Bill C-8

Economic and Fiscal Update Implementation Act, 2021

An Act to implement certain provisions of the economic and fiscal update tabled in Parliament on December 14, 2021 and other measures

Part 1 amends the Income Tax Act and the Income Tax Regulations in order to
(a) introduce a new refundable tax credit for eligible businesses on qualifying ventilation expenses made to improve air quality;
(b) expand the travel component of the northern residents deduction by giving all northern residents the option to claim up to $1,200 in eligible travel expenses even if the individual has not received travel assistance from their employer;
(c) expand the School Supplies Tax Credit from 15% to 25% and expand the eligibility criteria to include electronic devices used by eligible educators; and
(d) introduce a new refundable tax credit to return fuel charge proceeds to farming businesses in backstop jurisdictions.
Part 2 enacts the Underused Housing Tax Act . This Act implements an annual tax of 1% on the value of vacant or underused residential property directly or indirectly owned by non-resident non-Canadians. It sets out rules for the purpose of establishing owners’ liability for the tax. It also sets out applicable reporting and filing requirements. Finally, to promote compliance with its provisions, this Act includes modern administration and enforcement provisions aligned with those found in other taxation statutes.
Part 3 provides for a six-year limitation or prescription period for the recovery of amounts owing with respect to a loan provided under the Canada Emergency Business Account program established by Export Development Canada.
Part 4 authorizes payments to be made out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the purpose of supporting ventilation improvement projects in schools.
Part 5 authorizes payments to be made out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the purpose of supporting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) proof-of-vaccination initiatives.
Part 6 authorizes the Minister of Health to make payments of up to $1.72 billion out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund in relation to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) tests. It also sets out reporting requirements for the Minister of Health.
Part 7 amends the Employment Insurance Act to specify the maximum number of weeks for which benefits may be paid in a benefit period to certain seasonal workers.

Economic and Fiscal Update Implementation Act, 2021

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question and for starting off his comment in French. His French is excellent, and I am sure he could have said the whole thing in French.

Naturally, we do not always agree with our fellow MPs. Take vaccination, for example. The Bloc and the member alike know that vaccination falls within the jurisdiction of Quebec and the provinces, but we want everything to do with that to be evidence-based. That is how Quebec is operating.

The Bloc condemns Ottawa's tendency to stick its nose into areas under Quebec's and the provinces' jurisdiction. Ottawa tells them what they should do and imposes conditions, but it is not doing anything about the issues under its own jurisdiction. We would like to see a little humility. The federal government is not the supreme omnipotent ruler of everything.

For example, for health care, what the provinces need is more transfers and more money with no strings attached and no standards. The people who actually work in health care know this, but those at a distance do not. This reminds me of the British Home Rule and how Great Britain ran the colonies. That is how Ottawa is behaving.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Mr. Speaker, according to a City of Edmonton report released in 2019, there were 2,800 folks living in poverty and without a home in my city of Edmonton. One of the Bloc members mentioned some of the program deficits from 1994 related to the implementation of social housing. Recently, I spoke with members in my community, like Judith from the Bear Clan Patrol, who knows from working directly on the ground that this number is about 3,200 people today. Social housing is a key part of the solution: more units, more housing.

Would the member agree that the housing crisis cannot be fixed merely by a 1% tax that does not address things like a flipping tax or looking at how housing auctions are done? Would the member agree that we need to build more units now?

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right.

It makes me so sad to see how the gap between rich and poor seems to have widened in recent decades. There is more poverty because we are investing less in social housing, which is not to be confused with the bad concept of affordable housing. Meanwhile, the richest are gaining greater access to perks such as tax havens.

The state is supposed to narrow the wealth gap, not widen it.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Chris d'Entremont]

Order. It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Brantford—Brant, The Economy; the member for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, Infrastructure; the hon. member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands, Agriculture and Agri-Food.

Resuming debate. The hon. member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by saying hello to my new team members: Meili Faille, who is a former Bloc Québécois MP, Anaïs Thibodeau and Mishka Caldwell‑Pichette, who are probably watching right now. A warm welcome to them all.

