Bill C-14 (Historical)

Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2020

An Act to implement certain provisions of the economic statement tabled in Parliament on November 30, 2020 and other measures

Part 1 amends the Income Tax Act to provide additional support to families with young children as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic progresses. It also amends the Children’s Special Allowances Act to provide a similar benefit in respect of young children under that Act. As part of the Government’s response to COVID-19, it amends the Income Tax Act to provide that an expense can qualify as a qualifying rent expense for the purposes of the Canada Emergency Rent Subsidy (CERS) when it becomes due rather than when it is paid, provided certain conditions are met.
Part 2 amends the Canada Student Loans Act to provide that, during the period that begins on April 1, 2021 and ends on March 31, 2022, no interest is payable by a borrower on a guaranteed student loan and no amount on account of interest is required to be paid by the borrower.
Part 3 amends the Canada Student Financial Assistance Act to provide that, during the period that begins on April 1, 2021 and ends on March 31, 2022, no interest is payable by a borrower on a student loan and no amount on account of interest is required to be paid by the borrower.
Part 4 amends the Apprentice Loans Act to provide that, during the period that begins on April 1, 2021 and ends on March 31, 2022, no interest is payable by a borrower on an apprentice loan and no amount on account of interest is required to be paid by a borrower.
Part 5 amends the Food and Drugs Act to 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.
It also amends that Act to provide that any prescribed provisions of regulations made under that Act apply to food, drugs, cosmetics and devices intended for export that would otherwise be exempt from the application of that Act.
Part 6 authorizes payments to be made out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund
(a) to the Government of Canada’s regional development agencies for the Regional Relief and Recovery Fund;
(b) in respect of specified initiatives related to health; and
(c) for the purpose of making income support payments under section 4 of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit Act.
Part 7 amends the Borrowing Authority Act to, among other things, increase the maximum amount of certain borrowings and include certain borrowings that were previously excluded in the calculation of that amount. It also makes a related amendment to the Financial Administration Act.

Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2020

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Montcalm for the question.

I do not know why. This has been going on for far too long already. That is why, in my speech, I talked about the power to withhold spending.

Since the days of Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien, successive Conservative and Liberal governments have made cuts to health. Now they are trying to teach us a lesson and imposing national standards on us.

I was listening to the Prime Minister's response at noon. He said he would wait until after the pandemic to invest more in health transfers. That is unacceptable. Our health system needs help now. It is on life support.

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to work with my hon. colleague from Quebec. We have been working on a number of issues from across the country.

This particular bill would raise the debt cap for Canada. Is she at all concerned about the new levels of debt that the government is taking us to, and does the Bloc Québécois have any plans to help repay that debt?

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague. I have been working with him recently on the issue of modern slavery and human trafficking, a subject that we will be revisiting shortly.

To answer his question, I would say that in the early days of the pandemic, the Bloc Québécois was the first to try to hold the Liberal government to account. How many times has my colleague from Joliette risen in the House to demand an economic update?

In order to know where we are going, sometimes we need to know where we stand.

I think the economic statement came late. We needed this update much sooner. Of course, we are concerned about the whole issue of transparency in funding and programs. The Liberals have a habit of not wanting to tell us everything and of making investments that reward their close friends, the emergency wage subsidy being a prime example.

When Liberal members tell me that political parties like the Liberal Party need help as much as businesses in Shefford, I find it deeply insulting.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Madam Speaker, we know that pre-pandemic, one in five Canadians was not going to see the dentist regularly, and 6.5 million Canadians had no dental coverage at all. The expectation is that two million more Canadians will lose their benefits because of COVID-19 and the economic impact of it. We spend about $246 billion a year on health care. The NDP plan to cover all families that have incomes of $90,000 or less and ensure they get dental coverage would cost about $1.5 billion, versus the $246 billion we spend on health care.

Does my colleague agree and support that universal health care should cover everything from head to toe, including dental coverage, and does she support the proposal that was tabled today by my colleague from St. John's East?

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to remind my hon. colleague that health care is the jurisdiction of Quebec and the provinces. It is up to them to make their own decisions.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Madam Speaker, $1.1 trillion is a lot of money. That is what the national debt will be at the end of this fiscal year in accordance with this fall economic statement that we are debating today. It becomes very intimidating when we measure that national debt against gross domestic product, the GDP, in analysis of how well the economy can manage the debt. Just a few years ago it stood at 30%, but by the end of this fiscal year, March 31, 2021, in accordance with this fall economic plan it will stand at 55%, uncomfortably close to its 67% level during Canada's debt crisis in the mid-1990s.

We have heard many times from the Liberal side of the House that we can afford it, we have the fiscal room and we have the muscle power to manage this debt. That is true because, when we managed to get that 1995 debt crisis under control, we had a series of good, fiscally responsible governments that managed the economy, including through the Harper years.

