Bill C-13 (Historical)

COVID-19 Emergency Response Act

An Act respecting certain measures in response to COVID-19

Part 1 implements, as part of the response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), certain income tax measures by
(a) introducing a one-time additional payment under the GST/HST tax credit;
(b) providing temporary additional amounts under the Canada Child Benefit;
(c) reducing required minimal withdrawals from registered retirement income funds by 25% for 2020; and
(d) providing eligible small employers a temporary wage subsidy for a period of three months.
Part 2 enacts the Canada Emergency Response Benefit Act to authorize the making of income support payments to workers who suffer a loss of income for reasons related to the coronavirus disease 2019.
Part 3 enacts the Public Health Events of National Concern Payments Act, which authorizes payments to be made out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund in relation to public health events of national concern. It also provides for the repeal of the Act on September 30, 2020.
Part 4 amends the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation Act to allow the Minister of Finance to increase the deposit insurance coverage limit until September 30, 2020.
Part 5 amends the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation Act to authorize the Minister of Finance, with the approval of the Governor in Council, to make payments to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the purpose of increasing the Corporation’s capital.
Part 6 amends the Export Development Act to broaden the purposes for which Export Development Canada is established and to permit the Minister of Finance, until September 30, 2020, to determine the amount of Export Development Canada’s authorized capital as well as the amount of certain limits applicable to Export Development Canada. It broadens the transactions for which the Minister of International Trade, with the concurrence of the Minister of Finance, may grant an authorization. It also provides for the suspension of certain provisions of the Export Development Canada Exercise of Certain Powers Regulations.
Part 7 amends the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act to authorize additional payments to the provinces and territories for the fiscal year beginning on April 1, 2019.
Part 8 amends Part IV of the Financial Administration Act to authorize the Minister of Finance, until September 30, 2020, to borrow money under that Act for certain payments without the authorization of the Governor in Council, and it also amends that Part to extend the time for the tabling of the report on that Minister’s plans in relation to the management of the public debt. It also amends Part IV.‍1 of that Act to authorize that Minister to make payments to an entity and to procure the incorporation of a corporation or establish an entity, other than a corporation, for the purposes of promoting the stability or maintaining the efficiency of the financial system in Canada. Finally, it makes related amendments to the Borrowing Authority Act and a consequential amendment to the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation Act.
Part 9 amends the Food and Drugs Act to, among other things, authorize the Governor in Council to make regulations
(a) requiring persons to provide information to the Minister of Health; and
(b) preventing shortages of therapeutic products in Canada or alleviating those shortages or their effects, in order to protect human health.
Part 10 amends the Canada Labour Code to, among other things, create a regime which provides for a leave related to COVID-19 of up to 16 weeks. It also amends that Act to provide for the repeal of that regime and to provide for a quarantine leave under the medical leave regime.
Part 11 amends the National Housing Act to increase, for a period of five years, the maximum total for the outstanding insured amounts of all insured loans.
Part 12 amends the Patent Act to, among other things, provide that the Commissioner must, on the application of the Minister of Health, authorize the Government of Canada and any person specified in the application to make, construct, use and sell a patented invention to the extent necessary to respond to a public health emergency that is a matter of national concern.
Part 13 amends the Canada Student Loans Act to provide that, during the period that begins on March 30, 2020 and ends on September 30, 2020, no interest is payable by a borrower on a guaranteed student loan and no amount on account of principal or interest is required to be paid by the borrower.
Part 14 amends the Farm Credit Canada Act to authorize the Minister of Finance to determine the limit on the amounts that the Minister of Finance may pay to Farm Credit Canada out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
Part 15 amends the Canada Student Financial Assistance Act to provide that, during the period that begins on March 30, 2020 and ends on September 30, 2020, no interest is payable by a borrower on a student loan and no amount on account of principal or interest is required to be paid by the borrower.
Part 16 amends the Business Development Bank of Canada Act to authorize the Minister of Finance to determine the limit on the aggregate of the paid-in capital — and any related contributed surplus — of the Business Development Bank and any proceeds prescribed as equity.
Part 17 amends the Apprentice Loans Act to provide that, during the period that begins on March 30, 2020 and ends on September 30, 2020, no interest is payable by a borrower on an apprentice loan and no amount on account of principal or interest is required to be paid by a borrower.
Division 1 of Part 18 amends the Employment Insurance Act to give the Minister of Employment and Social Development the power to make interim orders for the purpose of mitigating the economic effects of COVID-19.
Division 2 of Part 18 provides that every reference in any provision of the Employment Insurance Act and of regulations made under it to a certificate issued by a medical doctor or other medical professional or medical practitioner or by a nurse practitioner is deemed to be of no effect and that any benefit that would have been payable to a claimant had such a certificate been issued is payable to the claimant if the Canada Employment Insurance Commission is satisfied that the claimant is entitled to the benefit.

An Act to Provide Further Support in Response to COVID-19

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here. I will be splitting my time with the member for St. Albert—Edmonton. He has always got such incredibly intelligent debate and I always look forward to his words.

I am so thrilled to be back in the House. I very much thank the people of Calgary Midnapore for returning me to the chamber with the highest percentile of votes in Calgary, the highest percentile of votes in any major centre and what I am most proud of, the greatest number of votes for any woman in Canada. It is an honour to be back in the House.

I would also like to take a moment to thank my team, which was so incredible throughout the election. I would like to thank my campaign manager, Mr. Justin Gotfried, the son of Richard Gotfried, the MLA for Calgary-Fish Creek. I would also like the thank Katie Cook who was my communications point person and my sister Holly Schramm who served as my official agent, keeping me in line and out of trouble with those books. I would also like to thank all the incredible volunteers. I would like to thank my parents Keith and Angie Schramm, who are still my constituents to this day, and my very good friends who I grew up with in Calgary Midnapore who put out signs and raised money for me, Joanna Shaw Morin and Caroline Baynes. Of course, I cannot go without thanking the loves of my life, my husband James Kusie and my beautiful son Edward Kusie who supported me in this journey back to the House of Commons. I thank them and I love them.

Again, I thank so much the people of Calgary Midnapore.

Here we are again in the House debating legislation on new benefits. As the member across the aisle indicated, yes, we on this side of the House were very collaborative and certainly went along with the government's requests for funds and for programs, because we care about Canadians. We are compassionate individuals and we knew that was what Canadians needed at that time.

I will give a brief history of all the times we went along with the legislation despite concerns because we knew that was what Canadians needed at that time.

Let us go back to March 13, 2020, when Bill C-12, an act to amend the Financial Administration Act, was presented; one billion dollars in funding for approval. We did not put up a fuss on this side. In fact, it received royal assent the very same day.

Let us go forward a little further into time. On March 24, 2020, we had Bill C-13, an act respecting certain measures in response to COVID-19. As the shadow minister for families and social development at that time, it was legislation to fix the shortcomings that the government missed at the time it created the original legislation, but, once again, we did not put up a fuss on this side of the House. We recognized that was what Canadians needed at that time. That bill also received approval from the House that day and royal assent the very next day.

On April 11, 2020, there was a second act respecting certain measures in response to COVID-19, Bill C-14, which was CEWS, and we know there were certainly a lot of faults with that at the beginning, as well as the CERB. It received royal assent the very same day. Again, I am just pointing out the collaboration this side of the House had always provided the government in getting Canadians the benefits they need.

Here we are again today, being asked to approve Bill C-2, but we are in a different time. We are heading out of the pandemic. I recognize we have the omicron variant, and I hope no fifth wave, but Canadians want to move forward into the future.

Therefore, I have a message for the government today, and it is that you do not get a blank cheque.

It is time to move our economy from benefits to jobs, and I am very proud to say that as the new shadow minister for employment future workforce development and disability inclusion. We currently have one million job openings, with a 16.4% jump from August to September alone. That is incredible.

One-fifth of those are in the hospitality sector. Other major vacancies occur in these critical health care sectors, including nurses and psychiatric nurses. We have heard in the House about the crisis in the trucking industry, how the average age of truckers is near retirement age and how there are just no new workers coming forward to take these positions. In fact, over one-third of employers have indicated that they have limited their growth in general as a result of not being able to find employees.

This affects every region and so many sectors. I said this when I made my request for an emergency debate on Friday to have a discussion about the shortage of workers in the country. It affects Quebec, the manufacturing sector in Ontario and of course the tourism sector in my home province of Alberta. For this reason again, I say again to the members opposite, “You don't get a blank cheque.”

I would like to move on to something that is very uncomfortable to talk about, and that is the fraud that we have seen with these programs. In fact, FINTRAC reported that there were organized criminals who knowingly and actively defrauded the government with both CERB and CEBA programs, that social media was used to recruit people, and in fact that stolen identifications were used in an effort to get these funds. There was the use of prepaid cards to prevent a paper trail, so they were very smart about this. They knew what they were doing, unfortunately for the government.

In addition, there were individuals who received these funds while not even living in Canada and in fact living in jurisdictions of concern, countries that posed a higher money-laundering or terrorist financing risk. From the start of 2020 until October 31, 30,095 suspicious transaction reports were registered for COVID-related benefits. That is over 30,000. Sadly, 30,000 of those also dealt with human trafficking and drugs, two issues on which the government has failed, but prosecutions are unlikely. Why? In July 2020, the Canadian Revenue Agency advised the House of Commons finance committee that the program had been targeted by organized crime and that Canada does not prioritize the investigation and prosecution of financial criminals. In fact, in the past decade alone, Canada has secured fewer than, wait for it, fewer than 50 laundering convictions. The government is not taking organized crime seriously. Again, for that reason, “You don't get a blank cheque.”

Finally, we in this country need to get a grip on inflation. Canada is among the top 10 countries with the highest inflation rates in the G20. Canada has the second-highest inflation rate in the G7, second only to the United States, which I know the government thought it would get along better with, since the Liberals still talk about the previous president all the time. Rates are predicted to reach 4.9% this month, a three-decade high, and are expected to stay there well into 2022.

Some provinces, including Prince Edward Island, are experiencing rates as high as 6.3%, and unfortunately it is low-income Canadians who spend one-third on shelter and 15% on food and higher energy prices. We cannot control the pandemic, but we can control spending. There was $74 billion on the CRB and there will be $8 billion for Bill C-2 if it passes. We should investigate the fraud. We should evaluate this further. Perhaps we should bring it to the finance committee if the Liberals are willing to strike the finance committee up again, but my final message to them is this: “You don't get a blank cheque.”

Employment Insurance Act

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is such a great day to be debating in the House of Commons. Before I begin, I want to give a big shout-out. I have been in Ottawa for a while, and I think all House of Commons staff are doing an excellent job of keeping us fed and making sure that our system works for the well-being of Canadians. I really felt that this week. They are doing a great job.

Now I will get to Bill C-24.

Bill C-24 would increase the maximum number of weeks available to workers through EI, with up to a maximum of 50 weeks for claims established between September 27, 2020, and September 25, 2021. It would also change rules for self-employed workers who have opted into the EI program to access special benefits. This legislation would allow them to use their 2020 earning threshold of $5,000, compared with the previous threshold of $7,555. Also, it would fix the Liberal-caused loophole in the Canada recovery sickness benefit for international leisure travellers.

The Conservative Party is supportive of Bill C-24. These changes are necessary and long overdue. We must get help to Canadians in need whose jobs have been eliminated as a result of the government-mandated restrictions and closures in response to the pandemic. Lockdowns are still in place in many parts of the country, and businesses cannot get back to normal even though they are working incredibly hard to do so.

My constituents in Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon are frustrated. They cannot go to church. They cannot earn an income the way they want to. They cannot live their lives the way they want to either.

The Conservatives' track record in this Parliament is strong. We have been behind pandemic assistance for Canadians throughout the entire COVID-19 period. We supported Bill C-13 one year ago, in March 2020. It brought in the Canada emergency wage subsidy for small businesses, a one-time additional payment under the GST/HST tax credit, temporary additional amounts to the Canada child benefit, a 25% reduction in required minimal withdrawals from registered retirement income funds, and the Canada emergency response benefit.

Last April, we supported Bill C-14 and Bill C-15, which improved the wage subsidy and implemented the Canada emergency student benefit. In July it was Bill C-20, to extend the wage subsidy. In September it was Bill C-4, for a CERB extension, the Canada recovery benefit, the Canada recovery sickness benefit and the Canada recovery caregiving benefit. In November it was Bill C-9, the emergency rent subsidy and wage subsidy expansion.

The Conservatives have been there to support Canadians every step of the way. What we are not supportive of, though, is the Liberal government's blatant disregard for parliamentary process, their lack of respect for Canadian democracy and their incredibly poor ability to manage the legislative agenda of the House to ensure that we can move past the pandemic.