I listened closely to members' speeches on this bill to implement the federal government's priority measures. I found the speech given by the member for Joliette to be particularly interesting.

I have an opportunity to remind members that even though Ottawa may be shelling out billions of dollars during this pandemic, the government is still trying to avoid showing the leadership expected of it to help those doing their part to ensure a real economic recovery.

I salute the contribution of all the political actors who realize the challenges we face in the regions and who, like me, will demand recognition for the importance of these vast territories, Abitibi—Témiscamingue in particular, and demand investments befitting their people and their aspirations. What we want is a real economic recovery for the regions.

As an aside, I want to salute Patrick Perreault of Métal Marquis and the great leadership he has shown with the Table Métal Abitibi-Ouest. Faced with a serious labour shortage, the people in that group know how to be proactive.

Although everyone is affected by and dealing with the pandemic, people still have every right to expect the government to speed up measures that affect the public directly. Let us not forget that voters declined to give the Liberals the privilege of a majority government, and rightly so.

I want to make it very clear that the Liberals do not want to solve anything at the end of the day. They systematically refuse to acknowledge the ongoing problem that is putting a stranglehold on the finances of Quebec and the provinces.

Let us have a look at what is in the minister's economic update. The government is maintaining the Canada health transfer escalator at 3%, which is the legal minimum and below the annual increase in health care costs, until 2027. What are the actual needs when it comes to the health transfer?

Quebec and the provinces are unanimously calling for an immediate payment of $28 billion to cover up to 35% of health care costs, followed by a 6% escalator. This is what the provinces are talking about when they speak with the minister and her officials.

To put that in perspective, the Abitibi‑Témiscamingue region accounts for roughly 2% of the population of Quebec, so it should receive around $120 million in recurrent funding every year. The problems we are having, in obstetrics for example, could be solved with permanent funding from the federal government through a transfer to Quebec.

As I see it, the federal government's categorical rejection of the provinces' demands is nothing new. A lot of ink has been spilled on this subject. However, people now have a better understanding of the significance and consequences of Ottawa's inaction. People are seeing how worn out, inert and craven the Liberal government is.

Let us not forget that ordinary people, our heroes, are the backbone of the health care system. I commend the leadership of Caroline Roy, CEO of the CISSS of Abitibi‑Témiscamingue, and her entire team, as well as the nurses and all the health workers in Abitibi‑Témiscamingue and elsewhere. I thank them for their work and encourage them to keep going.

People are wrong if they think they will never understand what a fiscal imbalance is. The pandemic crisis has exacerbated problems in health care, and the on-the-ground impact of underfunding is very real. I am sure my esteemed colleagues will agree that the money should be in the provinces' hands, not in the federal government's coffers.

Now, where is the investment the government promised, the tens of billions it was going to spend to lay the foundation for a strong recovery and create wealth without falling back on the oil economy of the last century? How about accelerating investment in aerospace, green energy and forestry? Those sectors are important to Quebec.

I have asked myself the same question my colleague posed about the utility of the new tax and its impact on unoccupied buildings owned by foreigners, and I recognize that this overheated market needs cooling.

What the Liberals are serving up now are measures that were announced in the 2020 economic statement, in budget 2021 and in a public consultation carried out last summer that, may I remind the House, did not attract much interest.

It is worth noting that this is the first time the federal government has stuck its finger in the property tax pie. It is all part of the Liberal pattern of interference. The federal government should work with the Government of Quebec and the City of Montreal rather than encroach on their jurisdiction.

The government should not be allowing property owners to leave their units vacant and unoccupied during a housing shortage. This measure does nothing to help regions like Abitibi‑Témiscamingue, which is also experiencing an unprecedented housing shortage. The solution is investments in affordable housing and transfers to the provinces. Once again, the federal government is infringing on an area of provincial jurisdiction.

I would also be remiss if I failed to mention the needs of Abitibi—Témiscamingue residents. I live there, and it is a region blessed by nature. However, in order to live there and develop the area, we need to act now and make sure it is developed in a sustainable way. We will never succeed in solving our labour shortage issues if we choose to be content with strategies that do nothing meaningful to ensure the vitality of our region and our homes. That does not reflect the strong economy that we have in Abitibi—Témiscamingue.

