see him.
We do not want to scrap the tax. We want to restructure it so that it is fair. For it to go up 6% in one year when we are already facing the effects of inflation is too much to ask of these producers. We want it capped and we want all these taxes restructured so that small producers are treated fairly and can compete.
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Mr. Speaker, I will not go into the whole spiel on inflation; I do not have that much time here tonight. However, when we look at the extraordinary profits of oil and gas companies and the extraordinary profits of the big box grocery retailers, it is clear that they have taken advantage of this situation. Because of factors coming out of the pandemic and because of the war in Ukraine, prices have started to rise, and they have taken advantage of that and added their own excess profits on top of it. That is one of the biggest factors in inflation.
Perhaps some of the government spending did cause inflation. If we look around the world, Canada is in the middle of the pack when it comes to how bad inflation is. However, what economists have been saying about the measures we are talking about here tonight, such as dental care for people who need it, a housing top-up for low-income families struggling to pay their rents and the GST rebate that has been doubled, is that those kinds of targeted programs do not cause inflation. If the Conservatives are concerned about inflation rising because of this, the experts will say they are wrong.
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Mr. Speaker, I agree that inflation is hurting Canadians. There are all these aspects to inflation. We have heard a lot about the price of gas. We have heard a tremendous amount about the price of housing and the impossibility of owning a home for new homebuyers in Canada. With the skyrocketing cost of rent in my riding, it is almost impossible to find rental accommodation of any sort, let alone afford it.
I agree that the top-up we are talking about helps people who are really in need of that help. These are people who are spending more than 30% of their income on their accommodation, on their rent. If someone were to tell them that $500 is not enough, they would say that it would be a big help.
We need to tackle the housing situation. The NDP wants the government to build 500,000 units of affordable housing to catch up to where we should have been had the federal government not gotten out of the affordable housing game back in the nineties. Yes, there is a lot for us to do to tackle housing and inflation, but Bill C-31 is an essential and very impactful, beneficial bill that would help the millions of Canadians who are struggling with their costs today.
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Mr. Speaker, for weeks we have been hearing the Conservatives talking about “triple, triple, triple” when it comes to the carbon tax.
In my province of British Columbia, the price of gas has gone up about a dollar a litre this year. The whole carbon tax, even if we got rid of the carbon tax, is just 10¢ or 11¢ of that. It is 1% of the greedflation we have seen from the oil and gas companies.
The increase that is going to happen this year is 2¢ a litre. Again, that is 1% of the price we are paying for fuel across much of the country. Today the price of gas was supposed to go up 10¢. If we got rid of the carbon tax, we would be back to where we were yesterday. This would not solve the problem of inflation for Canadians.
Could the member comment on that? All this talk about the carbon tax will do absolutely nothing for most Canadians. They need real help, and that is what the NDP is delivering tonight with Bill C-31.
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- Sep/27/22 4:44:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the hon. member started off well, pointing out that inflation does hit lower-income Canadians more than it hits higher-income Canadians, but he seems to forget that we are debating his party's motion here, which is about the carbon tax.
Right now, we have seen, in British Columbia, our home province, his and mine, that gas prices have increased about a dollar a litre this year. Two cents of that increase was from the carbon tax. The bulk of that increase was not from the price of oil. It was from greed. It was from big oil and gas companies seeing an opportunity and putting up the price of oil by a tremendous amount, fuelling inflation, and now he says that the federal government cannot do anything about that.
It can. It can put a windfall tax on those profits, those profits from greed, and take that money, billions of dollars, and distribute it in various ways to the people in Canada who are suffering now because of that rising cost of fuel.
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- May/12/22 3:12:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today an open letter to the Prime Minister, signed by nearly 300 top scientists and scientific organizations, highlighted that Canada's best and brightest graduate, post-graduate and post-doctoral students are living in poverty due to the inadequate funding they receive. The scientists point out that the dollar value of federal scholarships has not changed since 2003.
We need to increase the scholarship amounts and index them to inflation. How can we expect to keep these brilliant young scientists in Canada when we force them to work for less than minimum wage?
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