Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on yet another Conservative omnibus budget bill.
Like its predecessors, Bill C-60 includes a wide variety of complex measures, such as changes to the temporary foreign worker program, changes to the Investment Canada Act and the merger of DFAIT and CIDA. Each of these alone is an important issue and an important measure that deserves thorough consideration and scrutiny, both here in Ottawa and in communities across the country. People would like to understand exactly what is being proposed.
This is the Conservatives' third attempt to evade parliamentary scrutiny on their job-killing agenda by packing the bill full of unrelated measures into one big bill and trying to push it through Parliament. That is no way to show leadership in a democracy.
I rise today to speak to yet another Conservative omnibus bill. Like its predecessors, Bill C-60 includes a large variety of complex measures—from changes to the temporary foreign worker program and the Investment Canada Act to the merger of DFAIT and CIDA. These are important issues that deserve thorough consideration and scrutiny, both here in Ottawa and in our communities from coast to coast to coast.
This is the Conservatives' third attempt to evade parliamentary scrutiny on their job-killing agenda by packing dozens of unrelated measures into one bill and ramming it through Parliament.
The Conservatives are trying to tell Canadians to move along because there is nothing to see in Bill C-60. In a way, they are right. It is true. There is no job creation strategy, nothing to make life more affordable and nothing to strengthen the services that Canadian families rely on.
Following the 2008 economic crisis, the Minister of Finance begrudgingly ramped up infrastructure investment. He was forced to do it by the opposition. Now he is cutting billions of dollars in infrastructure investments to communities across Canada. These cuts will cost tens of thousands of jobs in cities and communities right across this country. Cuts to services, coupled with tax hikes on thousands of products that Canadians need, will serve as a double whammy to Canadian families. These are families, certainly in my community, like communities across Canada, who are already far too stretched and struggling to make ends meet.
The Conservatives claim to be good fiscal managers—we will set aside the fact that they just lost over $3 billion of our tax dollars—but there are other facts that speak to the contrary. The Minister of Finance missed his economic growth target for 2012 by 35%. He has presided over a record $67 billion trade deficit, and now private sector economists are telling us that this year will be even worse.
It is clear the Conservative economic agenda is not what Canada needs. Perhaps the most ironic part of the Conservatives' reckless cutting is that the Parliamentary Budget Officer has clearly demonstrated that the cuts in budget 2013 are just not necessary for Canada to return to a structural budget surplus. In other words, all this pain is not needed.
The PBO has pointed out that what budget 2013 is really about is eliminating thousands of jobs, cutting direct program spending and weakening GDP growth. This is not what leadership looks like, and what a time for leadership to go missing in action here in Canada.
A recent article in The Economist, entitled “Canada's economy: On thinning ice” warns:
—consumers are showing signs of flagging. The economy is set to expand by a paltry 1.6% this year. So the authorities are casting around for another source of growth. The trouble is they cannot seem to find one.
The article in The Economist goes on to say:
Jim Flaherty, Canada's finance minister, has repeatedly warned of the threat household debt poses to the economy. Yet in his budget on March 21st, [the finance minister] did little to encourage business investment or exports to take the place of consumers in supporting growth. Rather, his focus was on eliminating the federal deficit—currently at 1.4% of GDP, low compared with most G7 economies—before the next general election in 2015. His plan, which relies on spending restraint and unusually high revenue growth, is seen by many as wishful thinking. So the Canadian consumer remains the main hope for the economy. It is an odd situation where both government and business have decided to be excessively prudent in their spending, but are hoping that consumers will not follow suit just yet.
Despite these risks to our economy, the Conservatives insist on pushing stubbornly ahead with their austerity agenda, and they are crossing their fingers that Canadians, who already have a record 167% household debt, are going to keep spending. It has become clear that the minister's timetable for deficit reduction has little to do with external reality. A growing number of bank economists, including Craig Alexander and Don Drummond, agree that the government is fixated on eliminating the deficit ahead of the next federal election, but that it is not needed; it could wait a year.
Following a pre-budget meeting with the finance minister, BMO's chief economist, Doug Porter, told reporters, “It probably would be unwise for the federal government to step on the brake further than it already has”. In other words, there is no need for more austerity. There is growing consensus from the IMF to participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos that austerity is not the way to go. In fact, it is making problems worse.