We are in a position to capitalize on the emerging critical mineral economy, but I have some concerns. We want to process our resources close to where they are extracted. The current paradigm needs to shift. No more plundering our resources and sending them elsewhere in the world to be developed. We want these resources to be processed close to where they are extracted, in the mining regions.

The government needs to respond to our strategies to revitalize the forestry industry and develop new forest-based products.

We also have the right to promote our agri-food industry, what we process locally, and to make it easier to get our local products to market and ensure they can be competitive. What can be done to get more of the local products that our agri-food industry produces into the hands of a wider public?

Access to high-speed Internet is very important for SMEs and is critical to helping them go digital and claim their share of the market. There are apps available to them now, but they need access to high-speed Internet to use them. Some business owners are unable to access the tools to market their products.

According to the Agri-Food Innovation Council, small and medium-sized businesses in the industry cannot adopt some new technologies as quickly as their competitors in the United States and Europe because technological advancements rely on high-speed Internet access. GPS and videoconferencing are just two examples of this. People in urban areas take these things for granted, but people in many rural parts of Quebec and Canada do not yet have that luxury.

I think everyone understands what I am talking about. The government can make a real difference for the thousands of people in rural communities by adopting policies and measures that will enable economic undertakings to succeed.

On December 9, I spoke to the House in detail about the affordable housing shortage. The regions need money to build desperately needed housing. This is an unprecedented crisis.

The current housing situation in Abitibi‑Témiscamingue, in Quebec and in Canada is a perennial one caused by the chronic housing shortage, among other things. That is why building new homes is key.

We know that the need and the demand for housing will very likely continue to increase in the coming years. The government should therefore learn from the mistakes made in recent years and find innovative ways to stimulate the construction of housing, especially social, community and truly affordable housing.

I will now address one of the items in this budget statement. I believe that we need to get rid of fly-in, fly-out work and stop thinking of commuter workers as a magic bullet that will solve the labour shortage in remote areas. This system causes capital flight and does not attract new residents. I am really worried about this measure. Are we going to be able to let people develop resources in Abitibi‑Témiscamingue and then spend their wages elsewhere? Are we going to go so far as to pay for them to do that?

I think we need a new paradigm, one that encourages people to move to the regions and to settle in the area where the work is found. This measure seeks to expand the travel component of the northern residents deduction by giving them the option to claim up to $1,200 in eligible travel expenses. I am concerned that it will encourage specialized tradespeople to deduct their travel expenses from their income when they work in remote areas. In other words, this measure would cancel out much of the efforts being made by elected officials in remote areas.

This phenomenon is occurring at a time when the regions have a high birth rate. What kind of future will young families have in remote areas? Instead, should we not encourage people to move to the regions permanently to promote settlement and promote special status for Abitibi‑Témiscamingue in particular?

This could offer a long-term response to the labour shortage.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I will proceed in English, because I have a direct question.

I would agree with the member opposite, particularly on the importance of the forestry industry and agriculture. I know that is big in Quebec. It is big in my own area in Nova Scotia.

I have had interactions with the member before on the oil and gas industry. I know his answer will be that we are a petrostate and it has prevented Quebec from having its success. However, what I find challenging is how that resource has been so crucial for all of Canada, including for his province and mine.

Will he at least recognize that Quebec receiving transfers through equalization, which is driven in part by the revenues generated through the oil and gas sector, has been of benefit to the country and of benefit to Quebec, notwithstanding the fact that, yes, we are going to be making a transition in the days ahead?

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to my colleague, if there is one thing I will never bother to whine about here, it is equalization. Quebec never gets its fair share of budgets. Meanwhile, billions pour in for southern Ontario's automotive industry and for oil and gas.

The issues raised by the automotive industry include the processing of the critical minerals required for electric vehicles. Where will the lithium from our regions, particularly Abitibi—Témiscamingue, be processed? Will it be done near the source? Will it create jobs? Money does not need to be transferred, but can we at least spend our own money that will be generated by creating salaries and jobs in the regions? The entire economic system needs to change.

