- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Hastings—Lennox and Addington
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $121,555.68
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I rise to seek unanimous consent concerning a vote held earlier today on Bill C-34. I would like to mark my vote as affirmative.
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- Apr/17/23 4:48:21 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, after two weeks of meeting with people, businesses and families in my constituency, I can say that the consistent message is that Canadians need a break. Canadians need a responsible government to step up.
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- Apr/17/23 4:46:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is definitely no secret that Canadians are stretched in every possible regard, whether it is with housing or labour issues. The bottom line is that the budget that was presented is not responsible. It is a budget funded by Canadians suffering from inflation. Rather than providing real solutions, this NDP-Liberal government has unleashed an avalanche of uncontrolled spending.
From my perspective, Canadians cannot afford business as usual. No democracy is perfect, but all are perfectible.
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- Apr/17/23 4:44:39 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, there is no question that Umicore, the battery materials plant, is the first of its kind in North America, and I applaud the member opposite for raising it. I was there and I welcome that. It is expected to launch in the fall of 2025. I will certainly celebrate the small wins from the government and recognize that locally in Hastings—Lennox and Addington we celebrate when things go right.
I would like to acknowledge that it is a good win, and members on either side of the House need to recognize and applaud when things go right, not just knock heads. They should respect each other.
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- Apr/17/23 4:35:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the government has touted this budget as a budget that will tackle the high cost of living. Observers could be excused for thinking this meant the government would actually take substantive steps to address the underlying factors that have caused the historic rise in the price of food, heating, gas and other everyday essentials. Unfortunately, Canadians did not receive such a budget, and as a result, their confidence in the competence of the government's economic management continues to dither.
Instead of taking care of the issues of the day, the government has burdened future generations of Canadians with billions upon billions of dollars of unnecessary debt. It should not be up to Canada's sons and daughters to foot the bill for a government looking for a quick vote today.
Canadian families are suffering. That is the bottom line. This we know; we hear it every day. I can recite countless examples locally of small business owners or farmers who have had to make extremely difficult decisions in order to stretch their dollars further. However, there is one group of Canadians often overlooked in these discussions, a group of Canadians that has been treated as an afterthought by governments and looked at as an easy source of money when it needs to be found: our armed forces and its members.
Over the past couple of weeks, my office has been inundated by an alarming number of CAF members expressing grave concerns over numerous issues, most recently the replacement approved by Treasury Board of the post living differential to the Canadian Forces housing differential. The push-back on this new policy has been astounding.
One person, who granted me permission to use their quote, wrote, “ Many are losing money. The sliding scale it operates on has newly joined members making more money than those that have been in for 12-15 years. This means as you work hard, strive to lead and progress you will actually lose money. In what world does it make sense that as you promote into higher positions you take a pay cut? You have members who will lose money because once they move up in ranks and strive for more, they no longer qualify for the CFHD benefit and the raise does not match what they were receiving from CFHD. I'm talking about a decrease in pay anywhere from a couple dollars to 500 dollars a month. The CFHD benefit goes away for people who live in the same area for 7 years or more. Sure, many members get posted. But the Navy folks on ship are only stationed on each coast. Things don't change for those folks after 7 years for cost of living. Well it does. It gets more expensive but let's take away an allowance.”
I want to personally thank this person for being courageous enough to reach out to my office to share their concerns. If politicians never actually talk to our soldiers, sailors and airmen, regardless of rank, how will we ever know the issues they are facing and how can we begin to start working on them to solve the problems?
While I am sure the objective of this government was to increase the draw of new recruits into the forces, it has done this at the expense of keeping the ones we already have. The 7,700 troops who currently receive the post living differential will not qualify for the Canadian Forces housing differential. For them, it is just another benefit axed. For members living together who do qualify, that benefit is halved, and at a savings of $30 million. I can promise everyone in this House and everyone watching that the long-term effects in talent and investment we will lose as a result of this will far exceed that amount. That is only what we can realistically monetize in training costs. The amount of damage done to morale cannot have a dollar value attached to it.
It also unfairly targets the navy, as the new differential expires after seven years in the same address, and the navy is notoriously non-transitional in postings. The government needs to commit to communicating with our troops and ensuring that they will not be unfairly nickel-and-dimed to pay for over-budget programs like the Canadian Coast Guard Arctic and offshore patrol ships, AOPS, which just had its program cost quietly and unceremoniously increased by half a billion dollars, especially at a time when we are in a recruitment and retention crisis. The only solution for the reconstitution crisis is to take the stopgap that exists at the recruitment phase and put it into the retention phase so that there are more soldiers in and fewer soldiers out. The CFHD fails in that objective.
