Ben Lobb

[Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2022, November 21st, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise in the House of Commons, especially to speak to financial bills.

I always think back, whenever I get an opportunity to speak in the House on a financial bill, to what our old friend Jim Flaherty must think of a bill such as this. I think he would have a wry little grin and probably think that it did not quite come up to the measure of what he would be able to do, perhaps.

I also think about Milton Friedman, the father of modern economics in many ways, and what he would say about inflation, because if members go to Santa Claus parades or events in their communities, what are people going to be talking about? They are going to be talking about the economy, inflation, the carbon tax and some world events. Milton Friedman has been dead a long time, but as he said, inflation is “too much money chasing too few goods”. He also said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”

The Liberal government has said many times, and has passed the hat on excuses for inflation, but it has kind of settled at its last chance to say that inflation is a global phenomenon and we had no chance. However, if we look at the G7 and G20 countries, they all spent; they mega spent. They spent huge percentages of their entire economy, so if everybody is spending that much, we just need to look at what Mr. Friedman said so many years ago. It is quite simple.

I will give the Liberals credit for one thing. Somebody in here slipped a line into the foreword that says, “But we cannot support every single Canadian in the way we did with emergency measures at the height of the pandemic.” The government was spending a lot of money, and some of it very valid. It continues with, “To do so would force the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates even higher.” Here the Liberals are admitting in one line that they cannot do it all for everybody because it would raise spending too much, and on the second line they are saying they would have to raise interest rates to fight the impending spending inflation that would be caused.

“It would make life more expensive, for everyone, for longer. So as the central bank fights inflation, we will not make its job harder.” Well, that would be the first time in seven years the Liberals have made that decision.

I know other members have talked about public debt. To service the debt, the interest we would pay, and members have heard the numbers already, is $24.5 billion this year, $34.7 billion next year and $43 billion in 2023-24. Now, we are not in a debt spiral like the one some of the countries are heading towards yet, but that is a concern.

In the notations in the fall economic update, there is 425 billion dollars' worth of T-bills and bonds that will have to be sent out to the market in the upcoming fiscal year. Now, that is a lot of money to put out into the market and ask people to buy the T-bills, etc. One huge concern out there is if there are no bids, and we have seen that happen in other countries where there are no bids on government debt. I think there probably will be, but that is an awful lot of money to put out in one year, which is a little surprising.

I still have Bill Morneau's first budget from 2016. He had that nice book, which is in my office. I looked at it before I came over here. The Liberals inherited a balanced budget from the Conservatives in 2015, which is a fact. I will also mention that the inflation rate in October 2015 was 1%. There was a balanced budget and 1% inflation. The debt when Bill Morneau was the finance minister was $1 billion. It was $1 billion for Bill Morneau. Under this finance minister seven years later, it was $1 trillion, and now the number is $1.8 trillion. That is $800 billion in seven years, which is a lot of spending. It takes an Olympic effort to spend that much money in that period of time.

The net debt is $1.2 trillion. That is what they always hang their hat on, the net debt-to-GDP. The issue that I think most of us would like to bring up, and I am welcome to be corrected if I am wrong here, is that a lot of the assets, about two-thirds of the assets that the government lists, is CPP and QPP. It is really not even a government asset, if we think about it. It is kind of a dotted line to an asset. Really, if we took out the CPP and the QPP, the net debt would be a lot bigger. I think what I saw on a report was that we would not be number one, in terms of dept-to-GDP. We would be more like four or five, in terms of debt-to-GDP.

These are just some clouds on the horizon. If we do not take care of our fiscal house, we are going to have some long-term issues.

The economic report also talks about what happens if things are not as rosy as presented. That is when it gets really concerning. From now until 2027, believe it or not, the best-case scenario is that we are going to add another $200 billion to our debt. The worst-case scenario is that it is 50% worse, and we are going to add $300 billion to our net debt. I think that is a concern because, next year, the worst-case scenario is a $50-billion deficit.

We keep adding these on, piling these on, and I think a lot of people are looking at this and they are saying, “What am I getting for my money?” A lot of people, in my area, if they are going on a vacation now, if they are lucky enough to be able to afford one, do their level best to avoid Pearson airport. They will try Hamilton. They will try somewhere else, like Kitchener. They do not want the hassles of the Pearson airport.

I think to myself, here we are in one of the wealthiest nations in the world. We should have the best: the best ports, best airports, best infrastructure and best government service. If we want a passport, it should almost be next-day service. Everything is a mess.

Look at immigration. Look at how many unfilled positions there are in our country. Our office is inundated with people who are at the end of their ropes with trying to get somebody to come and work in their businesses. It is just one mistake from immigration, another one and another one. We would like to bring these hard-working people in and let them really put our economy to work.

If we went around and we asked parents what some of their issues are, what some pinch problems in their finances are, health care might be one of them. It is maybe not a financial one, but certainly there are concerns regarding emergency rooms. I am sure that everybody in here who has a kid or an elderly parent knows that it is hours upon hours if we have to go to the emergency room. We have shortages in every position in health care. It would have been great to see a better plan from the government to really deliver an improvement to our health outcomes.