Otherwise, there is only one solution: Quebec independence.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would ask my colleague to take a deep breath. Quebec receives the majority of Canada's equalization payments.

That being said, my question relates to another subject. My colleague was talking about Abitibi and its fly-in, fly-out workers. There is no need to go that far. I live in La Pocatière. Many people who work in La Pocatière live in Quebec City and commute a little over 100 kilometres every day.

Right across the province, we need employees and people to come and work in our areas. I would like to ask my colleague what measures he would have liked to see in the budget or in the 2021 economic and fiscal update to help keep people in his region.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology for the question. Regarding the health transfer, I want to note that when we talk about the fiscal imbalance on the one hand and the absence of $6 billion in health transfers to Quebec on the other, to me that amounts to the same thing. Quebec is being taken for a ride, and I will never allow that.

On the issue of the labour shortage, there are also some solutions. We agree that the budget statement does not offer any tangible solution to the labour shortage problem. For example, hundreds, if not thousands, of students from francophone countries are systematically rejected. There is a problem with the system right now, seeing as a certain “systemic discrimination” is causing these people to be rejected.

Back home in Abitibi—Témiscamingue, there have been four such cases. These people are part of the strategy to attract workers to address the labour problem. These are people who are coming to study here in specialized fields at our universities and CEGEPs and who will fill jobs in the labour market. We want to welcome them to our regions, but right now, Ottawa is preventing us from doing so.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the cost of housing has skyrocketed, and I want to thank the member for bringing up the housing crisis. In my riding of Victoria, people are struggling. We need affordable rentals. We need housing that has rent geared to income. We need more co-op housing. We need home ownership to be within reach.

After decades of inaction from Liberal and Conservative governments, investors and big corporations have taken over the market. Speculators continue to buy properties to renovate and resell quickly for a profit, outbidding families and driving up prices in communities across Canada.

Housing is a human right and the government's half measures are not working. Now we see that the Liberal's approach is not only too little, but also has multiple loopholes.

Does the member agree that instead of protecting wealthy speculators who drive up the cost of housing, the government should introduce a tax on flipping, while making significant investments to build truly affordable housing?

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I share my colleague's concern.

We absolutely need to focus on building social housing. We will have to find ways to fund it. I dream of seeing a new plan for figuring out how to maximize land use and build new housing across Canada. It is the challenge of the century.

We must ensure that everyone has access to affordable housing. One of the solutions for finding money is the fight against tax havens. That seems obvious to me. It is time to take action.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill C-8. It is my first time giving a speech in the House in the new year. It is not my first time on my feet but my first time speaking at length, so it is my first time speaking in the House since the omicron wave seriously took hold. I want to take a moment to recognize what a punch in the stomach it has felt like to Canadians across the country, many of whom had some hope that we were getting beyond the pandemic. When this wave came, I think many of them felt all of those many feelings we have been feeling over the past two years kind of condensed into a new wave of the pandemic.

I want to give special thanks to all the frontline workers we talked about at the beginning of the pandemic, who never went away and never stopped doing those important tasks even though the limelight shifted away from them.

Health care workers continue to labour in really difficult circumstances, and they are overworked, tired and under-resourced.

Teachers and child care workers have had to face the pandemic all the way through. In this particular wave, and I will speak to my own experience in Manitoba, they were having the challenges of remote learning and are now having to deal with full classrooms and students and colleagues who are getting sick, or they are getting sick themselves.

Grocery store workers are putting themselves at risk once again. As my colleague from Windsor West has rightly pointed out, some of the big grocery chains said that when another wave came they would bring back hero pay to recognize the risks workers are taking in order to help Canadians, but they have not stepped up to reinstitute that pay.

All of these things together are leading to a lot of outrage, and I am going to talk a bit about some of the things I find particularly outrageous today and that inform my work.