In March, Carol Goar of the Toronto Star wrote of the finance minister's austerity agenda:
Since he began chopping programs and expenditures, the economy has drooped, the job market has sagged, consumers have pulled back and the corporate sector has hunkered down, sitting on its earnings. The same formula has delivered worse results in Europe.
In fact, an IMF report released in January estimated that in the European case, every dollar in government spending cuts would cost $1.50 in lost output. This past week, the hand-picked interim Parliamentary Budget Officer, put in place by the government, confirmed that the overall impact of budget 2012, fiscal update 2012 and budget 2013, will be a loss of 67,000 jobs by 2017 and a 0.7% reduction in GDP. This is at a time when our economy is only expected to grow by 1.5% annually. In other words, the economy is barely growing at all. This is an additional significant drag on our country's economic growth.
Despite what the Conservatives claim, their plan is actually holding back the Canadian economy, instead of accelerating it. What is worse is that they have failed to outline any contingency plan to deal with slowing growth and increasingly negative fiscal indicators. Instead, they are stubbornly moving ahead with austerity measures despite warnings from economists about the consequences.
Right now, at any given time, there are more than six Canadians looking for work for every job that is available. Statistics Canada figures recently released showed that the number of vacant jobs has fallen to the lowest level since record keeping began in March 2011. Our youth unemployment rate is double the national rate. TD Economics has said that the spike in youth unemployment from the recent recession will cost our economy $10.7 billion over the next years alone.
These are young people whose futures are on the line. They are people just starting out and trying to get a toehold in our economy. Young people should be full of optimism and willing to take chances at the beginning of their adult life. However, too often they are saddled with debt, they are saddled with very limited or no job prospects, and they are saddled with a tremendous amount of insecurity and huge costs.
Our aboriginal population is growing faster than any other group in Canada, yet this vibrant young population faces significant barriers to economic participation and development, including chronic underfunding of education at all levels.
Budget 2013 presented an important opportunity for the government to put forward real solutions. Unfortunately for Canadians, the only job creation strategy the Conservatives have is for temporary foreign workers and some parliamentary secretaries.
The Conservatives like to crow about their 900,000 net new jobs, but what kind of jobs and for whom? Too many are temporary. Too many are insecure. Too many are held by temporary foreign workers instead of Canadians.
Nearly 1.4 million Canadians are still unemployed. There are still 240,000 more young people unemployed today than before the recession. The Conservatives can clap on the other side about this situation, but it is a national tragedy that they are turning their backs on Canada's youth and all of Canada's unemployed.
At a time when families are struggling to make ends meet, hundreds of thousands of Canadians are in part-time and precarious work when they would rather have full-time permanent jobs. In fact, a recent report by the United Way in Toronto and McMaster University has shown that 50%, fully half, of the workers in the GTA and Hamilton regions are in this kind of precarious work. It means a day-to-day struggle against insecurity and uncertainty.
For those Canadians who do have employment, wages have stagnated. In fact, in the 25 years between 1981 and 2006, including one of the most prosperous periods since the 1950s, workers' wages across Canada fell sharply behind. While Canada's real GDP per capita grew by 51%, average real weekly earnings did not increase. In other words, workers are being left behind.
At the same time, the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada has doubled in the past six years and tripled in the last decade. As Gil McGowan, the president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, notes:
The bottom line is that Canadians are being displaced by temporary foreign workers, wages are being suppressed and employers are being allowed to abdicate their responsibility for training Canadians.
Professor Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa agrees:
Flooding the market with workers from elsewhere year in and year out—even during a major recession—is not about an acute labour shortage. It is nothing more than a wage subsidy to low-paying firms, a subsidy that stunts the reallocation of goods, capital and labour that is the basis for efficient markets.
What is the government's response?
Just yesterday Barrie McKenna of The Globe and Mail wrote: “... the federal government is now belatedly acknowledging that two of its signature workplace programs may be making the country's employment landscape worse, not better.”
Belatedly, indeed. After years of mismanagement, the Conservatives are proposing to fix major flaws by giving the minister an override power when work permits and labour market opinions approved by government become political hot potatoes.
This is a band-aid solution that does not get to the heart of this government's mismanagement of the TFW program.
In the meantime, not only are the Conservatives failing to create jobs, but they are continuing their attacks on Canadian workers.
Bill C-60 gives the Treasury Board sweeping powers to interfere in free collective bargaining and impose employment conditions on non-union employees at crown corporations.
With an enduring jobs crisis and cash-strapped households, where do the Conservatives expect Canada's growth to come from?