Even the $10-a-day day care business, I have a bit of an issue with that. According to Statistics Canada, there are about 660,000 Canadian families that do not use the government-run day cares. They receive nothing. They do not get $10-a-day day care, so almost half of the kids out there do not get that. Once we are in Ontario, say, for example, when one is in JK, at four years old, parents probably need the extended day program. That is $28 a kid every day. If one had two kids, that can be hundreds and thousands every month.

Yes, if one is lucky enough to get one of those spots in a licensed day care, one is going to pay $10 a day, but the other problem is that, in Ontario, we almost have a deficit of 100,000 ECE workers, day care workers. In the future, this increase to $10 a day is really zero if we do not have the staff to fill the jobs.

There is a lot here. I am sorry if I sound like I am being pretty critical here today, but there is plenty of material to be critical of. That is our job over here. The Liberals will tell us how great they are, and it is our job to point out some of their shortcomings.

The last point I have is on clean tech, hydrogen and critical minerals. I think we would find a lot of commonality, potentially, on all sides. One of the issues we have is that we can never get any of these projects done. To do these projects takes years if not tens of millions of dollars.

With that, I thank the House for the time and I will take my questions.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, November 14th, 2022]

With regard to the government's COVIDAlert and ArriveCAN applications: (a) were the applications written using open source code, and, if not, why not; and (b) what is the code or the URL of the code for each application?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, November 14th, 2022]

With regard to the government's ArriveCAN application: (a) what specific data is collected through the application; (b) what departments, agencies, government organizations, or third parties have access to or receive the data, any subset of the data, including anonymized data and any data transferred at a later date; (c) broken down by each entity in (b), (i) what type of data is shared, (ii) is the data anonymized, (iii) what is the data used for, (iv) what is the number of travellers data available to the entity; (d) where is the ArriveCAN data stored; and (e) where does each entity that has access to or receives the data store their data?

[Government Spending, November 2nd, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, when the Liberals spend, it is Canadians who pay. Hard-working Canadians pay through crushing inflation when they are buying groceries, filling up their vehicles and heating their homes. The Liberals have added more to Canada's debt in seven years than all the other governments combined in its 150 plus years of history.

With all this Liberal spending, is our country further ahead? No, it is not. It seems everything the Liberals are responsible for is broken. Instead of investing, the Liberals have wasted Canadians' hard-earned dollars. For example, they spent $54 million on the ArriveCAN app, which should have cost $250,000.

The next time someone goes in for an overtime shift or to work an extra shift on the weekend, or the next time someone feels like they are working seven days a week to get ahead, I want them to remember one thing: Canadians deserve better. They deserve a government that will cut government waste and respect our hard-earned taxpayer dollars.

[Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2., October 27th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, let us not create more bureaucracy. Let us not create red tape. Let us not create more chaos on people figuring out how this all works. We already have a delivery mechanism. It is through the provinces. In the province of Nova Scotia, for those who are 14 and under, regardless of income, they get their dental. It is an X-ray, a cleaning, a checkup for kids and their cavities filled. That would have been a great place to start from coast to coast to coast, and from sea to shining sea. That would have been fair. That would have been equitable.

[Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2., October 27th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, it would support kids, but the point is that the Liberals and the New Democrats are calling this “dental care”, but it is a dental subsidy. If they truly wanted to do dental care, they had plenty of time. The Liberals have been in government for seven years, and the NDP has been propping them up for many of those years. They have had years to put this together and years for consultation, and they have not.

Members can look through the press releases to find out where a federal-provincial health ministers' meeting took place with substantive discussion on dental care, the funding of dental care and best practices in dental care. They will not find it.

[Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2., October 27th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I would argue that from the NDP's point of view, this is a windfall. The government has received a windfall in the form of its increased tax collection because of inflation and oil and gas record profits, to be able to put into the government taxes. Let us think about what it would be if it were not. We would have a deficit that is double, triple or quadruple what it is today. Therefore, the coalition members should be happy about where they sit today, but the taxpayers in this country should not be happy.

[Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2., October 27th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, it is great the member recognized it was 1%. The biggest difference is that we did not have the money printer on full speed. The Liberals have the money printer on full speed. We do not and we did not have it on full speed. The budget was balanced in 2015. If we are debating a balanced budget in 2015 with the Liberals' Bill C-31, we know they are taking on a lot of water with their bill here today.

[Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2., October 27th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today.

We are here talking about Bill C-31 and I thought, because it has to do with the inflation issues in Canada, I would quote the famous economist Milton Friedman. He was not a Canadian economist. Nonetheless, he was a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

This is what he had to say about inflation. He has been dead for years, but obviously this rings true today. He said, “There is one and only one basic cause of inflation: too high a rate of growth in the quantity of money—too much money chasing the available supply of goods and services.” That quote is from approximately 50 years ago, and it was as true then as it is today.

Another thing he said was that people learn and governments never learn. I think that is also true today.