I am outraged when I get emails, as I did today, about another senior who has lost their life, not because of the pandemic directly but because they took the government at its word when it said it would be there to have their backs, would support them through the pandemic and told them to apply for help when they lost their job. They did. They applied for CERB.

Because the government could not figure out its own rules, and that is probably the most charitable interpretation, or because it did not care, it decided to claw back those benefits that were supposed to be for working seniors in need through the guaranteed income supplement. Not only did the government do that and not catch it before it happened, but the government was advised at least as early as May of 2021 that it was happening and it chose to do nothing about it. The government chose to do nothing about it.

One could say that the government did nothing about it until it happened, except that it happened in July and it still did nothing about it. The Liberals called an election and did nothing about it. They came back from the election and did nothing about it. It took weeks of persistently raising this in the House of Commons to get an announcement, and that announcement did not solve the problem because that money still is not in the pockets of seniors who are in dire need.

The money is not in the pocket of the senior I heard about today, the senior with type 2 diabetes who could no longer afford the food and medication they needed to be healthy and passed away. I have an email open in front of me about a couple from Mississauga who are in dire straits. The two of them are trying to live on $1,300 a month because their GIS payments are gone.

The government says not to worry and that it has a solution with a one-time payment in May or June. There are already seniors who are no longer living and who cannot receive that payment, and there will be more by May or June. That outrages me. It outrages me on the substance of the matter, because Canada should do better. It outrages me because it breaks the promise the Prime Minister made to people in this country that the government would be there for them.

Instead, on a principle of bureaucracy, the Liberals are not, because they could not figure out their internal systems, or they did not have the right lists or they were not sure about this or maybe needed to do that. This is after just proving to the country that when the political will exists they can roll out a program to millions of Canadians almost overnight.

Liberals expect us to believe that, for those seniors who were already receiving money from the government, already on a list, already in a system where we were paying them, they cannot find a way to get money into those seniors' hands so that they are not dying in the cold. It is not believable and it is shameful.

I am outraged about that. I am proud that people in Elmwood—Transcona sent me here to relay that message to the government. I am going to keep doing that until that money gets into the hands of seniors who can then get back into their homes and out of the jeopardy they are in because the government cannot be bothered to take on its own bureaucracy, which is telling it something that needs to be done cannot be done, when we all know that is not true.

That outrages me.

I am outraged that people during the pandemic were dying in personal care homes because of years of cuts, at the federal and provincial level, to health care. We know our system has been under-resourced. Those cuts did not come because Canada could not afford to do those things. Over the years that those cuts came to our health care system, the corporate tax rate in Canada went down from 28% to just 15%. That is a huge decrease. That is almost a 50% tax cut to the largest corporations in Canada, while our government was telling us it could not afford to pay its fair share of health care to the provinces.

That is shameful.

What is more shameful still is that we are two years into this pandemic and there has hardly been a long-term care centre in Winnipeg that has not had a COVID-19 outbreak. There has been no work done by the federal government to convene the provinces to talk about better national standards and funding those standards.

I am not talking about the federal government telling the provinces what to do. I am talking about convening them so they can talk about best practices, so that every Canadian can benefit from the best things our provincial governments are doing to serve Canadians in long-term care, and then ensuring the federal government is at the table to help resource those things.

That was the power of—

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Chris d'Entremont]

I am sorry to interrupt. Would the hon. member be able to move the microphone up? Interpretation is having a hard time. There is a lot of popping coming off of the microphone.

[Daniel Blaikie, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I suspect that may have something to do with the shouting, but I did say I was outraged and I suppose that has some technical consequences.

Here we are. We are two years into the pandemic. We have not made significant progress on long-term care. It is not like the experts that have been advising governments on how to handle the pandemic were caught off guard that there was another wave of the pandemic. Even early on, they were saying there would be probably at least four waves. We know that these are problems that need to get fixed, even if somehow magically the pandemic were to end tomorrow. We hear certain members in the House, even today, suggesting that somehow the pandemic is a function of public health restrictions or something. If we end the public health restrictions, we do not end the pandemic. I wish that were true, but we are fighting a virus. We are not fighting each other. We need to bear that in mind.