Two days ago, the member for Windsor—Tecumseh, who is the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, popped into the HUMA committee and table dropped a substantive and constrictive motion for a pre-study of Bill C-24. Neither the text of the motion nor its intention was shared in advance. He ignored the proactive efforts of my colleague, the member for Kildonan—St. Paul, who had reached out to him as soon as Bill C-24 was tabled in the House.

The deadline at the end of the month, which the Liberals are trying to beat, is not some surprise that was sprung on them. To further illustrate that the right hand of the government does not know what the left hand is doing, the member for Kildonan—St. Paul had to direct the member for Windsor—Tecumseh to pick up the phone and talk to his House leader during committee because the motion he was attempting to ram through was no longer necessary. We had come to an agreement outside of his ham-fisted efforts.

Cross-party collaboration is more than possible. Think of all the time that could have been saved if the parliamentary secretary had attempted to engage himself in that process with committee members.

The Liberals love to complain that the opposition is holding up important legislation, yet here we are, in March 2021, debating necessary updates to legislation from September 2020. The Liberals knew for months that benefits would be expiring, but they failed to act until the last minute. They have repeatedly missed the mark on legislation for emergency supports, leaving thousands of Canadians behind.

A key component of this legislation is addressing the incredibly flawed Canada recovery sickness benefit. Because of the Liberals' disrespect for Parliament and their poor legislative drafting, a loophole was created that allows international leisure travellers to receive the CRSB during their quarantine. This is completely unacceptable. The CRSB is for individuals who must miss work because of COVID-19, not for subsidizing the quarantine period of international leisure travellers. This oversight is a direct result of the government's rushing legislation through Parliament because of its prorogation. It is outrageous that the Liberals waited months to fix their mistake.

If the government tried implementing the transparency it espouses to employ, so much headache would have been avoided. For instance, if the Liberals had tabled a federal budget at the beginning of March, this would have ceased to be an issue entirely. There is even a precedent by the government for including employment insurance updates in federal budget legislation. In 2018, the government proposed amendments to the Employment Insurance Act to implement a number of reforms related to the extension of parental benefits.

We have not seen a federal budget in 723 days. This is the longest period in Canadian history that we have been without one.

Even setting aside our criticisms, we cannot ignore how the non-partisan Parliamentary Budget Officer has repeatedly called out the government for its lack of fiscal transparency. In a PBO report issued on November 4, 2020, on supplementary estimates (B), we found out that the Department of Finance, which under Bill Morneau had been issuing biweekly updates to the finance committee during the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic, stopped providing this information once Parliament was prorogued and Morneau had resigned. We are talking about tens of billions of taxpayer dollars heading out the door under the guise of COVID relief measures, and the government has revealed precious little about where these dollars are going.

From the same November 4 report, the PBO underscored that our role as parliamentarians is being obfuscated and obstructed by the government. As the report notes, “While the sum of these measures is significant”, some $79.2 billion, of which 91.5% was related to COVID spending, “the amount of information that is publicly available to track this spending is lacking, thus making it more challenging for parliamentarians to perform their critical role in overseeing Government spending and holding it to account.”

There is no publicly available list of all federal COVID-19 spending measures. There is no consistency in the reporting on the implementation of these measures. There is less and less information being provided transparently to parliamentarians and the PBO. The government could not do a better job of keeping its finances secret if it provided everyone in the House with blindfolds.

However, to its credit, the government has made some efforts to provide additional financial information. As the PBO noted in its February 24, 2021, report on the supplementary estimates (C), “Notable improvements include a complete list of Bills presented to Parliament to authorize spending for COVID-19 related measures”, which is information anyone could find on LEGISinfo, “and a reconciliation table between the Fall Economic Statement 2020 and the Estimates documents”. Still, as the PBO reminded us in February, “The frequency at which the Government provides an updated list of COVID-19 measures in one central document...and the inconsistency to which actual spending data on COVID-19 measures is made publicly available remain areas of concern”.

These are baby steps, but bigger leaps are needed from the government when it comes to fiscal transparency. We as parliamentarians depend on the government to provide us with accurate and timely information about federal finances. We cannot do our work of keeping the government accountable for its spending choices if it does not respect us enough to provide the necessary information to allow me and all of my colleagues to do our jobs effectively.

Again today, it is up to the opposition to correct the continued mistakes of the government. This is disrespectful to us as parliamentarians, it is disrespectful to this hallowed institution and it is disrespectful to the Canadian people, for whose tax dollars we are ultimately responsible.

Taxation

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Madam Speaker, throughout this pandemic the government has been very clear: Workers who lost their income due to COVID-19 were going to receive support, the Prime Minister assured us. Again and again, in statement after statement, the Prime Minister told Canadians “We're here for you.” Those were the words that meant everything to Canadians who did not know how they were going to pay the bills and put food on the table.

Today, however, those words ring hollow for hundreds of thousands of Canadians and their families, people who put their faith in this government and believed that the Prime Minister had their backs, only to discover that it was not true.

More than 400,000 Canadians who applied for the CERB in good faith, who were told by the government that they were eligible and who were in fact eligible according to the CRA website, who received CERB in order to survive, have now received a letter from the CRA informing them that they have to pay that support back. Why? It is because their government changed the rules on them. It is not just wrong: It is a betrayal. It is a betrayal of the House and a betrayal of Canadians.

We spent a lot of time working together in a committee of the whole to get Canadians the help they needed to get through the pandemic. The NDP pushed the government at every turn to do better, and often the government listened to us. We recognized that provinces and territories had to implement strict public health measures to combat the transmission of the virus. We knew that these measures would cost people their jobs. We knew that if we did not act, our economy would be devastated and lives would be ruined. I and my fellow New Democrats called immediately and repeatedly for help for those who needed it, and the government listened and made that critical promise to Canadians that help would be coming.

When the government finally brought the CERB forward for a vote, the legislation, Bill C-13, defined those who would be eligible for support as “...a person who...for 2019 or in the 12-month period preceding the day on which they make an application under section 5, has a total income of at least $5,000”, and the CRA website listed the eligible sources of income to include income from self-employment. That is the bill that I and other members of the House voted for, but that is not what self-employed Canadians are getting from this government.

Canadians should be able to trust their government, and if they follow the rules, so should their government.

The CERB was a lifeline for millions of Canadians. It was a way to make it to the next month, and the next and the next. It is the difference between paying rent and becoming homeless and the difference between hanging on and bankruptcy. Now the government has taken that lifeline away from hundreds of thousands of self-employed Canadians. Worse yet, it is throwing them back overboard.

It is inhumane and, quite honestly, ridiculous, and it does not have to be this way. The government can decide right now to reverse this inane decision. Just apply the legislation the way it was written, which means allowing self-employed Canadians to use total income rather than net income to determine CERB eligibility. It means counting income from grants to artists and performers the same way it is counted for tax purposes.

Will this government restore Canadians' trust and reverse this disastrous CERB clawback?

Opposition Motion—Status Update on COVID-19 Vaccines

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

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Jonquière for a very good speech. I would like to talk a bit more about those pharmaceutical companies, and I'm drawing inspiration from the open letters my colleague from Joliette published. He published another one just this week in L'aut'journal.

Recently, the Government of Canada admitted that the U.S., the U.K. and Germany would start vaccinating their populations in December 2020, whereas Canada would have to wait until the first months of 2021. Why will Canada be starting the process months after the others? It is hard to know, because the Government of Canada signed confidential agreements with pharmaceutical companies that put Quebeckers and Canadians in line behind the Americans, Brits and Germans. That is why the Bloc Québécois demanded that the federal government agree to the Government of Quebec's request for more information about how we will be getting the vaccine.

The Government of Quebec and the Bloc Québécois want to understand why Canada did not get any guarantees for priority processing of its orders. Why did it not align its approval process with those of the vaccine-producing countries in order to synchronize timelines? Why will Quebeckers not be vaccinated at the same time as the rest of the world? Why is Canada unable to come up with a solution to Canada's vaccine production and licensing capacity so that the vaccine could be produced in Canada on a tight deadline? Above all, why did the Prime Minister give a false impression about how quickly the vaccine would be available in Canada?

Upon closer examination of the Government of Canada's decisions and actions, it is hard to know whether there is a real plan for vaccination and, more importantly, whether there is any willingness to increase vaccine manufacturing capacity in Canada, particularly in Quebec, with Medicago, a Quebec-based pharmaceutical company that has the capacity to meet the demand for vaccination with other international pharmaceutical labs.

That is why the Bloc Québécois demanded that the federal government agree to the Government of Quebec's request for more information about the decisions and actions of the Government of Canada. With former Bill C-13, the federal government had established the legal framework required to ensure that pharmaceutical companies could produce a competitor's vaccine without having to wait for a licence. However, Ottawa backed out after the first step. Lastly, the Prime Minister gave false impressions.

I will now speak about the destruction of our pharmaceutical industry because it is worthwhile delving into this issue. I would like to remind my colleagues in the House of Commons that just a few years ago, Quebec had the capacity to develop and sell vaccines. For decades, Quebec was a world leader in the pharmaceutical sector. In Longueuil, Laval and Montreal, in the metropolitan area, large pharmaceutical companies were well established in Quebec.

Under the Government of Quebec's requirements, Canada was collaborating with the Government of Quebec to develop a true pharmaceutical cluster. At the time, the pharmaceutical industry in Quebec was thriving, with many start-ups. The governments of Canada and Quebec were providing economic incentives and policies favouring the development of large laboratories, as well as local manufacturing of innovative drugs. Hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of start-ups, SMEs and jobs were being created.

In the 1980s and 1990s, through the collaboration between the federal and Quebec governments, Quebec built a true pharmaceutical cluster, but as usual, the federal government simply destroyed Quebec's pharmaceutical cluster in the 1990s and the 2000s.

It was the Liberal Party that started the destruction in the 1990s by reducing patent protections for pharmaceutical companies operating in Canada. The Liberal Party then suspended Technology Partnerships Canada, a risk-sharing investment program. When the Conservatives returned to power in the 2000s, Stephen Harper simply finished what the Liberals had started by abolishing the program.

From then until 2012, all of the big pharmaceutical laboratories in Quebec shut down one after the other. Once again, Quebec was abandoned by Ottawa. Meanwhile, the Liberals and the Conservatives chose to favour pharmaceutical companies in Ontario at the expense of those in Quebec. I should also point out that the pharmaceutical companies in Ontario have always contributed significant amounts to Liberal and Conservative election campaigns. Both the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party were responsible for Ottawa's choice to stop investing in pharmaceutical companies in Quebec.

That is why, even though the Government of Quebec wanted to develop its pharmaceutical cluster on its own, it simply could not keep this industry competitive in the face of global competition. What kind of dynamic growth would we have seen in Quebec's pharmaceutical industry? What kind of expertise would Quebec have now? I believe that this industry would still have been one of the best in the world. It would surely be in the process of manufacturing a vaccine. That vaccine might even have been approved by now, and we would have been vaccinated.

Once again, Ottawa undermined an important industry in Quebec. Once again, Quebec had a world-class pharmaceutical industry, but Ottawa kept dragging Quebec down. Once again, Quebec's expertise was world-renowned, but Ottawa kept plundering Quebec's industry to help Ontario's. It is always the same old story with Ottawa.

As we saw with the shipbuilding, auto and forestry industries, and as we are currently seeing with the aerospace industry, Ottawa continues to drag Quebec down. Quebec gives half of its tax revenue to Ottawa, but Quebeckers have a bad feeling that they are paying for the destruction of Quebec's most successful businesses with their own money. They have felt that way for far too long. We see it happening with the decisions made by the Liberal and Conservative parties, which do not really care about Quebec's economic development.

I think it is worth mentioning these industries. It has been said that this was a missed opportunity and that there has been a decline in the pharmaceutical industry in Quebec. We were once one of the major world centres. In the early 2000s, we had seven big private pharmaceutical labs in Canada, six of which were located in Quebec. They were Merck Frosst, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Witten A.R., Shire BioChem, Boehringer Ingelheim and AstraZeneca, whose vaccine is currently undergoing approval.

In 2006, the best year for Quebec's pharmaceutical sector, investments totalled $600 million. Six big pharmaceutical companies had research centres that employed 8,100 people. The pharmaceutical sector had 21,000 employees.

All the big pharmaceutical laboratories subsequently closed their doors. Now, the pharmaceutical industry is one-third smaller. Several major researchers have left the country. Several small pharmaceutical companies were bought out for their patents, and their products are now manufactured abroad. That is the crux of the problem.

If this had not happened a dozen or so years ago, the vaccine could surely have been manufactured in Quebec and Canada. The pandemic might have been over by now, and we would have been able to leave our homes. We could have spent Christmas with our families. The Liberals and the Conservatives bear a certain responsibility for this.

Income Tax Act

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Madam Chair, I think the finance minister needs to pick a lane, a lane of transparency, accountability and a team Canada approach or one that denies Canadians the access to information on our public expenditures.