What we need is better equipment. We need to start replacing our Victoria-class subs and our aging Auroras, expand our over-the-horizon radar capabilities and commit to spending 2% of our GDP on national defence. Our troops need better incentives, better pay, better housing, a fair and timely recruitment process and a quick and compassionate transitioning process. We also need to remember that the government’s solemn responsibility to our soldiers, sailors and airmen is not nullified as soon as they leave the CAF.
At this point, I want to thank my two colleagues, the members from Banff-Airdrie and Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan, for their excellent work in advancing veterans issues and being staunch advocates for our former CAF members.
Canadians, regardless of job, have been struggling. This budget was an opportunity to provide relief to those who have been dealing with these costs since well before the last election. Instead, we have a government that chooses to run up billions in new debt while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the harsh realities facing everyday families the country over, including those in uniform.
The country is facing crises on many levels. The government came out with a pay raise for our forces members and almost immediately negated that net increase by completely revamping their housing differential in the middle of a cost of living crisis, a recruitment crisis and a retention crisis. They expect our normally stoic forces members to be happy about this newest slap in the face. Struggling Canadians both in and out of uniform deserve better than a complacent government content with the status quo.
When he retired, Jim Flaherty was, as many opined, a “steady hand at the tiller”. During the last economic crisis, the prudent and conservative approach he took showed Canada to be an island of stability in a global sea of uncertainty. It is crucial that the government of the day, regardless of its stripe, ensures economic stability and does not fall pray to the siren calls of political gamesmanship. It is for these reasons that I will be voting against the budget.
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- Apr/26/22 12:08:06 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for the acknowledgement of my family's career. My father had a lovely retirement gathering last week and it was wonderful.
With regard to the question he asked, I believe that my colleague has failed to mentioned the positive record of the Stephen Harper government and the results that he did deliver for seniors.
More specifically to pharmacare and dental care, I think the devil is in the details. I would love to be proven wrong, but I am not—
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- Apr/26/22 12:06:03 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have to recognize that when seniors get to that stage in their life, whether it be in their own home to age in place, in a long-term care facility or in the homes of their children, they will be living the rest of their lives there. It is their space. It is their social circle and their recreational circle.
When it comes to seniors, it seems like the current government has a habit of taking one step forward and two steps back. I am delighted with the record that the Conservative government has with regard to seniors. I think it is really important and prudent of us, as parliamentarians, to have their backs, in the words of the Liberal government. If they are going to have the backs of seniors, they need to step up and act.
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- Apr/26/22 12:04:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will start by suggesting that respect for this place, respect for my colleagues of all stripes, is incumbent on all of us to recognize. Due process, evaluation and critique of certain bills and passages are critical. In my opinion, it is the scrutiny of the public expenditures that is the core, and it is our Parliament's obligation. It is who we are as individuals and it is who we are as parliamentarians, and we can never give up that responsibility, especially in a confidence and supply arrangement.
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- Apr/26/22 11:52:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, budgets are important. They are the core of a parliament. It is a real honour to be able to rise here today and speak to budget 2022. For many of us, this is the first substantive piece of legislation that we as new parliamentarians are tasked with scrutinizing. The importance of this job that Canadians have trusted us to undertake cannot be understated.
Every single day, many people from Hastings—Lennox and Addington are calling and emailing my office with grave concerns about how they can make ends meet. Just last week, our office received hundreds of feedback forms indicating that the cost of living and affordability was their number one concern. The cost of groceries, gas, home heating and everything has increased. It is my obligation and my role as their member of Parliament to bring them a voice in this House.
On general spending measures, the Liberal government suggests that the announcements in the budget will help weather inflation and make housing more affordable. In my opinion, the continuation of this Liberal approach is destined to drive us right back into a crisis of an order of magnitude larger than that of the early 1980s, based on constantly adding new permanent spending programs on borrowed money.
As noted in an article I read recently, only a small portion of our national debt is refinanced each year, so we will not get stung all at once. However, year by year, servicing costs will rise and the ability to afford our essential programs will dwindle, unless taxes rise substantially to cover the rising costs of both debt serving and increased program costs.
The core function of our Parliament has been, and remains, to oversee the expenditure of public monies.
Parliamentarians, and parliaments themselves, fought long and hard to pry this authority from the hands of imperial executives and governors, decades ago. Their actions lend themselves to our uniquely Canadian brand of responsible government.