The way to get through this is with a lot of care and resources to be sure. As we were cutting those taxes for big corporations and telling people that we could not fund the health care that they needed, that was also being done by a lot of governments provincially. We are seeing it in Manitoba, Alberta and around the country because we have people in the government who do not believe in public health care in the first place and would rather see it privatized and would rather give tax cuts to big corporations instead of ponying up the funding that we know is necessary to have proper health care.

I am outraged at the Liberal Party, which promised as long ago as 1997, and the government has said again and again until their most recent Speech from the Throne, that they were going to make progress on pharmacare. Why am l mad about that? It is because I understand that people are really getting hit hard in the pocketbook with the inflation that is happening. I know there is no magic wand in the desk of government and some of the factors driving inflation right now are beyond their control. However, what is in their control? They could certainly help with the cost of prescription drugs because a national pharmacare program would do that. It would save money. It actually costs less to have such a program than Canadians are spending right now on prescription drugs.

We are going back a couple of years now to the PBO study, but the PBO was very clear. Right now Canadians are spending about $24 billion a year on prescription drugs with the many provincial systems that we have and the many private plans. One national system would cost about $20 billion a year. That is a way to save money and serve people better and help bring down some of those costs that are making things so hard for Canadians right now. It is something the government absolutely needs to do and would help.

The NDP has long proposed taking on telecom companies. Canadians are paying among the highest rates for cellphone and Internet. That is not a luxury anymore. It is not a “nice to have”. If people want to participate in the labour market, good luck finding a job and keeping a job if they do not have access to the Internet or to a cellphone. That is something that the government could do. It could take a regulatory approach to bringing down prices and making sure that, at the very least, there is a genuinely affordable plan for basic access to something as important as cellphone and Internet rates.

What is in Bill C-8? There is nothing particularly offensive, but not a lot of the things that we really need. I think that is the dilemma. Certainly there are many Canadians who are frustrated, in this time of real difficulty and real challenge with the pandemic but also with, for many of us, a real looming sense of challenge when we look at what is happening to the planet and all the extreme weather events and we look at the economic disruption and the displacement of people that it is going to cause, that we are just not rising to the occasion. Yes, absolutely we should be helping businesses improve their ventilation systems. That is the right thing to do in the context of the pandemic and these measures make sense as a way of contributing to that.

We ought to be helping schools improve their ventilation systems. It is not a real answer to reimburse teachers for some of what they are paying out of pocket, because I do not think teachers should have to pay out of pocket. Until we have governments that are willing to fund education to the extent that it needs to be, so that every student has what they need, I am thankful to teachers who are willing to go above and beyond, and I am willing to support a measure that gives them a little relief for doing things out of compassion for their students that they really should not have to do because that is a compassion that we should have collectively. We should work collectively to fund the things that students need, instead of leaving it to their teachers on an individual basis.

I am glad in principle that the government is looking at having some kind of tax for underused housing. However, I think it will be important to interrogate that seriously at committee, because initial analyses suggest that there are loopholes that we could drive trucks through in this legislation. There is a lot more we need to do to tackle the problems of the housing market, some things the Liberals themselves promised in the last election, like banning blind bidding. That was a platform commitment of the Liberal Party.

Why is that not here? What could they possibly be waiting for? Are house prices not high enough? Do they need to escalate faster for the Liberals to make good on their own election commitments? Give me a break. That stuff should at least be here.

We also know that we need a serious plan, not the national housing strategy they love to tout, because it is inadequate. We need to get more real units, and I am not talking about so-called affordable housing, which has a technical definition that really just means “high rent” for most people, rent they cannot afford.

We need to build housing with rent geared to income, and we need to explore non-market options, like co-ops and other things like it, so that we take the speculation out of enough of the housing market that people really can access housing. That would also help relieve cost pressures among people for whom home ownership is a real goal. It would be a larger group if prices came down, as it was not that long ago. That would help them out too by relieving demand in the housing market and helping to lower prices overall.