Bill C-11, Bill C-12, Bill C-13, Bill C-14, Bill C-15, Bill C-16, Bill C-18, Bill C-19, Bill C-20 and Bill C-4; the Parliamentary Budget Officer says that we do not have public information on all of those bills passed and that received royal assent.

Does the member opposite agree that Canadians deserve to have that information?

COVID-19 Response Measures Act

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise this evening in support of Bill C-4, an act relating to certain measures in response to COVID-19.

This is a very important bill. It will allow us to build on the measures already set out in Canada's COVID-19 economic response plan so we can protect Canadians during the next wave of the pandemic and, more importantly, continue to support them as the economy reopens.

A number of my colleagues have already spoken eloquently about the new measures this bill proposes, such as the Canada recovery benefit, the Canada recovery sickness benefit and the Canada recovery caregiving benefit. I will also talk about them in a few minutes, but I would first like to talk about the importance of passing Bill C-4 quickly. Time is running out.

As we know, the legislation we are debating here today would, among other things, extend the Public Health Events of National Concern Payments Act to the end of this year. It is a very long title for a very important act that is otherwise set to expire. As hon. members may recall, it was enacted in March as part of Bill C-13, adopted by the House. It allows the government to spend the money needed to protect Canadians and address the public health crisis of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It has been a cornerstone of Canada's COVID-19 economic response plan, a plan that has been critical to supporting Canadians and Canadian businesses.

I know I have spoken about this many times, but I cannot understate the extent to which Canadians have relied on our economic response to get them through these extraordinary times. Through this plan, our government has delivered on programs, such as the Canada emergency response benefit, that have helped millions of Canadians. The CERB has ensured that millions of Canadians have not had to make impossible choices between putting food on their tables and paying their bills when they have lost their jobs or seen their incomes reduced as a result of the pandemic.

The CERB has helped nearly nine million Canadians since March.

Given how many Canadians lost their jobs this year, it quickly became apparent that many of them would need financial support until they could get back to work. However, the existing income support programs were not designed to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. That is why we created the Canada emergency response benefit, or CERB, and made sure that many Canadians would be eligible, for instance by allowing workers to earn up to $1,000 per month while still receiving the CERB.

The Canada emergency response benefit has been a key program, supporting millions of Canadians unable to work because of COVID-19. It has had a tangible impact on the quality of life of millions of families from coast to coast to coast, in every constituency in this country, and that is thanks to the Public Health Events of National Concern Payments Act. The Public Health Events of National Concern Payments Act also paves the way to support businesses across this country, especially our small businesses.

Canadians have worked their whole lives to establish businesses that serve their communities and provide good local jobs. Small businesses not only are the backbone of our economy, but define our neighbourhoods. They give our main streets their character, owners become community leaders and they become the places we rely on to connect to one another.

The list goes on. It is largely thanks to the Public Health Events of National Concern Payments Act that we are able to help Canadians, support our businesses, and protect everyone's health and safety. However, there is still more work to be done. The increase in COVID-19 cases across the country and the arrival of the second wave clearly show that we are still grappling with the pandemic. We must not let our guard down. We must continue to protect the Canadians who need us most. We must continue to support them, but first we must give ourselves the means to do so, and we must do it now. When Parliament passed the Public Health Events of National Concern Payments Act in March, the date of repeal was set for September 30, 2020. This means that the act will expire tomorrow, but COVID-19 will not expire. We must extend the act. We owe it to Canadians.

The limited extension of this act would allow the government to continue to do a lot of the things we have been doing to support Canadians and businesses that are most in need. For example, this act would allow the government to keep buying the necessary personal protective equipment to help essential workers. It would also crucially continue support for the public health, social and economic response in indigenous communities. We understand that indigenous communities are vulnerable to the impacts of COVID-19, which is why we acted quickly to provide nearly a billion dollars to support public health and community-led responses in these communities.

Extending the Public Health Events of National Concern Payments Act to December 31 would ensure that there are no needless interruptions to several programs, especially since a second wave of the pandemic is imminent and has already hit some regions. The extension would enable the government to continue to support the provinces and territories and improve the capacity of our health care system. Take, for example, the federal government's investment in testing and contact tracing. We are talking about a legislative framework that has been essential to our assistance plan.

Extending the act would also enable the government to help small businesses and maintain support measures for farmers, food companies and food supply chains. It would ensure that there is no interruption to the final payments under existing programs, such as the CERB, while we begin to transition to the new assistance programs.

We are now six months into the worst health and economic crisis in Canadian history. COVID-19 has affected all aspects of Canadians' lives, from their health to their livelihoods. We will overcome this pandemic, but this will require the work of every order of government, every community and every one of us. For our part, we will support people and businesses through this crisis as long as it lasts. Let me be absolutely clear with the House and with all Canadians: We will do whatever it takes to get through this pandemic.

We are trusting science to lead the fight until a safe, effective vaccine becomes available. Until then, we must remain vigilant and use the tools available to us, such as testing, treatment and physical distancing. The government will continue to be there for Canadians, just as Canadians are there for each other. We will do whatever is necessary.

Canadians are counting on their government to be there for them when they need it. We know that too many are still unable to work because of COVID-19, including many women, many newcomers to Canada and many people who are self-employed. As we have said previously, and the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion said earlier this evening, we will continue to support these vulnerable Canadians. Those who have been receiving CERB will be supported by the employment insurance system. Let me be clear on something: We will not let down those who do not qualify for EI.

Bill C-4 would ensure that the workers impacted by COVID-19 have the support they need by creating three new transitional benefits to ensure that Canadians can continue to support their families and make ends meet.

First, under the Canada recovery benefit, $500 per week for up to 26 weeks could be available to those individuals not working due to the pandemic and who do not qualify for EI, including the self-employed. This would also be available to those individuals working reduced hours who have lost 50% or more of their income due to the pandemic.

Second, the Canada recovery sickness benefit would provide $500 per week for up to two weeks to workers who are unable to work for at least 50% of the time they would have otherwise worked, either because they contracted COVID-19, think they might have it or because they isolated because of the virus.

Third, the Canada recovery caregiving benefit would be available to those who cannot work because they are caring for a close relative or because their child cannot go to school or day care because of the pandemic. These Canadians could receive $500 per week for up to 26 weeks.

These transitional benefits are proposed as part of the government's plan to support Canadians, as we work to build a stronger, more resilient economy. All three would be available for one year. We know this crisis will not pass this week or next.

This pandemic is the worst public health crisis Canada has ever encountered. Canadians of all ages everywhere in the country have been hit hard. Millions of Canadians lost their jobs or had their hours cut along with their income. Job losses may be the most obvious effect of the global economic shock we have all had to withstand, but the shock also highlighted a whole range of quality-of-life issues, such as mental health, family violence and social ties.

We firmly believe that policy development must be guided by prosperity and quality of life for all Canadians. That is what will help us build a stronger, more resilient country, and that is what guides us as we develop the pandemic recovery plan.

This is not the time for austerity. As Canadians continue to weather the consequences of the pandemic, we must maintain certain assistance program and launch others. Bill C-4 will enable us to round out many of the existing measures. It will also help us make our COVID-19 economic response plan more effective. In the medium and long terms, we will also have to recover from the pandemic by building a stronger and more resilient Canada.

Canada entered this crisis in the best fiscal position of its peers. For the past six months, the government has been using that fiscal firepower so Canadians, businesses and our entire economy have the support needed to weather the storm. The same firepower can also help us to overcome this crisis and build back as a stronger, more resilient country.

It is critical to ensure that the Canadians who need it the most continue to receive the support they need. It will help to ensure that Canadians and the businesses where they work continue to receive the support they need.

I will end by saying this. Our government's first priority is addressing this pandemic and ensuring Canadians are healthy and safe. We are getting them the help they need today, while finding solutions which will improve their quality of life over the months and years to come.

Our government's priority is to fight this pandemic and make sure Canadians stay healthy and safe. We will give them the help they need now, and we will come up with solutions to improve their quality of life in the months and years to come.

The measures contained in this bill would help us to do exactly that. I urge every member of the House to do the same.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Madam Speaker, as others have said, the reality we have been dealing with for the past six months has plunged workers in Quebec and Canada into a climate of unparalleled uncertainty.

Week in and week out, our constituents have been calling us and reaching out to us for answers to their questions. The government has loosened the purse strings to support people during this difficult time, and that is great. Now the plan is to transition CERB recipients to special recovery benefits outlined in Bill C-4. The bill includes three benefits and measures to make EI more flexible.

As an aside regarding EI, it is important to remember that, over the past 25 years, successive governments have robbed the EI fund of $59 billion to balance their budgets. Those governments, Conservative and Liberal alike, used their discretion to redirect those billions towards other budget priorities of the day.

With the EI fund having been plundered, COVID-19 certainly required a robust, costly measure that would have to be implemented quickly. That was the CERB. In terms of public finances, one can imagine that the support scenario might have played out differently if the EI fund had not been plundered so badly. Many women and young people have suffered because of this.

The CERB was good, but it had what I would call some design flaws. It helped a lot of families, and with all the uncertainty and the second wave, the Canada recovery benefit is very welcome, especially as it puts a renewed focus on the employment insurance system and more specifically the stabilizing role it plays for the economy. That is the role this system must play.

We were elected by people who are close to us in our ridings. We have responsibilities to them. Even though, as an opposition party, we did not introduce Bill C-4, it is still our duty to point out to the government the inconsistencies in some of the measures or some of the rules. It is also our duty to act with kindness and integrity in the hope that we will be heard. That is how we give a voice to our constituents, regardless of their political stripe. However, are our voices heard when they are conveyed by elected members?

I want to share with this assembly a specific case that is certainly not unique in Canada: the parents of critically ill children benefit EI program. That program came into effect in 2017 with a remarkably compassionate objective.

In the summer of 2019, an evaluation was done. The evaluation noted that there were just over 15,000 recipients, 80% of whom were women earning around $40,000 a year. The conclusions and recommendations section of the evaluation stated, and I quote:

...the Parents of Critically Ill Children benefit was effective overall in meeting its policy objectives. The benefit:

-was effective in easing financial pressures on parents in order to allow them more time to provide care to their...child;

-provided adequate temporary income support;

-helped keep claimants attached to the labour force; and

-contributed to positive social impacts....

These objectives seem quite similar to the objectives of maternity benefits, in that they allow parents to take care of children. Unlike maternity benefits, these special EI benefits for parents of critically ill children were not factored in when calculating eligibility for the CERB, even though the objectives are very similar.

I bring this up because my office has been devoting considerable time and effort to the case of Ms. Beaulieu, from Repentigny, since April. We have written letters, held Zoom meetings and made phone calls to two departments, including calls to the ministers themselves, a deputy minister and regional assistants. Ms. Beaulieu is one of the people who was left out of the CERB. Her four-year-old son has a critical illness. Ms. Beaulieu will likely never be able to hold a full-time job again.

Because of COVID-19, she lost her part-time job, the first job she had been able to hold in two years. As a result of the design flaw in the CERB that I mentioned earlier, parents of critically ill children do not qualify for the special benefits. This woman's eligible earnings fell less than $3,000 short of the threshold to qualify for the CERB.

The report indicated that, from 2013 to 2017, the period that was assessed, 15,300 people were eligible to receive the benefit. That is only 15,300 people in four years. When someone is taking care of a sick young child and then COVID-19 suddenly strikes and they lose their income, what are they supposed to do? The options are nothing short of heartbreaking.

How is it possible that no adjustments have been made to these measures after five months of lobbying? How is it that the government took advantage of this new bill to make changes to EI, but it did not listen to these people? Very few people are applying for this benefit, and they can easily be identified based on the seriousness of the child's health status or medical condition.

The government was quick to offer the CERB to other segments of the population. Why did it not listen to this legitimate request on behalf of caregivers of critically ill children? There were simple solutions; they only needed to be deemed eligible. If the government is going to review the terms of the EI program at all, why not do it properly? I just summarized a situation for which solutions could easily have been found.

I have another example. A few weeks before the pandemic eroded our parliamentary democracy, the House voted by a wide margin in favour of a motion moved by the Bloc Québécois to increase EI sickness benefits to a maximum of 50 weeks. This would also have been a great opportunity to align EI with a majority decision from the House. What does this failure to act say to the elected members of the House who voted overwhelmingly in favour of this motion and whose views on the changes were not considered? It is pretty disappointing that the government is refusing to listen.

We know full well what the deployment of programs like the CERB represents. Nothing is perfect, but our job is to work on improving what is introduced. The changes that should have been made to the CERB were delayed or non-existent. In the case of Ms. Beaulieu, we presented a solid argument. We did so diligently and respectfully in the appropriate forums. Eligibility for the special benefits for parents of critically ill children was never considered. To date, no official answer has been provided on this issue. One minister's staffer even refused to let me contact a deputy minister who was designated as the lead on this issue. Obstacle after obstacle was thrown up.