If we look at what is happening in Canada with the M2 money supply and how it has continued to increase, based on the numbers I have, it has increased a lot in the last two and a half years. However, if we look at where it peaked, which my numbers say was in July, that is also roughly the time when inflation peaked in Canada, which was in June, at 8.1%. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the comments economist Friedman made many years ago ring as true today. They are evidence-based here in this country. There is only one place where inflation starts, which is with the government and the money tree, the printing of money.

Former finance minister Bill Morneau and the current finance minister, in my opinion, have very little credibility on where the cause of inflation started and even less credibility on how it should and shall be fixed. Let me go through some excuses that have been proposed in the last year alone.

In September and October of 2021, it was, “Don't worry, folks. Inflation is transitory.” Do members remember that?

I can hear a child crying in the gallery because she just found out how much she will be paying for her fair share of the debt.

In November, it was because of greedy corporations. Do members remember that? It was then said, in December, that it was because of supply chain bottlenecks. In February, the blame was laid on the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the spiking of gas and oil prices. At the end of the day, the root cause of the inflation in this country can be laid at the feet of the finance ministers and the Governor of the Bank of Canada.

Another point of reference and data on inflation is from October 2015. There was a Conservative balanced budget and the inflation rate in Canada was 1%, further proving our point that fiscal policy directly impacts the inflation rate. In October of 2015, with the Conservative balanced budget, which was the last time we saw a balanced budget, the inflation rate was 1%, but today spending is out of control and inflation is over 7% or 8%.

If we went up and down the country roads and main streets to ask people where their biggest point of pain is right now with respect to inflation, almost 100% would say that it is the costs of heating their homes, paying their electricity bills, keeping their vehicles on the road, and putting groceries in their cupboards and fridges to feed their kids or family.

I am not saying these other things are not important, because they are, but if we were to ask people today what the most important things are, it does not matter what political party we are from, the people we represent are probably going to tell us that. We heard it today, and I am glad it was brought up because it has to do with consultation.

The idea of this bill goes back a long way. Jack Harris had a motion similar to this in the previous Parliament, Motion No. 62. That was my old buddy Jack.

With this particular bill on dental, it is obvious there have been no consultations. When the minister made the announcement, it was not with provincial health ministers. It was not with premiers to say look what we have done together. This was a direct cash payment support to keep the government of the day in government.

It would have been great to have a consultation with the provinces, health care professionals and dentists to ask what the benchmark is. I know our Deputy Speaker is from Nova Scotia, and there is a good possibility that Nova Scotia has one of the best dental care programs in the country.

In Ontario, the province I represent, it is the healthy smiles program. On average, the Nova Scotia plan is enhanced from what Ontario has. It would have been great for everybody to get together to say that Nova Scotia has a great plan. Maybe we would need to put it in over a number of years, but let us have it all hammered out and have a five-year plan or a 10-year plan to make it happen.

What we are looking at today, we can call it dental care, but it is not dental care. This is not a form of dental care. The provincial programs, I would argue, are a form of dental care. We can argue if they are good, bad or need enhancing, but they truly are forms of dental care. What we are seeing today is a direct payment to people to help pay for a dental bill.

If we went around the countryside and asked people what their number one priority is for health care, I do not believe dentistry would be in the top two or three answers, depending on who we asked. If we ask families what the number priority is, they would say not having a family doctor. That is probably the number on problem. If people are sick, they have no place to go other than the emergency room, and they have no doctor who has a reference of their medical history.

I just mentioned the emergency room. In the hospitals in the area I represent, their emergency rooms are closing at night or are completely closing. For many members of Parliament, it is just like it is in Huron—Bruce. If we asked the people in my communities, such as Clinton, Walkerton or Seaforth, what is more important, and they would say it is all important, but this is probably the most important thing for them: They do not want to wait 12 hours for a kid to be seen by a doctor to find out what is wrong with them. People who are parents have probably had that experience before. There are a lot of issues.

We can think about how the times have changed just in the last seven years. I heard an anecdote today on the television. It was someone saying that they used to worry about if they could get a parking space downtown. Now they are worried that, if they go downtown and park, they are going to get stabbed in the back by somebody and get robbed. This is all in just seven years. I do not completely blame the Liberals, obviously, on that one, but that is what people are thinking.

What I would say on the rental issue is that I am in a rural area. I know, Mr. Speaker, you are from a rural area. We have huge affordable housing needs in our ridings, along with many others. The dollars that are offered in this rental program will help, but if we are really looking at what can make a difference in the country and make a difference in rural communities, we should give that money to the provinces and let the provinces work with the counties and municipalities to build long-term affordable housing. That would have been a far better use for it. Mayors In Saugeen Shores, Kincardine, Goderich, Exeter and Clinton, in my area, would have been well-served by commitments for affordable housing.

[Taxation, October 4th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, because of the Liberal government's failed economic policies, the Canadian dream of owning a home, putting kids in sports and taking a modest family vacation is impossible. At a time when Canadians need some help, what do the Liberals do? They triple the carbon tax.

Will the Liberals cancel their plans to triple the tax on gas, groceries and home heating and give hard-working Canadian families some hope?