In a National Post op ed, economist Armine Yalnizyan writes about household debt in Canada:
Yes, many goods are cheaper than they were a generation ago. But the list does not include higher education and home ownership, both of which lead to greater economic security.
For many people, these two items are increasingly out of reach.
Those costs have zoomed past most people's income growth. Increasingly, Canadians have been pursuing these two dreams with ever-growing piles of debt. You don't need to work at the Bank of Canada to know that current levels of household debt offer a precarious foundation for sustained growth.
No matter your political leanings, most people understand that endless concentration of income, wealth and power is bad for the economy. After all, businesses rely on rising purchasing power of the many, not the few, to deliver growth and profits.
In 2001, a study by the International Monetary Fund found that:
...when growth is looked at over the long term, the trade-off between efficiency and equality may not exist. In fact, equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth.
This comes at a time when inequality is rising in Canada.
Budget 2013 does nothing to address the record levels of household debt or the rise in inequality. Instead the Conservative government has remained focused on an austerity agenda that has made major cuts to the services families rely on.
Putting people to work is clearly the best way to reduce our deficit. There is no need to reinvent or to privatize public services, no need to trample on economic and labour rights, no need to sacrifice equality in the name of efficiency.
New Democrats know that investing in education and infrastructure, making life more affordable and supporting our small and medium-sized businesses in creating high-quality, high-paying jobs is the real solution to our deficit.
Canadians are counting on us to provide leadership and to bring forward ideas and proposals that put the public interest first. New Democrats have tried to make this point time and time again. The Conservatives just do not seem to be getting it, so let me be clear: we do not want a budget that pushes aside the concerns of first nations groups and pushes stubbornly ahead without real consultation.
We do not want a budget that attempts to balance the books by downloading costs onto struggling families, provinces and municipalities.
We do not want a budget that fails to account for the long term and leaves the next generation further behind than the last.
We do not want a budget that fails to move Canada forward in a 21st century economy and leaves a huge environmental debt for our children and grandchildren.
We do not want a budget that not only ignores the concerns of Canadians but will also actually make it harder for families to make ends meet.
New Democrats will continue to stand up and hold the government accountable in the interest of all Canadians. We do not support the Conservative budget of 2013 or its implementation bills unless they are revised to address the real priorities of Canadian families and unless the government starts providing real leadership for this country.
With that, I seek unanimous consent to move the following motion: that notwithstanding any order or usual practice of the House, that Bill C-60, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 21, 2013 and other measures, be amended by removing the following clauses: (a) clauses 136 to 154, related to the Investment Canada Act; (b) clauses 161 to 166, related to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the temporary foreign worker program; (c) clauses 174 to 199, related to the proposed department of foreign affairs, trade and development act; (d) clauses 213 to 224, related to the National Capital Act and the Department of Canadian Heritage Act; (e) clauses 228 to 232, related to the Financial Administration Act and collective bargaining between crown corporations and their employees;
that the clauses mentioned in section (a) of this motion do form Bill C-61; that Bill C-61 be deemed read a first time and be printed; that the order for second reading of the said bill provide for the referral to the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology; that the clauses mentioned in section (b) of this motion do form Bill C-62; that Bill C-62 be deemed read a first time and be printed; that the order for second reading of the said bill provide for the referral to the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities; that the clauses mentioned in section (c) of this motion do form Bill C-63; that Bill C-63 be deemed read a first time and be printed; that the order for second reading of the said bill provide for the referral to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (FAAE);
that the clauses mentioned in section (d) of this motion do compose Bill C-64, that Bill C-64 be deemed read a first time and be printed, and that the order for second reading of the said bill provide for the referral to the Standing Committee on Heritage; that the clauses mentioned in section (e) of this motion do compose Bill C-65, that Bill C-65 be deemed read a first time and be printed, and that the order for the second reading of the said bill provide for the referral to the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates; that Bill C-60 retain the status on the order paper that it had prior to the adoption of this order and that Bill C-60 be reprinted as amended; and that the law clerk and the parliamentary counsel be authorized to make any technical changes or corrections as may be necessary to give effect to this motion.
In proposing this motion, we are attempting to allow for proper study of some very complex clauses of this bill, rather than have them all merge together in one large bill for study at the finance committee. We believe that the sections that pertain to industry should be studied at the industry committee, which can invite witnesses and actually hear testimony, and similarly for the foreign affairs committee, et cetera.
That is the rationale for introducing this motion.