Ms. Beaulieu would have to wait. Two departments spent months passing the buck back and forth and telling us what we already knew. All we could do was watch as time ran out on the CERB program, without any benefits for critically ill children. Still today, because we continue to fight, we are told that an analysis is under way that will look into the rationale for treating earnings from these benefits the same as maternity benefits. From what I understand of the analysis, this has nothing to do with the issue; it is about determining whether Ms. Beaulieu is eligible. However, that is not what we want. We want this for everyone affected by this matter.

We support the new recovery benefits proposed in Bill C-4, but what are we supposed to think of the past six months and the approach that was taken? How should we interpret the complacency and lack of consideration for such a serious case? The government gave itself extraordinary powers through Bill C-13. Today I will not mention the files that have been overlooked for the past few months, but on the flip side, I do have to criticize the political reasons behind the Liberals' decision to prorogue Parliament for five weeks. Opportunities have been missed, as this bill would have been put through its paces.

To the MPs who watched time run out without doing anything or even responding to the communications from various ridings regarding cases like the one I talked about today, I have just one word to describe how people perceived it. That word is indifference.

Proceedings on the Bill Entitled an Act Relating to Certain Measures in Response to COVID-19

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Madam Speaker, all Canadians want Parliament to function properly. All Canadians care about what is going on with health care. All Canadians, particularly folks in Quebec and Ontario, are seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases. We need measured, worthwhile, relevant action, but we believe that must happen through healthy democratic debate. What we are seeing now is anything but.

The government is about to introduce legislation that will result in $57 billion in spending, and it is reducing the time parliamentarians have to speak on the bill to barely four and a half hours.

This is anything but parliamentary democracy. As elected officials, we have a duty to hold the government accountable. We were elected to ask the government what it is doing, how it is doing it and why. With four and a half hours of debate, we cannot hope to understand where the $57 billion is going. Unfortunately, that is what the government is forcing us to do, and we condemn it in the strongest terms.

Why are we here today? We are here because we are concerned about the health situation of Canadians. We are concerned about the survival of Canadian businesses. We are concerned about Canadian workers who are out of jobs because of the pandemic. We are concerned because the Liberal government tabled some ideas, proposals and policies that created a lack of manpower and businesses were forced to close.

In my riding, many restaurants and other businesses closed their doors because they needed workers but instead people preferred not to work and to use what we call in French the PCU.

The debate is serious, which is why we must take the necessary time to study the measures the government is proposing.

All of us on this side want to help Canadians. All of us on this side want to help the business community. All of us on this side are concerned about the health of Canadians and want to help everybody on that issue. All of us on this side want to work hand in hand with the provinces. On this side, we are not going to say what is good for the provinces but rather ask how we can help them. That is the Conservative view, not the Liberal one.

What we have today in front of us is a government that acted at the last minute. The government decided to have just four and a half hours of debate for $50 billion in taxpayers' money. This is unparliamentary, and we strongly disagree with the approach of the government.

We are here today because the government has acted in an unfortunate way in recent weeks. We should remember that when the pandemic broke out, we had urgent action to take. We worked with the government, but we also took the government to task on a number of occasions. I will come back to that later. We wanted to work together. That is why we agreed to have the hybrid Parliament and why we agreed to have committees. We were doing our job, which is really relevant.

Some senior members in our party, including the hon. member for Carleton, the hon. member for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles and the hon. member for St. Albert—Edmonton, just to name a few, asked questions that were very relevant to the WE scandal, but awkward for the government. The government had decided to give $900 million to friends of the regime without a call for tenders. Once it started really feeling the heat, the Liberal government decided to kill parliamentary democracy by proroguing the session.

Let's keep in mind that, in 2015, these paragons of virtue said that they would never use prorogation and that they would never prevent parliamentarians from expressing themselves, but they did at the first opportunity.

We would not be where we are today had the government allowed parliamentarians to continue doing their job, yet that is exactly what the government is encouraging us to do. For six weeks, we were unable to do our job as parliamentarians, a necessary job.

The government recalled the House with a throne speech last week. The very next day, it introduced Bill C-2, which includes budgetary measures to help Canadians.

We understand that time is running out because of the sunset clauses on government measures. Because of these sunset clauses, the House has to vote on certain issues before October 1, but the government is the one in charge of the calendar. It is the government that decided to shut down committees and close Parliament six weeks ago. It is the government that decided to recall the House last week when it could have easily done so earlier. The government could have easily allowed Parliament to do its work in committee, but no.

These people who really enjoy controlling Parliament and the situation have made it so that we have just a few hours before the sunset clauses take effect. They bear all the responsibility for that.

It is very funny to hear the government House leader saying that Liberals want to walk together and work together and that there is no time for political games. This is exactly what they are doing. We are not working together. They want to work all by themselves. They say they do not want to play political games. That is exactly what they are doing right now. We have $50 billion in front of us that we have to debate and they are letting parliamentarians talk about it for only four and a half hours. This is a big joke. This is everything but parliamentary democracy. We need to work together, obviously, but we need the tools to do that and what the government is tabling today does everything but give parliamentarians the right tools to do the work.

Conservatives are here for Canadians. I can assure everyone that we will stand by our guns in this situation because we need to work correctly, and that is exactly what we intend to do.

Last week the government introduced Bill C-2. We saw millions of dollars' worth of spending on the horizon. After question period last Thursday, the government House leader told us that Monday and Tuesday, so today and tomorrow, would be dedicated to Bill C-2, which was fine.

Even then we realized that we might not have enough time to really get to the bottom of things. Acting in good faith and to avoid partisan games, we proposed something that we thought was entirely fair and appropriate and that, above all, would mean that we could get the work done. We proposed meeting on Sunday in committee of the whole for over six hours to allow four ministers to appear before us and answer questions from the opposition and the government, in order to get to the bottom of the matter in relation to Bill C-2. That is our job as parliamentarians.

That is the way Conservatives are working. We have to hold the government to account. We are here to ask questions and the ministers are here to answer questions.

Being in cabinet is a privilege. If the gods and my leader are willing, maybe one day I myself will be in cabinet. Who knows? At any rate, being a minister is certainly something.

The ministers we hoped would answer questions before this committee were serious ministers, senior ministers who are responsible for billions of dollars. We wanted to hear from the Minister of Finance. We wanted to hear from the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, as well as the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development and the Minister of Labour. These four ministers played a central part in the discussions surrounding Bill C-2, which represents more than $50 billion in spending. They could have answered the committee's questions. However, our proposal was declined. We were fine with that, because it is part of the democratic process.

A few hours later, however, we found out that the government and the NDP had hammered out an agreement on Bill C-2. That agreement was negotiated in a proper democratic fashion. We are not going to raise a fuss over it.

We will see how the debates go. What points will people raise about the bill that is about to be introduced? What are members going to be able to say in a mere four and a half hours about $57 billion in proposed spending?

This is the key element of this debate today. The government is asking taxpayers to spend $57 billion and we, the representatives of Canadians, will only have four and a half hours of discussion and debate. That is absolutely not enough, and there is no partisanship in that. Those are the facts. Technically speaking, we need to go deeply into this bill. We need to know exactly what the intention of the government is. We have a job to do, but the government, which killed the parliamentary process this summer and dodged the responsibility it had to work with other parties, decided to kill our responsibility to go deeply into the bill.

When the Liberals are attacking us on that, they are not attacking us; they are attacking Canadians. Canadians deserve answers. Canadians have elected us to ask tough questions. I know them. I know they are ready to answer that. Let us do our jobs. The government is not doing that right now.

It might come as a surprise to some of us that the government would treat parliamentary procedure so grievously.

I have had the privilege of representing the people of Louis-Saint-Laurent for almost five years now. I cannot thank them enough for electing me twice. This is not the first time in the past five years that this government's approach to the rights, privileges and responsibilities of all parliamentarians, including those in opposition, has been a little too authoritarian.

Members will recall the infamous Motion No. 6 tabled in May 2016. It gave the government extraordinary powers to ram through bills that should have been given more serious attention.

Sadly, we all remember how that led to a deeply unfortunate and disgraceful incident: the Prime Minister left his seat, grabbed an opposition member—our party whip—by the arm and marched him across the chamber like a crook.

This was called “elbowgate”. The Prime Minister crossed the floor, grabbing a political adversary and using it just like that. That was everything but good. That was a shame. I have never seen an act so disgraceful, and it was coming from the top, the Prime Minister. Why? Because we were asking to have a friendly debate, and Motion No. 6 was anything but that. The Prime Minister was not happy with our position and he did something very wrong. Obviously, he excused himself the day after. He did what he had to do.

We were then able to proceed. However, the government's main intention with Motion No. 6 was to hinder the work of parliamentarians, especially opposition members.

A year later in May 2017, the government did exactly the same thing. It once again proposed measures aimed at limiting parliamentary work, especially that of the opposition and particularly in committee. Thanks to a vigilant opposition and our tireless work at committee trying to block this measure, the government realized that it made no sense.

A number of bills were introduced in May 2019. The government wanted them to pass after just minutes, never mind hours, of debate. It was unacceptable.

Hon. members will also recall that in the winter of 2019, when another Liberal scandal, the SNC-Lavalin one, had just erupted, the government decided to put an end to the parliamentary committee's work. That was also unacceptable.

This Liberal government's first Parliament ended with 63 time allocation motions. Yes, the current government imposed 63 gag orders. That was also unacceptable.

As I said earlier, during the campaign, the Liberals said that they would be very frank and very honest with all parliamentarians, that they would make Parliament work, that they would not prorogue the House. However, that is what they did. They also adopted 63 time allocation motions. This is anything but parliamentary freedom and this is everything but good parliamentary attitude.

We ended up with this new Parliament following the election. When the COVID-19 crisis began, all members from all parties worked in good faith for the good of Canadians. Obviously we had to give the government certain powers, as the situation was unforeseen. Nevertheless, the Liberals gave themselves powers that were excessive, to say the least.

Let's not forget that the first version of Bill C-13 would have allowed the government to take measures and write cheques at will until the end of 2021. They were very ambitious, not to mention greedy. That was not what needed to be done. Our vigilance, and that of the other parties, ensured that the government backed down.

That was a good indication that the government was very ambitious. When it came time to say that this was an extraordinary situation and that Parliament could not sit in its usual fashion, the government decided to give itself all sorts of powers until December 2021.

How could we accept the fact that the government was ready to have full power for more than a year and a half? That is not parliamentary democracy. Canada deserves better. We understand and recognize that we have to address some situations if some emergency arises, but we shall respect the responsibility of parliamentarians. Again, this morning the government is so happy to shut down the parliamentary system and this is unacceptable to us.

We are very sad to see that the government wants to muzzle parliamentarians once again. The Conservatives are well aware that we need proper measures for Canadians and that these measures have to correspond to the needs of Canadian families, that we must take into account Canadian businesses that are facing tough challenges, that we must take into account Canadian workers who lost their jobs, and that we must take into account the men and women with children who are worried.

Indeed, we have measures to bring in. Indeed, we must work together. Indeed, we must put partisanship aside in order to act for the good of Canadians. However, we have a job to do, and when the government is getting ready to spend $57 billion, we think parliamentarians should do their job. Four and a half hours does not leave enough time for us to do our job properly.

Therefore, I move the following amendment:

That the motion be amended:

(a) in paragraph (b), by replacing the words “not be deferred”, with the words “be deferred until the expiry of time provided for Oral Questions at the next sitting day which is not a Friday”; and

(b) by replacing paragraphs (c) to (e) with the following:

“(c) if the bill is adopted at second reading, it shall be referred to a committee of the whole and the House shall, when the orders of the day are next called after the bill has been read the second time, resolve itself into a committee of the whole on the said bill, provided that:

(i) the committee be subject to the provisions relating to virtual sittings of the House,

(ii) the Speaker may preside,

(iii) the Chair may preside from the Speaker’s chair,

(iv) the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, and the Minister of Labour be invited to appear,

(v) each minister shall be questioned for 95 minutes, provided that:

(A) the chair shall call members from all recognized parties and one member who does not belong to a recognized party in a fashion consistent with the proportions observed during Oral Questions, following the rotation used for question by the former Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic;

(B) no member shall be recognized for more than five minutes at a time which may be used for posing questions;

(C) members may be permitted to split their time with one or more members by so indicating to the chair, and

(D) questions shall be answered by the minister or another minister acting on her or his behalf,

(vi) notices of amendments to the bill to be considered in committee of the whole may be deposited with the Clerk of the House at any time following the adoption of this order until the conclusion of the second hour of debate in committee of the whole,

(vii) at the conclusion of time provided for questioning ministers, or when no member rises to speak, whichever is earlier, the Chair shall put forthwith and successively every question necessary to dispose of the committee stage of the bill, including each amendment deposited with the Clerk of the House pursuant to subparagraph (vi);

(d) once the bill has been reported from the committee of the whole, the Speaker shall put forthwith and successively every question necessary to dispose of the report and third reading stages of the bill, provided that no recorded division shall be deferred; and

(e) the Standing Orders relating to the ordinary hour of daily adjournment shall be suspended while the bill is being considered under the provisions of this order”.