These are things that we really need to be doing. I look forward to having an intensive study at committee of this new proposed underused housing act. I think that is a good piece of parliamentary work. However, we are kidding ourselves if we think it is really going to change the fundamental trajectory of the Canadian housing market, not just in the last two years, as the Conservatives would have us believe, but over the last 20 years, during which prices have been going up consistently because we have had federal governments that, since the mid-nineties, have not come to the table with enough funding to build enough non-market housing to relieve serious pressure on the market. That absolutely needs to happen.

There is more money proposed for things we need, particularly rapid tests, and we are quite supportive of that. There are some questions, though. I did ask the Associate Minister of Finance about this earlier, and I was somewhat dismayed that he did not have an answer. In Bill C-8 there are proposals for money for rapid tests, and in a stand-alone bill, Bill C-10, the government proposed to spend money on rapid tests. Bill C-8 asks for $1.72 billion for rapid tests and Bill C-10 asks for $2.5 billion for rapid tests, and the Associate Minister of Finance and the government could not give a clear answer to whether it is asking for $4.2 billion combined, the $2.5 billion in Bill C-10 or the $1.7 billion in Bill C-8.

I think Canadians should know, and I think Parliament should expect to have some reliable reporting on those numbers as we go, because as we know, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, not that long ago, said the government, when it came to tabling its public accounts, was considerably late and was an outlier among other G7 countries. I think the government really needs to get with the program. There has been a need for a considerable amount of public spending, but the fact that we need to spend is not a reason not to report well on what the money is being spent on and not to do it in a timely way. In fact, it becomes that much more important that the government reports well and in a timely fashion on its spending when so much money is going out the door and so quickly. There are certainly things to talk about in that regard.

Suffice it to say, while I am not impressed by the extent to which many of the things we need to do to rise to the moment are not in here, whether they are in facing the pandemic or the climate challenge, I am not of the view that this is a reason for things not to proceed. However, I really think the government needs to figure out how to rise to the occasion and move forward with a sense of urgency, particularly, to reiterate it one more time, the extent to which is has to internalize the sense of urgency required when it comes to seniors who have had their benefits clawed back by the government. They are not just losing income; they are also losing access to provincial programs in many cases. They were part of their support network and kept them housed, fed and alive. All of that has been called into jeopardy because of the government's refusal to act swiftly in May of last year when it knew that this was going to be a problem. This is something the government absolutely has to act on with urgency.

It also has to address all the people who are still out of work because of the pandemic. Let us not kid ourselves. We all know somebody, at least one person if not more, who is struggling to get back to the job they had or to get enough hours in a new job and who cannot support their family. The 40% cut to pandemic benefits was bad enough, going from $500 a week to $300 a week, but in addition to that, with the Canada worker lockdown benefit, the government made it way harder for people to access help. My office is hearing from people in Elmwood—Transcona and from people across the country who are trying to access this benefit at a time of incredible need and cannot access it. They are being told that it should take a matter of days for a response, but they have waited weeks and still have not gotten a response. The government had a system that was providing income support for a lot of people, and when it ended, the government was still providing support to about 900,000 people. What it was replaced with is not adequate to the task, both in terms of how much it delivers and in terms of the criteria that people have to navigate to access it.

As I said, Bill C-8 can certainly go to committee and there are things worth looking at, but this is not the kind of leadership we need at the moment. The government has to do more to rise to the occasion. I will continue to be here, as will my New Democratic colleagues, to press the government to rise to the occasion.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I disagree with the overall assessment the member made when he talked about seniors. As a politician for over 30 years, I have witnessed many years of NDP governments at the provincial level in Manitoba and many years of Progressive Conservative governments, and I can tell the member that in the last five or six years, since the Prime Minister, his cabinet and my colleagues have been at work, we have done more to support seniors in real, tangible ways.

The member talked about corporate tax breaks. I would like to remind him that there were maybe six corporate tax breaks from the NDP in the Province in Manitoba while there was a need for funding in long-term care, which was the total responsibility of the NDP provincial government.

Does the member see any hypocrisy there? Would he not recognize that as a government we have been very progressive in providing for and being there for our seniors, because it is the right thing to do?