In his important work, The Public Purse, which is used as source material in our most recent practice and procedure manual, Norman Ward describes the struggle of our nascent pre-Confederation legislatures, as it related to oversight, thus:
In principle, therefore, the first goal usually sought by an assembly was to make the executive at least partially dependent on the assembly for its income; the second was to make it wholly so; the third, and most sophisticated, was to insist on some sort of detailed public accounting, on a systematic basis, of expenditures after they were made.
In 1838, Lord Durham was sent by the mother of parliaments to investigate the cause of the previous year's rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. One of the litany of causes was, as he describes, related to the relationships between the assemblies and the executives.
In his hugely influential report, Lord Durham wrote:
The Assembly, after it had obtained entire control over the public revenues, still found itself deprived of all voice in the choice or even designation of the persons in whose administration of affairs it could feel confidence.
He went on to state:
It is difficult to conceive what could have been their theory or government who imagined, that in any colony of England a body invested with the name and character of a representative assembly could be deprived of any of those powers which, in the opinion of Englishmen, are inherent in a popular legislature.
This speaks to two principles of parliamentary control of finances: first, that the executive should have no income that is not granted to it or otherwise sanctioned by Parliament; and second, that the executive should make no expenditures except those approved by Parliament, in ways approved by Parliament.
I am not suggesting that this legislature does not possess the capacity to scrutinize. I know it does, but I believe in recent years we have not been wielding that authority properly and effectively, especially as it relates to Mr. Ward’s third point regarding what ultimately became our main estimates. As a result, Canadians are now paying the price.
We need only look at this very budget document for proof positive of what rushed legislation does, most particularly in the case of budgets. Hidden away in annex 3 of the budget, the fourth from last page reads as follows:
In Budget 2022, the government proposes to amend the Old Age Security Act to clarify that the one-time payment made in August 2021 to seniors age 75 and older will be exempted from the income test for the Guaranteed Income Supplement and Allowances. This amendment corrects a reference error resulting from the passage of the Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1.
This begs the question: What was the error?
In sections 266 and 268 of the Budget Implementation Act, 2021, the section that had intended to make the one-time, $500 payment to struggling seniors aged 75 and up non-taxable, the Liberals quoted the wrong section of the act. Instead of quoting section 275, the section that actually created the payment, they cited section 276, which is completely unrelated to seniors and instead deals with the Public Service Employment Act. As a result, right now, under law, as desperate seniors are filing their taxes, that $500 is considered income, and not just at tax time but come the July recalculation period for benefits. In other words, the government has created and legislated yet another potential benefit clawback.
It is only prudent to highlight that last time, the budget was time allocated, meaning that the government, with the NDP's support, limited the amount of debate that we could have on the budget. That was debate where we might have found this error and saved seniors the stress of another possible clawback.
I would note that it was the same group of seniors, those aged 75 plus, who had the wrong T4 information sent to them due to a misprint. How convenient that the same, exact group of people who were subject to an age-restricted benefit that everyone, including, I imagine, the CRA and the ESDC, thought was non-taxable, received misprinted T4s. Now we find out that the benefit is, under word of law, actually taxable. That is why my colleague for Miramichi—Grand Lake and I called on this government to extend the filing date for seniors.
With regard to seniors, they have very little to celebrate in this year's budget. Of a projected $56.6 billion in new spending through to 2027, a paltry $20 million has been earmarked for supporting our seniors. To put that into perspective, that is 0.04% of spending announced in the next five years. There is nothing to help struggling formal and informal caregivers, nothing to help long-term care facilities and nothing to help alleviate the increasing cost of living they all face. Low-income seniors need help today, and they cannot afford to wait.
To get back to my original point, our job here is to scrutinize. What we do here is the basis for responsible government. When we cannot do our jobs, Canadians suffer. On my file alone, we have seen it with the GIS clawback, we have seen it with the T4 delays, and now we are seeing it with the one-time payment, which are all things that could have been avoided if we actually took the time to do our job right. I will give credit to the hon. Minister of Seniors, who has acted on things when they were brought to her attention, but the point is that it should never have gotten to this point.
Lastly, I want to touch on the absolute absurdity that is our main estimates process in relation to the budgetary process and the need to align Treasury Board with Finance in the preparation of those documents. However, my time is running short, so I will leave members with one more recent quote from the 2019 report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, entitled, “Improving Transparency and Parliamentary Oversight of the Government’s Spending Plans”. The report quotes Scott Brison as saying, “The ability to exercise oversight over government spending is the most important role that...parliamentarians can play in representing Canadians.”
I urge everyone here to heed the words of our former Liberal president of the Treasury Board and let parliamentarians do our jobs thoroughly and effectively, because Canadians cannot afford for us to do otherwise.
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