Government Business No. 10

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member across the way for her speech. Also, I find it interesting that she gave a little list of all the things that she has been up to. It is always wonderful to hear different approaches.

I have a specific question.

The member mentioned the importance of family and the importance of certainty, particularly during a pandemic. Earlier today, I did ask the Minister of Employment multiple times, as I have over the past few months, about the issue of accessing parental benefits. I just want to find out from the member if she is hearing from her own constituents, from mothers and fathers who are unable to know where they stand. I talked to one woman who was eight hours short of meeting the requirements for eligibility to receive parental benefits from employment insurance. The minister has been given the powers under Bill C-13, with a stroke of a pen, to deal with it. Is the member facing the same circumstances in her riding? Does she support dealing with this as quickly as possible and treating this with the urgency that is necessary?

Having a baby during a pandemic is bad enough, but trying to figure out where one stands with employment insurance with that uncertainty is, I think, unconscionable.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

Mr. Chair, I would just go back to our original discussions around Bill C-13. The Liberal government made an unparalleled power grab and the opposition leader pushed back, along with many members of the opposition parties, to say that we were not going to give unfettered, unheralded power to amend our laws without going through Parliament.

What we did give the government was a lot of power to introduce programs. This is where it is really important for us, as members of Parliament, to be relating the experiences on the front lines of the pandemic in our ridings. Ottawa is very far away from British Columbia.

When we bring up suggestions, for example, about the Canadian emergency business account, stating those loggers, realtors and barbers using a personal chequing account are now at a disadvantage to their competition across the street who have been using a business chequing account, it is really unfair. In May, the Prime Minister said that the government would fix this, but it still has not done that.

We have done a lot of good things on this side, such as the Canadian emergency wage subsidy among others, and a lot of other parties have contributed to that. However, the government needs to continue to understand that we are on the front lines and that members of Parliament do understand the problems in their ridings. The Liberals need to respect that and start listening. Again, if we are to see the country get through this pandemic, it will be because Canadians bring the problems to Ottawa and they are heard and responded to ably.

Supplementary Estimates (A), 2020-21

[Jean-Yves Duclos, Liberal, President of the Treasury Board]

Madam Chair, I am delighted and honoured to address the House today in an extraordinary context.

Thank you for, Madam Chair, for this opportunity to discuss, in particular, supplementary estimates (A) for 2020-21.

As committee members know, every year, the government tables the supplementary estimates, which sets out its spending plan.

These supplementary estimates present information on spending requirements across federal organizations that were either not sufficiently developed in time for inclusion in the main estimates or have since been updated to reflect new developments.

This is the first supplementary estimates to be tabled this fiscal year. It includes a summary of the government's additional financial requirements and an overview of the main funding requests and horizontal initiatives.

The supplementary estimates (A), 2020-21, also shows that the government is continuing to invest in people, in workers, in the economy and in support related to COVID-19 to ensure the country's success and economic recovery.

Parliamentarians will have the opportunity to review and vote on these allocations, which seek to provide important services to indigenous communities, safe and secure transportation for travellers and support for Canada's armed forces. This is in addition to COVID-related expenditures.

Specifically, these supplementary estimates include $6 billion in operating and capital expenditures, grants and contributions to be voted on by Parliament for 42 different federal organizations. These voted measures represent a 5% increase over those included in the main estimates for 2020-21 that I tabled on February 27, including more than $1 billion for the government's response to the COVID crisis.

For the purposes of parliamentary information and transparency, the supplementary estimates also includes forecasts of statutory expenditures totalling $81.1 billion. It is important to note the key difference between voted spending and statutory spending. Voted spending requires the annual approval of Parliament through what is called a supply bill, whereas statutory spending is approved through other laws. The current estimates contains information on statutory spending to enable parliamentarians to have the most comprehensive information available on the spending planned by the government.

Canadians and the parliamentarians who represent them have the right to know how public funds are being spent and to hold the government to account. Estimates are brought forward to ensure that Parliament can review and approve the new spending needs of the Government of Canada.

The supplementary estimates (A) for 2020-21 include $6 billion in new funding across the government, including $1 billion in continued support for COVID-19 relief.

For maximum transparency, the estimates documents also provide information on spending authorized through the COVID-19 Emergency Response Act and the COVID-19 Emergency Response Act, No. 2, which have already been negotiated, discussed and unanimously approved by parliamentarians.

We know that Canadians want maximum transparency from Parliament. These estimates include statutory information on spending that was first authorized through the COVID-19 emergency response acts that were presented, debated and passed in the House. This spending is now helping Canadians.

The health, security and well-being of all Canadians remain critical to our government. As a result, these supplementary estimates include a request for an additional $1.3 billion in voted expenditures to deal with the impact of COVID-19 on Canadians.

This includes $405 million for the national medical research strategy to fund tracking and testing of COVID-19, to develop vaccines and therapies, and to enhance clinical trials and biomanufacturing capacity in Canada.

There is also $302 million to support small and medium-sized businesses.

This also includes $274 million for urgent research and innovation on medical countermeasures, $87 million for the Community Futures Network, and $59 million to help the Canadian Red Cross Society support individuals, families and communities during the pandemic.

Here are some of the other key initiatives included in these estimates that support a variety of Canadian priorities: $585 million for the Department of National Defence to fund the joint support ship project to replace vessels that have reached the end of their lifespans, and $481 million for the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs to fund the federal Indian day schools settlement agreement.

In addition, $468 million is allocated to the Department of Indigenous Services to support the safety and well-being of first nations children and families living on reserve.

There is also $312 million for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority and Department of Transport, which will fund aviation security screening services.

For my own department, called the Treasury Board Secretariat, the estimates include $396 million for the disability insurance plan; $82 million for previous requirements, in this case to cover the cost of negotiated wage adjustments; and $9 million to continue the Canadian Digital Service's operations.

The supplementary estimates enable the government to be transparent and accountable for how we plan to use public funds to provide the programs and services Canadians need. In accordance with the government's commitment to transparency, we continue to provide additional important information online regarding these supplementary estimates.

For example, we have published a detailed listing of legislated amounts reported through these estimates and a complete breakdown of planned expenditures by standard objects such as personnel, professional services and transfer payments. Our online information tools reflect our commitment to give Canadians a clear explanation of where public funds are going and how they are going to be spent.

Furthermore, the Minister of Finance committed to reporting to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance every two weeks about the key measures taken by the government to help Canadians.

Lastly, the government remains firmly committed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as these supplementary estimates show.

The new spending plans in these supplementary estimates will help support people affected by the pandemic and maintain support for the economy and Canadians.

As we advance these plans, I would like to acknowledge the crucial work of all parliamentarians as we continue to work together for the future of our country and the wellness of all Canadians. Canadians are counting on us and expect all parliamentarians to be steady in their support as we navigate through these very challenging times. Let us honour their trust.

I would now be happy to answer any questions that members of this House may have.

Proceedings of the House and Committees

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to have the opportunity to speak in this debate today. As my colleagues will agree, these are unprecedented times, which calls for a government response to match.

This is a situation unlike any we have ever experienced in our lifetimes, and I am proud of how our government has responded. When we looked at what was happening around the world and the terrifying effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in countries like Italy and Spain, it was clear that something drastic needed to be done.

Beginning on March 13, and in the following days and weeks, most of Canada was put on pause. In response, our government worked fervently to bring forward a package of measures that would allow Canada to survive while much of the economy was paused, to allow for the putting into place of public health measures needed to avoid the worst impacts of COVID-19.

On March 24, we introduced Bill C-13, which included a comprehensive suite of measures to ensure that individuals, families and businesses could withstand the shocks of a paused economy, such as we have never experienced. My colleagues and the members opposite will remember those negotiations, which spanned long into the night, to ensure that we could pass legislation with much-needed measures as quickly as possible.

Through Bill C-13, we introduced, among other measures, the now well-known Canada emergency response benefit, the CERB. Since this benefit was put in place, there have been more than eight million individuals, for a total of almost $39 billion in benefits. These are the numbers as of May 21. Canadians who had lost their jobs and did not qualify for employment insurance, and who would not have had money for rent or food, are now receiving the CERB. Due to the CERB, a single mom of two who worked part time in a nail salon did not have to worry about putting food on the table when she lost her job because of COVID-19.

Thanks to the Canada emergency response benefit, many Canadians who were worried about their finances received the support they need to get through this period of uncertainty.

We also introduced measures to help the most vulnerable Canadians. We amended the Income Tax Act to issue a supplementary GST/HST credit payment and an extra Canada child benefit payment.

Under these measures, a couple with one daughter will get an additional Canada child benefit payment of $300, on top of an additional GST/HST credit payment of $733, which is the maximum amount, given their lower income.

We saw that investment markets were being impacted by the pandemic. Seniors are worried about their savings. This is why we also reduced the amount that seniors are required to withdraw from the registered retirement income fund.

Knowing that students were facing particular worries of their own, we provided relief for students to receive federal student financial assistance, and we paused the requirement for paying back interest and capital on federal student loans.

Through Bill C-13, we introduced measures to allow for transfers of funds to provinces and territories for expenses related to COVID-19. We also allowed for certain exceptional regulatory powers, notably in relation to employment insurance, and removed the requirement for providing a medical certificate for sick leave.

We also introduced a 10% temporary wage subsidy for small employers for a period of three months. As we observed the number of CERB applicants and how the economic situation was unfolding, we introduced a new bill, Bill C-14, on April 11, with a new Canada emergency wage subsidy that allowed for a 75% wage subsidy for eligible employers. This helped ensure that companies could retain their employees, rather than be forced to lay them off. Due to the CEWS, Canadian business owners can apply for support to help them keep their employees on the payroll until business picks up again.

On March 24, when we tabled Bill C-13, we did not know how bad the situation would get, how long the public health measures would have to stay in place, or the exact impact on the economy and Canadians. On May 1, once it had become clear that the situation would continue through the summer, we tabled Bill C-15 to create the Canada emergency student benefit.

Many students depend on summer jobs to pay their tuition and cover their expenses, such as rent and groceries. In short, they need the money to meet their needs. It was becoming clear that many of them would not be able to get jobs this summer.

Finally, on May 15, we introduced Bill C-16 to support our dairy farmers.

Our government introduced four bills in response to the COVID-19 public health emergency in Canada. These bills contained unprecedented measures, several of which I mentioned earlier. They were all developed in exceptional time frames, with public servants working all hours to make them possible. I would like to thank those hard-working public servants, many of them my constituents, for working around the clock to serve Canadians.

Our government has been quick to act and has made adjustments where necessary, modifying or introducing new measures as the situation evolved. We have based our decisions on available evidence, looking for ways to get money to those who need it as soon as possible. We have also worked collaboratively with the members opposite. I recall being on phone calls every day with officials hearing how hard members from all parties were advocating for their constituents. We negotiated the content of the bills prior to their introduction.

It is difficult to predict all of the effects that the pandemic will have on the economy and the population. Some flexibility is required to be able to respond quickly. Given the circumstances, the government continues to ensure that it can respond quickly and appropriately. Many of the measures that have been put in place will expire by the end of October. Until then, we will continue to take all of the necessary measures to support the country.

In response to those who are comparing us to other countries around the world that are having the same problems, I want to say that every country's situation is different. We have our own regional challenges, distinct populations and programs that cannot necessarily be compared to those found elsewhere. Our unique context requires us to develop our own solutions, and that is what we have done.

It would be difficult for somebody to disagree with the fact that what the government has done through Bill C-13, Bill C-14, Bill C-15 and Bill C-16 has never been achieved before in the span of three months. During that time we have introduced and passed four distinct pieces of legislation. We have increased existing benefits, we have developed new benefits and we have given individuals financial breaks. Because of the measures the government has initiated, our constituents are being supported during these times of great uncertainty.

I believe our government has acted quickly and purposefully, with the best interests of Canadians and Canadian businesses being central to the measures we have advanced. We have demonstrated that Canadians can rely on the government to be there in times of need, in times of crisis.

As the effects of the pandemic continue to unfold, we will ensure that the measures put in place meet the needs of Canadians. If new gaps or problems emerge, we will do as we have done thus far and listen to all parliamentarians and all Canadians and bring forward measures as needed.

[Ahmed Hussen, Liberal, Minister of Families]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join my colleagues today to participate in this important debate on how we can do business as the elected representatives of Canadians in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As we know, Canadians are experiencing unprecedented disruptions to ordinary life. Across the country people have lost their jobs, or have had to temporarily step away to take care of loved ones. They face an uncertain future. How we work together as parliamentarians during this time of crisis will not only shape our present, but our future.

It is thanks to the spirit of joint work that we have been able to put in place so many emergency measures so quickly and help support Canadians during this crisis. In two short months we managed to pass legislation and publish interim orders. We also implemented measures to support temporary foreign workers and other vulnerable Canadians, such as students and persons with disabilities.

I would like to spend my time today talking about these laws and measures. I would like to begin with the Canada emergency response benefit. Through the Canada Emergency Response Benefit Act, our government is providing direct support to workers who have stopped working for reasons related to COVID-19 and is helping stabilize the economy. For eligible workers, the CERB provides temporary income support of $500 a week for up to 16 weeks and it is available from March 15, 2020, to October 3, 2020.

The sole purpose of this legislation is to benefit Canadians. The CERB was created directly in response to this immediate and extraordinary public health situation. The reality is that our EI system was simply not created to handle the effects of a global pandemic. It was not designed to cover all of the various situations that Canadian workers face.

Service Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency joined forces, and in just a few weeks we developed a fast and simple service delivery approach. The result is that we are getting urgent help out to Canadians and adjusting our policies as we identify gaps. For example, after we launched the CERB on April 6, we quickly recognized that some people were not getting the help they needed the most. We listened to Canadians.

Before going on, I would like to quickly share the latest CERB numbers. As of May 22, we have received applications from 8.1 million people and dedicated public servants have processed over 99.7% of those applications. We are already considering the next steps, with the initial CERB period coming to an end in early July. The pandemic continues to create uncertainty in our economy, and we understand that many Canadians may still be out of work at that time.

A word now about students and youth. We recognized very quickly that students and youth were facing unique challenges and that many were not eligible for the CERB. That is why we announced comprehensive support for post-secondary students and recent graduates, representing an investment of approximately $9 billion. An act respecting Canada emergency student benefits has enabled the four-month Canada emergency student benefit. Students who are not eligible for the CERB can receive $1,250 a month between May and August. Students with disabilities and those with dependants can receive an additional $750 a month.

We have heard a lot in the past month about how these payments might disincentivize students to work. This is not the Government of Canada's understanding of the effects of the benefit. We have heard very clearly from students, from coast to coast to coast, that they want to work and want to serve in their communities in this time of crisis. That is why our measures do not end with the Canada emergency student benefit. We also announced the creation of tens of thousands of additional jobs, including jobs in the agricultural and processing sectors through mechanisms such as our youth employment and skills strategy and the Canada summer jobs program.

Other important measures to help students during the COVID-19 pandemic include our changes to the Canada student loans program. We are expanding eligibility for this program for September. We are also increasing the value of the Canada student grants by 60% and increasing the cap on Canada student loans from $210 to $350 per week of study. These new measures come in addition to earlier measures to pause the repayment of student and apprentice loans interest-free until September 30, 2020.

If Canadians want more information on what kind of support is out there for them, we now have a new tool online called “Find financial help during COVID-19”. The tool was launched on Friday, May 22, and is helping people figure out which government benefit program best meets their needs based on their specific circumstances. For example, the tool provides people with information on the CERB and the CESB, as well as the Canada child benefit top-up, and it will be updated if or when the Government of Canada adds new measures to support Canadians during this unprecedented time. The tool is a great example of collaboration across government between the Canadian Digital Service, Employment and Social Development Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency, with the result that Canadians are receiving accurate and timely information about the supports available to them.

Before I close, I would like to briefly speak about what the Government of Canada is doing to address the concerns of persons with disabilities during this pandemic.

We recognize that some groups are significantly and disproportionately impacted by this crisis. For some persons with disabilities, underlying medical conditions put them at greater risk of serious complications related to COVID-19. Others face discrimination and barriers to accessing information, social services and health care. In the spirit of “nothing without us”, the Accessible Canada Act and to support Canadians with disabilities, we established the COVID-19 disability advisory group. This group is currently offering advice to the government on the real-time lived experiences of persons with disabilities during this crisis. As the Prime Minister has said, our government is committed to supporting Canadians with disabilities. We will have more to say about further steps we are taking to support them shortly.

We undertook the noted measures in legislation collectively, as a Parliament, with the sole aim of helping Canadians and supporting the economy. As the situation evolves, we are ready to take further action as needed. Canada's elected representatives are up to the task.

Canada Emergency Student Benefit Act

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today.

I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill C-15, an act respecting Canada emergency student benefits. This is another bill in response to the urgency of the COVID-19 crisis, the great pandemic. It is an unparalleled and unprecedented situation.

We have never been through anything like this before, and we are seeing level after level and aspect after aspect of debate taking place in this place on different pieces of legislation as we rush to fill the gaps.

There are a few things to say about this, but before I do, I want to acknowledge that I am honoured to speak today on the unceded territory of the Algonquin nation and express to it our enormous thanks for its patience and generosity. Meegwetch.

We are in the midst of something that we can say is unknown to us, but I was very taken with the analysis by the parliamentary budget office, and I want to speak to that for just a moment.

I am hearing from some constituents who are saying, “Yes, we need all the help we can get right now in this pandemic, but who's going to pay the bills for all of this? What are we going to do when the bills fall due?” I think it's important to take a moment there.

I have been privileged to participate in the finance committee meetings and to ask questions of the Bank of Canada governor, Stephen Poloz, who with his team has done an amazing job; to have an insight into what governments all around the world are doing; and to let Canadians know that we are certainly not alone in this. I think it is obvious that we are not alone in fighting the public health crisis that is COVID-19, but we are also not alone in deciding that there are certain prescriptions for an economy that will help us all.

I do not think Canadians have noticed the absence of certain things, but let me just say that there is an absence of things that we would not want to see, such as runs on the bank. We are not seeing people lining up, saying, “I better get my money out right now. I don't trust the system.” We are not hearing people say, “I can't make my credit card bills because of usury levels of interest rates that have been hiked up.” We have seen that rates are supposed to be going down. A lot of these things we are seeing are the result of very specific prescriptions that are being followed not just by the Bank of Canada but by central banks around the world.

To colleagues and friends here, I recommend the International Monetary Fund review of what is going on. The trillions of dollars that are being spent by governments around the world are, in a sense, backstopped by monetary policy that says we can get through this, but we have to do a couple of things. We are going to ramp down interest rates to as close to zero as possible, so that the cost of borrowing goes down. We are going to introduce more liquidity into the system with a number of measures, including the Bank of Canada's purchase of federal bonds and provincial bonds in the billions and billions of dollars. Bond purchases by our central bank do not add to debt or deficit. They increase liquidity and keep cash in the system so that we do not have a credit crunch.

It is important to note that we have been through situations when things were much worse for our financial picture than now. Even when we get through this, after all the money that is planned to be spent, our debt-to-GDP ratio will not be nearly as bad as it was in the early 1990s.

We have the International Monetary Fund report and the report from the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. No one is sanguine about this, but if we read the International Monetary Fund reports and the report from the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, as Canadians we are left knowing this: We are not in this alone, and the measures taken by the central bank and by the finance minister and the government are so far not putting us in financial peril.

One of the things we do not mention enough is that we are in a very privileged position. An analogy used by Stephen Poloz when he was speaking to the finance committee is that just as COVID-19 will be much harder for people who have underlying health conditions and do not go into this situation in a healthy state, so too are nation states more at risk when they do not go in healthy. However, we are in a privileged position. Our debt-to-GDP ratio was the lowest in the G7 when this crisis hit, and we had historic levels of employment. Certainly in my living memory, it is the closest thing to full employment that I have ever seen in Canada. This is what the Governor of the Bank of Canada meant when he talked about fiscal firepower, and the finance minister has used the same term.

That is not to say that this is not a deep economic crisis that has befallen us, along with a big deep public health care crisis that has befallen us, but just to say that it is not piling on debt, while being a deficit for sure.

The PBO suggested that when spending is temporary, such as it is now, we would most likely expect to bounce back as we did at the end of the Second World War with a large surplus in 1947, but only if certain conditions are upheld. One is that we need to hold the country together. I am so grateful to every province when I hear the deputy prime minister say that there are weekly calls with every premier of every province and territory with the Prime Minister. That is a very healthy thing.

I think it is very important that no matter how much sparring is going on today while we are meeting in person, behind the scenes there is tremendous collaboration and no one party can claim credit for things. Yes, the Greens advocated that 10% was not enough and we had to have 75% in the wage subsidy, and that was done. I think that is a credit to all of us in this place, those who came to it more slowly and those who advocated first. We have to work together or we will not get through this.

Back to where we are in terms of our financial position, I am hoping we do not bounce back in the sense that we go to an economy such as we had before, which had glaring inequities. I hope that we bounce forward and that when the pandemic is over, we look at an economic prescription for the country that is consistent with the urgency of the climate crisis, that is consistent with getting people back to work, doing things like retrofitting our buildings to make sure that we maximize energy efficiency, so that every building could produce more energy than it uses. That is doable. Also, I hope that we have an electricity grid that works as a national energy corridor east to west, north to south, and that it is 100% renewable energy.

There are things that we can do so that we can come out of this crisis with, again, closer to full employment and with less social inequity, with clear action to ensure our seniors are well housed and well cared for, with clear action to make sure that we do not have a social safety net full of holes but that it is repaired, and that we move toward guaranteed livable income.

I just made a note of the most recent book title that came to my attention. I commend it to my friends in the Conservative Party because it was written by a Conservative. Senator Hugh Segal's new book is out, and it is called Bootstraps Need Boots: One Tory's Lonely Fight to End Poverty in Canada. I would love to see that fight be less lonely and I thank our former parliamentary colleague, former Senator Hugh Segal, for bringing forward a book at a time when the topic of guaranteed livable income, or universal basic income, has never been as hot a topic.

I will pause parenthetically because of my recent exchange with the hon. member for London—Fanshawe about the fact that I say “guaranteed livable income” and others say “universal basic income”. We have adopted, as Greens, the term “guaranteed livable income” because if we want to make sure that the amount that every Canadian receives actually creates a situation in which they find their situation livable and not some level of poverty in which they are moderately better off than they were before. That is a debate for another day.

We are here to look at Bill C-15. It is coming again, as we have seen, in waves, in response to the pandemic. We can look at it and see that first the government looked at people who did not qualify for EI. What did we do? The Canada emergency benefit, CERB, came in first, and then we had to make sure that this amount of money was improved upon by looking at things like reducing student loans. Bill C-13 in this place had 19 different parts and was dealing with the impacts on individual Canadians. There was not enough there for small business. We have been pushing harder on that. Bill C-14 gave us more, looking at programs to help small business with access to loans to cover their rent.

New announcements are made almost daily, and we still have people falling through the cracks. We still have small business falling through the cracks. However, some of the people falling through the cracks who are helped today are our students. It is terribly important to recognize that many students who did not earn $5,000 last year will not qualify for the CERB. For some other reasons, they certainly cannot expect to find jobs this summer in their chosen field and the Canada summer jobs program cannot absorb the number of people who need the income supports right now and who need enough money to live on.

Many students are, as we have heard today, people living as a married couple with children, or a single mom with children who is also going to school. Currently, the benefit provided in this piece of legislation is not adequate to help all of those people with their bills, because the amount of money in the initial offering is $1,250.

However, I note that under this legislation the minister may make changes by regulation to improve that. That, of course, is the minister of employment and social development. This piece of legislation requires that the minister receive approval by the Minister of Finance to make changes to the amount received or the weeks it is available.

Personally, I would have gone in the other direction with this legislation. The Conservatives have made it more restrictive. I would have made sure that the minister for employment and social development could make those changes without permission from the Minister of Finance, because they make so much sense.

I want to pause because I note the minister for employment and social development has been with us all day today. I want to thank her for her hard work. I know she has been working around the clock, like many ministers. I know she is a mom with kids at home. Like all of my friends with kids still at home, keeping the kids occupied while also being on a computer and the phone day and night to make some of the most massive changes in that portfolio and in living memory is daunting. I want to thank her for her diligence.

The missing piece in this that still concerns the Greens greatly is what we are doing for international students. This legislation applies to a person who is a Canadian citizen; it certainly applies to indigenous Canadians; it applies to permanent residents as found under the definitions in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act or a protected person under the meaning of that act as well. What do we do about our international students?

We have something in the order of potentially half a million international students in this country now. The international students program contributes over $20 billion to our economy and leads to the employment of 170,000 Canadians. As we all know, international students pay far higher fees. They come into Canada and of course contribute to our economy by paying their rent and buying their groceries.

I do not know how many members saw on CBC a few nights back a young woman being interviewed about her experience as a foreign student in Canada. Her landlady was telling her not to worry and that if she could not pay the rent, she would not charge her. She was also giving her groceries. That is a really wonderful Canadian moment. It brought tears to my eyes to hear this young student saying that if it were not for her landlady, she would have neither a roof over her head nor food.

What about the international students who do not have a landlady like that? So far here are their options. If they made $5,000 last year, they can qualify for the CERB, but if they did not make that amount of money, they will not qualify. If they are an international student and also a permanent resident, they would qualify under today's bill for the emergency benefit for students. However, if they are not a permanent resident, if they only have their student visa to be in Canada, they would not qualify.

We still have a problem. It has been identified by the Canadian Federation of Students, which is asking for improvements to this bill. It has two asks. One is that it be $2,000 a month, which is something the minister can do by regulation after this bill passes, but we would have to come back here and re-legislate this to change the definition of “student” in order to allow it to apply to an international student, unless we tinker with one of the other programs such as the Canada summer jobs program. There is still a deep concern for people who are falling between the cracks.

For the simplest way to avoid falling between the cracks, I go back to my earlier reference to a guaranteed livable income. That would be one way of making sure there would be no one in Canada so economically insecure they would be pushed out of the place they are living, unable to afford food, and unable to find a job and not fitting any of the existing programs.

I am grateful for the effort of everybody in the cabinet who have been working so hard, as well as all the civil servants who clearly have been working. As members of Parliament, we are on the phone with them on Saturdays and Sundays. If Canadians do not know, everybody I can find within any government department is working really long days seven days a week.

I have worked with them on rescuing Canadians stranded in other countries. It is extraordinary. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the whole team at Global Affairs Canada seem to have converted themselves into what I have been doing at home myself, part-time travel agent, but to rescue over 20,000 Canadians from over 144 countries is a monumental feat. However, I see the same level of hard work happening when we have Sunday phone calls and my questions are being answered by officials in the Department of Finance, correctional services or indigenous services.

By thanking everyone involved, I am not saying everything is perfect, but for Canadians watching or listening to this now, they need to know that thousands of people are working in ways that I have never seen a government work ever in my life. It is important to say to them, as we say to our front-line health care workers, to the people in our neighbourhoods who are still stocking the grocery store shelves, who are driving the trucks, who are planting their fields now so we will have food in this country, to everybody who is doing the work while most of us are locked up at home, we are deeply grateful, including all of the civil servants who I know have been knocking themselves out.

I heard a story from a friend about a family Zoom call. The husband of one of the people on the family Zoom call mentioned that his wife was working in the federal civil service. He started to say “my wife”, broke down and started crying. There is a level of strain on families working in the federal civil service, and I want to pause to say thanks to everyone who is working so hard.

When I mention the gaps, it is not to say this is not good enough and I am angry with the government. It is to say we have to keep working. Maybe, in hindsight, we can agree it would have been better to bring in one measure, as we have been advocating, but I am not angry the Government of Canada has failed to do that so far. What we need to do is help each other as much as possible. I think that means being kind toward those who we see are falling short of what needs to be done, recognizing that nobody has ever worked this hard ever. If we hold together as a country and keep our partisanship to a bare minimum, though I would actually like to see it erased into a nothingness that says we are all in this together, there is plenty of time when it is over to try to get a gotcha point in to try to score something for television, but right now we need to be deeply grateful that we are in this country.

We could be anywhere around the world and trying to rescue people. Knowing what is going on in places like Ecuador and India, knowing what might happen in the continent of Africa, knowing how hard people are working and knowing how relatively safe we all are, I know every single person in this place recognizes how very fortunate we are as a country and as a people.

I also ask us to think in this moment about whether we cannot do more for the developing world, if we cannot do more to avert famine, if we cannot see ourselves stretching ourselves a bit more. However, for now, I will be voting for this legislation, but with a very strong plea that we do more for our international students, that we figure a program out where it is needed, so that no student falls through the cracks.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Mr. Speaker, this is Bill C-15. Bill C-13 was the first wage subsidy and first emergency bill, which the government did not get right. It listened and brought Bill C-14 forward. I am hoping, therefore, that we might see a Bill C-16 so that we can actually fix this new project.

With half of the $9 billion the Liberals are committing overall to student relief, they could massively increase the Canada summer jobs grant and allow half of that investment to trickle down to small and medium-sized businesses and farms and provide relief for many of the front-line essential services, as well as jobs for students in return for the money. There would still be enough money left over for a $1,000 tuition credit for all students, at half of the overall cost of this program.

For the minister in charge of the middle class and those working hard to join it, why is the government's program so structured to prevent people from working? We should incentivize work, and wherever that government investment in students can trickle down to small businesses and farms, why would we not do it that way?

Proceedings of the House and Committees

[Paul Manly, Green, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Madam Speaker, I agree that we need to model behaviour, be responsible and listen to the health authorities and what they have asked us to do. They have asked us to stay in place.

Originally, when the border was closed, we were told that it was supposed to open tomorrow, but the government is now going to extend that border closure for another 30 days. The opposition did its job on Bill C-13. We did not agree to what was written in that legislation and we all got together and it was changed.

Did the hon. member not see the member for Carleton questioning the Minister of Finance at the finance committee? That was televised. We are seeing accountability through our committees.

If schoolteachers can hold Zoom classes and control the meeting with children asking questions, why can our Speaker not control a question period virtually? I am seriously disappointed that we are not modelling the kind of behaviour that we should be to Canadians. We should be resting in place, we should be doing what the health authorities have asked of us and we should be using the virtual tools we have to hold the government to account.

COVID-19 Emergency Response Act, No. 2

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, what a wonderful note on which to rise to speak today, to see the paragraph that I was initially so pleased to see in the unanimous consent motion, and the government will implement measures without delay. It is much improved through our work unanimously. I want to thank the NDP for taking the lead in making sure that benefits are going to people where there had been gaps. Clearly the Minister of Employment and the Minister of Finance have been working hard to try to address gaps.

Before I get too far into discussing what we have done here today and what we have been doing as parliamentarians, I do want to pause and on behalf of the Green Party of Canada thank all of the essential workers: the front-line workers, particularly those in the health care professions, including our doctors, our nurses, our first responders and our personal care workers who go into senior homes. There are so many people right now without whom we could not self-isolate in safety. We could not practise our social distancing without truck drivers who make sure there is food on the shelves, and the workers in our grocery stores who make sure that the shelves are stocked. There are efforts to stop hoarding and make sure that we look out for each other.

Essential workers in this context include some people that we often do not stop to celebrate. They tend to be the lower-paid workers. In this moment, I just want to express on behalf of all of us again our deep gratitude. It is particularly concerning that we are not ensuring that these people are protected. PPE, personal protective equipment, which is now on the tip of our tongues, was not something we talked about.

We should have learned lessons from SARS. I worked with Sheela Basrur and I love her. The work on SARS, and the commissions at the time warned us that we would need to be ready for another pandemic and that we should not let these supplies run low. I am not going to play a blame game. It is human nature. The farther we got away from the SARS pandemic, the less we went to check how much was stored on our shelves. Do we have enough N95 masks? Do we have enough gowns and gloves? Are we protecting our front-line workers enough?

We still have a crisis. There are still places, people, hospitals and senior care homes that are crying out for this protective equipment. They are crying out as we gather here. I thank them for what they are doing. We do it every day at home. I go out on my balcony on Second Street in Sidney. I know my neighbours are at home because all around me I can hear them banging on pots and pans. The streets of my community, Sidney by the Sea, are empty, but at 7 p.m., there are people in the marina blowing their boat horns and banging their pots and pans. I just want to thank all the health care workers across Canada.

I also want to thank my caucus members. I would split my time if I could, but the hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith is in Nanaimo—Ladysmith and the hon. member for Fredericton is in Fredericton. She is still self-isolating from her last trip to Ottawa and New Brunswick rules require that she stay put. The hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith was not able to make the trip. I am enormously grateful to be here.

While I am expressing gratitude, I want to thank the hon. Minister of Employment for giving me a lift. I also have to thank the leader of the official opposition, because I think it was more or less his plane. It is a new term for me: We “plane-pooled”. We went from Fredericton to Victoria to Regina, which is not a regularly scheduled thing.

I was glad that Jill and the kids could come along too. It was a family event as we made our way here. I am so grateful. I booked all my commercial flights and I have to say I feel so privileged and so grateful. It was a special feeling to know a government plane was going to pick me up. I did not expect it, but I have to say I was semi-terrified about the transits I was going to have to make through four airports. I have a lot of reasons for being grateful.

With that, I want to turn to the legislation. We are working hard as MPs. I know every single member of government is working hard, and I include in that the civil servants.

I am used to working seven days a week, but I am not used to getting an email back from staff at the civil servant level from the western diversification office when I write about a routine grant that has a 30-day window. It is because people are working at home, civil servants too, and I thank them. I know they are working Saturdays and Sundays, because they answer my emails on Saturdays and Sundays. This is an extraordinary time.

I am not sure how others in this place will feel about it, but I want to say publicly that I think we are eventually going to need the Emergencies Act. I know that the premiers said no, but I think we are eventually going to wish we had had it in place.

The public welfare portion of the Emergencies Act is not the War Measures Act of old. I read it for the first time a couple of weeks ago and thought that it is what legislation to deal with an emergency looks like when it is not written by people in the middle of an emergency. It is thoughtful: It does not suspend our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it does not send the army in anywhere and it respects provincial jurisdiction and the use of provincial police forces.

I will give members one example that is in my heart right now.

In the community I represent, Saanich—Gulf Islands, the Gulf Islands are being inundated with visitors who are coming in by ferry, even though BC Ferries has told people not to come unless their trip is essential. These small communities are really feeling it. The grocery store shelves empty out with people from urban areas coming to visit. I know it is happening in cottage country. I am sure the Muskokas are experiencing the same thing, with people getting out of the city and going to their cottage. However, the health care systems and services in these more remote rural communities cannot handle the kind of inundation of people that is happening now.

I want to flag for my colleagues here the way the Emergencies Act works. It can be invoked; it does not need new legislation. It can be invoked by the Governor in Council, but when Parliament is in recess, it must be recalled within seven days to discuss and debate it.

In an ideal world, just as a precaution, I would have liked us to discuss and debate it today while we are here so that we have it in our back pocket if we need it. I am not certain that at some point in the coming weeks we will not wish we had it to make sure that we had a national priority system for the distribution of ventilators and N95 masks, or that we did not have the capacity to say that we need to stop people from going into these smaller communities that cannot handle an influx of population right now.

This brings me to the bill we have in front of us. I think it is time to think about transformational change. The hon. member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie was pointing this out a moment ago. We are doing things now in real time so fast that those of us who have been parliamentarians for a while would not have been able to imagine that government could roll out these programs so fast. It is an extraordinary tribute to hard work, thinking outside the box and being liberated from some constraints, because the pandemic of COVID-19 is a bigger threat than anything we have faced in the short term.

I make the parenthetical comment that the climate crisis is still a larger threat to human civilization than this pandemic, but this has caused civil servants, ministers and opposition members to think in different ways. This has caused our Conservative friends, like the member for Carleton on conference calls we have had, to be the voice that asks, “What about the small credit unions? What about helping the small credit unions, not just the big ones?” I thought to myself that we should not ever make assumptions about people. I did not think that was something the member for Carleton would say, but sure enough, he did. There is concern for all of us, and the basic needs of all have risen to the top. As I said earlier today, this experience has shown us that life is more important than money.

That is a truly fundamental lesson in a culture that normally protects the economy above all else.

Now we know that we have to protect our economy and rebuild it, but not at the cost of human lives. We know what is important.

In looking at this, I hope that we can agree at some point that a guaranteed livable income is what the country needs. As other members have mentioned, in normal times not everybody can pay their bills. In normal times, kids who should be able to go to university cannot afford it. In normal times, too many people fall between the cracks. We can fix those cracks. We can fix those gaps.

The Green Party of Canada has, way before I was involved with it, stood for a guaranteed living income.

We need a guaranteed minimum income to allow everyone to live sustainably.

I hope we will come back to this. For now we have Bill C-13. It went quite far toward looking at gaps, but we recognize that they remained. That is why we are back for Bill C-14.

I am pleased to see the wage subsidy increased to 75%. I am pleased to see the tweaking around definitions of what is an eligible employee to make sure that we do not accidentally create a one-day mistake. I am pleased to see the changes around eligible entities and, of course, around the qualifying periods. This makes the whole program much more accessible to more companies and employers that are able to give that wage subsidy.

However, it does not deal with every situation, not even still. If one thing is shown by trying to come up with legislation to meet every circumstance and fill every gap the way we are doing it, it is that one size will not fit all.

This is true even when talking about senior homes. I received an email today from Meadowlane, a seniors home on Salt Spring Island. It is run as an independent living facility, so it is not within the health authorities. It has additional costs but is a not-for-profit society, so how does it handle these additional costs? It does not have deep pockets. Obviously costs are going up. The workers are stretched. The home needs to buy more masks and more gowns, and it does not have a revenue deduction because people are still in the home. Not every circumstance fits yet to our best efforts in this place.

Similarly, I have talked to venture capital businesses. They have the venture capital and are on the verge of a breakthrough, but the BDC venture capital model is not working for them because their venture capital comes from firms that are not in the recognized group within the BDC plan. We need some flexibility there too. We need to be able to say to businesses that if they are on the verge of really taking off, we should not be restricting where they get their money.

Speaking of money, I want to pick up on a point made by the hon. member for Burnaby South earlier today, which is about the banks. The Minister of Finance has clearly been exerting maximum diplomacy on the banks, getting them to say that they will let people have a longer time to pay their mortgages, but the six big banks are misusing his good faith. I will put it that way. They are not so profitable for nothing. Last year's profit of the six big banks in Canada came to $46 billion. It is 10 years in a row now that they have made more money year over year, and we can see why. They are saying to people that they do not have to pay their mortgage for a while, but when they pay it the banks are going to get them.

This is not team Canada. This is not the spirit we want to see. I think it is about time that the large banks were taxed at a higher level. We tax our big banks less than other countries in the G7 do. Why? I guess we like them. I am not sure they like us.

I would love to see the Minister of Finance convene by conference call all of the country's credit unions and ask them what they are capable of doing. What would they be able to do to help the small businesses in this country avoid bankruptcy? What would they be able to do to get them money up front that was not a loan so they could pay their rent and not go under due to the fixed costs of business?

I grew up in my family business as a kid. Through my twenties I waitressed and cooked in my family restaurant on the Cabot Trail, which was a seasonal business. I think about my parents, and if this had hit us then, I do not know what we would have done. We would have had 35 seasonal employees that we could not hire. We would have been wondering if we should open or not and what the heck to do with all the things we had to pay for no matter what. That is what I am hearing from businesses in my riding now.

Someone emailed me the other day, and the email just about broke my heart. I will not give any biographical details, but the writer described himself as a 250-pound man covered in tattoos. He said that morning he went to the bathroom and shut the door so his kids would not hear him crying. He has businesses that cannot open right now and he has no way to pay the rent on them. Despite all of his life savings, he is already indebted. Small businesses are going to need more than what we have here.

I am encouraged because the unanimous consent motion does speak to short-term support measures for Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises that will be partially non-refundable. We have to work on how much is “partially”. We have to do way more. If we want to get out of this, which we do, as a country with businesses that run in the black, we cannot let them go into deeper debt. They will not go into deeper debt; I know they will not. They are already telling me that if they take out a $40,000 loan without interest, they will not be able to pay it back and will then go bankrupt later. This is a real concern and is coming from the heart.

There are other issues that matter to us across this country. We know one size does not fit all in any category.

Before my time is elapsed, I want to thank everyone in the government and the provincial governments and particularly our public health officers, from Dr. Theresa Tam to Dr. Bonnie Henry in B.C. to, back again across this country, Dr. Strang in Nova Scotia. These guys are now our daily friends on TV. We see them more than we see those we used to watch on TV. We now know who we can look to for advice. We can look to those public civil servants whose job is public health. I am enormously grateful to all of them, because as every Canadian has witnessed, they are also working around the clock.

It is now clear that these are extraordinary circumstances. We must find solutions together. We must continue to work together. As members of Parliament, we must find ways to work virtually. I do not know how that will be possible, but I know that things that once seemed impossible are possible.

I mentioned earlier that Doug Ford says the Deputy Prime Minister is his therapist. This kind of thing would not have been considered possible a short time ago. We need to work together.

On behalf of the Green Party caucus, I give my word that we will do whatever we can. We have been forwarding advice, complaints, ideas and worries to a listening ear, and for that we are grateful. In this crisis, which does not at this point have a clear end in sight, we need to be able to say to every one of our constituents and to every Canadian, permanent resident and foreign student, for whom I am very worried, that if they are living in Canada we have their backs. If they feel that no one is there for them right now, they should not worry. I want them to reach out to us and tell us what they need. We will fight for them.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will point out that the original legislation, Bill C-13, did not allow for that. Municipalities have it in their laws that they may not run a deficit, so it is unfortunate to see that in many cases they are making tough decisions. Those same tough decisions are being made by many small and medium-sized businesses right now, and not because of a law made by their provincial government but because of the law of economics.

There is zero cash flow coming in. Landlords are knocking on tenants' doors constantly asking when they are going to pay their rent. Employees are asking questions about whether or not they will have a job. Many small and medium-sized enterprises have said they will not be able to benefit from the Canada emergency bank account because they are below that threshold. It is extremely difficult for me as a member of Parliament to say, “I am sorry, but you have not been captured in this legislation.”

There are many who by design will not be captured in this legislation, and there will be many who will not be captured by accident. That is why it is so important that all members of Parliament convey their concerns, whether it be in this place, online or through written letters. I hope the Prime Minister and his cabinet are listening.

COVID-19 Pandemic

[Carla Qualtrough, Liberal, Delta, BC]

Mr. Chair, we need to make a change.

There is a regulatory change that needs to happen, and that would, under the first emergency response act, have to be signed off by three of us. We are working hard to make sure that happens quickly.

Statements Regarding COVID-19

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by acknowledging that we are gathered on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin people.

I thank them again for their hospitality and generosity. Meegwetch.

I want to thank all my colleagues for unanimously agreeing to give me a chance to speak on this momentous day. A thousand thanks to them.

It really means a lot to me that the Green Party is recognized in this place and allowed to speak as we gather in these entirely unprecedented times.

I was moved by the Prime Minister's remarks in reminding us of Vimy. I had not planned to speak about Vimy, but on April 9 this year, I noticed that my husband was very depressed and wandering about, and he said he was thinking of his grandfather, who was machine-gunned on Vimy on April 9, 1917. His grandfather survived; otherwise I would not be married to my husband, I suppose. His grandfather, John Owen Wilson, survived, got back to British Columbia and ended up as chief justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court, but the sacrifices of Vimy are not forgotten. The courage and solidarity of previous generations are not forgotten.

I have thought in recent times that, being a boomer, a 1954 baby, I'm one of the last of a generation that remembers that time of solidarity and sacrifice. Not that I lived through the war or the depression, but my parents did. The family stories become part of who we are; they are in our bones, the notion that government steps up and that government is on our side. I think that through years of neo-liberalism, we have gotten this idea that government is kind of in our way, picking our pockets. I am really relieved that in some ways this social solidarity that we will have coming out of this pandemic will allow us to see that individuals are a part of their government, that their democracy works for them. I hope that can be a lasting lesson.

We are here together in a way that I want to acknowledge with deep gratitude. Parliament is working well, even when we are at a distance. I want to thank the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and so many different ministers for their openness to hearing opposition ideas and concerns.

I will share with Canadians what the last couple of weeks have felt like, working from home non-stop, 24-7. A lot of Canadians would not imagine that every single day at 1:30 B.C. time, 4:30 in Ottawa, every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, we have an opportunity to ask anything. In my mind, this is how the ideas have been working. It is quite true that a lot of the things we wanted were not in the first bill, Bill C-13. It is quite true that Greens, like others, said that it should not be a 10% wage subsidy; it should be 75%. We made that case, and individual examples came forward.

We have those daily question and answer sessions. I know that not all of us get our questions in every single day. Some of us do well. The member for Carleton does well, and I do pretty well. We push *1 and go for it. We do our best to get our questions out there, but in my head this is how it has been working. We raise a question and we ask something like, “What happens right now, when Bishop McMenamie has just contacted me and the Anglican Church on Vancouver Island has separate churches and they all have their own CRA number but there is only one employer, so the 30% reduction in revenue compared to some other reference period does not work at all in this circumstance?” Then today I looked at the most recent version of the bill. “Entity” is redefined, and it now covers that specific weird example of the Anglican diocese and an issue raised to me by Bishop McMenamie. There may have been many other MPs who asked a question that stumped the Finance Canada senior officials who were on the telephone with us every single day, but when I see that in the bill, I see that my question was not only a question, but it flagged an issue.

This is what I hear from ministers: to keep sending them the specific concerns that we see and to keep telling them where the gaps are, because the MPs on the ground, right across Canada, are the eyes and ears on the front line who are able to say that nothing that is in place right now, with all due respect, is working for small businesses.

I am terrified that a lot of very small businesses, seasonal businesses, restaurants and so on, are going to go under, even with the wage subsidy. However, in today's unanimous consent motion, which I saw before coming here, I was very relieved to see that it calls for the government to implement short-term support measures for small and medium-sized enterprises, “which will be partially non-refundable, with the primary objective of maintaining jobs and reducing debt related to fixed costs”. That is what I keep hearing from small businesses: that they cannot afford to pay their rent and that the wage subsidy does not help them.

Without being just a Pollyanna about our circumstances, I want to say that it means a lot to me that we have come forward as individual MPs, opposition and Liberals, to say, “What is happening does not work. There are too many people, such as students and people in the gig economy, who are not covered by CERB. What are we going to do?”

Today's unanimous consent motion says that we will implement measures without delay. I think “without delay” would actually meet what the member for Burnaby South said, and right now, today, we say that everybody can apply. That language suggests that the government is not saying, “We've gotten this perfect. Go away.” What I hear from minister after minister is, “We're learning. We're working as hard as we can.”

I want to say that the Minister of Foreign Affairs and his parliamentary secretary have been available to me pretty much 24-7 for the 50 or so constituents I have helped to get home so far. I still have about a dozen I am working on, and the parliamentary secretary knows well that I have someone stranded in Vanuatu.

There is a real sense of all hands on deck, and I want Canadians to know that. I want them to know that there is a spirit of non-partisanship, of “We are team Canada and we are all in it together.” Nothing exemplifies that for me more than the new-found best-friend relationship between the Premier of Ontario and the Deputy Prime Minister. I think this shows stepping up to a circumstance where we are all at risk. We are thinking about being surrounded by death. We are thinking about wearing our masks. I have Lysol wipes here, below my desk. We are constantly vigilant, but we are also working together because we are Canadians. This must not be a moment that divides us. We must remember this and work differently in the future.

Yes, I want to press for guaranteed livable income. We will keep doing that. Yes, I want to press that we will, in this place and before too long, see new climate targets that meet the imperative of a looming disaster far greater than COVID-19, which threatens to kill more people and wipe out civilization. It cannot be postponed.

However, right now I want to give my thanks for the spirit of collaboration. The Prime Minister spoke of the fact that this time, of course, is a season of many religious observances. It is Passover. I wish happy Passover to my Jewish friends and family. Vaisakhi is also coming up soon. In a few weeks, it will be Ramadan for my Islamic friends, a period of fasting and reflection. I am just finishing Lent, a period of fasting and reflection.

It speaks to the unprecedented nature of the crisis we are in that, as far as I have been able to determine through research from home and looking through every bit of constitutional and parliamentary history I can find, the Parliament of Canada has never before sat on Easter Saturday. Good Friday, particularly in previous generations, was held sacred. The idea of meeting on Easter weekend would have been impossible to imagine, but here we are and this is why.

Looking at the clock, I think that in about 10 hours it will be dawn in Jerusalem, and the first morning light of that sunrise will strike the walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is built on the spot where we are told the original cave was in which the body of Jesus Christ was wrapped and placed in the tomb, with a rock rolled in front of it. Approximately 10 hours from now, at dawn, will be the remembrance of our stories, tradition and faith, the most significant day, the most profound and important day of the Christian calendar, the resurrection of Christ: that the stone was rolled back and that those who loved him, Mary and others, came and thought the body had been stolen, but the angels came to them, and then Jesus disguised as a gardener came to them and said, “No, He has risen.”

In this time, when we are surrounded by death and we are worried about our mortality and that of the people we love, we can think of the things that are most important. After this is over, we will recognize that we can survive, that we can break the bonds of death, that we can have faith in each other, that we can invest ourselves in love for each other and our communities, and that we can remember what really matters. Right now, as I watch my grandkids on Zoom family chats, what would I not give for a hug?

I would love to think about our lives as transformed by this in ways that are profound, as we recognize that, for the first time in our lives, governments all around the world have decided, without hesitation, that life is more important than money. We have deliberately and voluntarily shut down our economies to save lives. We have deliberately and voluntarily created for ourselves as lawmakers, as policy-makers, the challenge of economic recovery, because we did not hesitate to know that saving lives is more important than money.

When this is all over, I hope to God it is over with a minimum loss of life in Canada and around the world. I am particularly worried for those countries that lack basic health care. We must not forget our obligations to the poorest of the poor, just as we do not forget indigenous peoples in Canada, just as we do not forget those who are most marginalized and homeless. When we get through this together, let us remember that in this pandemic we discovered what really matters.