Today, the big debt, $1.1 trillion, is going to be affordable only because interest rates are as low as they are. The federal government can borrow money at less than 1%. Money is almost free. Why would the Liberals not borrow as much as they can? However, any economist will tell us that interest rates will not stay low forever. Central banks will respond to inflationary pressures. It has happened throughout human history and that is not going to change.

In a debate in the House a couple of months ago, the member for Carleton, who is the Conservative Party's shadow minister for finance, asked what a 1% hike in interest rates would cost the Canadian treasury. It was a rhetorical question because obviously the math is very simple. One trillion dollars is a one followed by 12 zeroes. If we multiply it by 1%, it is now a one with 10 zeroes, which is $10 billion. That is $10 billion every year if interest rates go up only 1%. That is $10 billion that is not available for the federal government to spend on other important programs, including health transfers and giving Canadians the help that they need. That money is now going to be taken away from Canadians who need help and who have come to rely on these programs. That money is now going to go to international bankers and pension funds and make them richer.

I know that the middle of a worldwide pandemic is not the time to talk about cutting costs. The Conservative Party recognizes that the federal government has a big role to play in a time of crisis: to keep liquidity in the marketplace and confidence in the minds of the public, and to keep the economy going so that people can keep on working, earning paycheques, taking care of their kids, paying for university, and paying the mortgage or rent. We recognize that this is important. The Conservative Party has stood right along with the Liberal government to support these programs that Canadians need so badly to get through this economic crisis.

Where do we go from here? We are happily seeing a light at the end of the COVID tunnel. We are not there yet, but we are optimistic that there is a post-COVID world that we need to plan for. Canadians want to get back to work and they want to see their government get its fiscal house back in order. We need to see a plan that will move us away from a credit-card economy to a paycheque economy. The problem with the current Liberal government is that it does not have a good record of managing the economy.

Many people remember that leading up to the 2015 election the Liberal Party campaigned on a promise of a few small to medium-sized deficits, somewhere around $10 billion to $15 billion per year for three years, but that in the fourth year of the Liberals' mandate they were going to balance the budget. They did not even come close to that. The deficit was multiple times higher than what the Liberals had promised, and by the 2019 election campaign they had given up all pretense of ever wanting to manage to balance the budget. Therefore, Canadians are rightly concerned about the current government's record of poor fiscal management and its ability to manage a post-COVID relaunch of our economy.

There is another aspect of the government's response to the COVID-19 crisis I want to highlight that has frustrated many Canadians. Even though our COVID relief spending is the highest among all our trading partners on a per capita basis, we also have the highest unemployment rate. How could that be? We are spending almost $400 billion more this year than we are taking in, in government revenues, yet millions of Canadians are being left behind.

I have a couple of examples from my riding. I was talking to a husband and wife who are family business operators. They run a dance studio. Business was pretty good until the provincial public health officer shut them down. They were happy the federal government came out with an emergency rent subsidy program, and it looked like they would qualify. Certainly, if one looked at their bank account and balance sheet, they qualified. However, when they filled out the application, they realized because of their corporate structure, and because they could not answer that they were operating at arm's length, they were disqualified. Like tens of thousands of family-owned businesses across the country, they have a dual corporate model, where one company owns the land and the building and the other owns the company that operates within the building. It is required by many bankers to mitigate risk and manage commercial operations. I can hardly imagine the government had intended for that to happen.

The operators of a hotel chain here in British Columbia are another example. They qualified for the rent subsidy, but had to share the subsidy across a whole group of properties. They complained to me, saying that if each of them were an individually owned hotel property they each would have individually qualified. Because they had to share the rent subsidy across the whole family, the rent subsidy became almost meaningless. They said to me that it looked like the Liberal government was taking the “M” out of SME, small and medium-sized enterprises. Medium-sized enterprises like theirs do not qualify.

As my colleague from Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo said, the government is a day late and a dollar short, and a lot of Canadians are suffering on account of that.

Bill C-14 has seven parts. My party is going to support most of it, but we have trouble with part 7, which is about future spending. We wonder why the federal government feels it needs to have a total debt ceiling of $1.8 trillion, when all it really needs is $1.1 trillion to get through this fiscal year. Does it not trust Parliament to do the right thing at the right time? The government should come back when it needs more money and we will respond, as we have in the past and throughout this crisis. We will look at the legislation and question it and the proposed programs, because we are the opposition and that is what we do.

I submit that the emergency programs Canadians are now relying on are very much better because of the work we and other opposition parties have done. Canadians want transparency. They want to know bills are being debated in Parliament and that the government does not have unfettered power to do as it wishes. When it needs more money, it should come back and ask for it, and prove to us that its spending plans will actually help the Canadians who need it most.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am not sure what world the member is living in when he says this government has a poor record of managing the economy. Before the pandemic, we had the lowest unemployment rate since we started recording it in the sixties. We had one of the fastest-growing economies in the G7.

Yes, it is true our unemployment rate is two points higher than the U.S. and the U.K., for example, but their death rates per population are three times higher than in Canada, because this government took the position that we needed to invest in and protect Canadians. It is one thing to say the economy is not in a good position, but it does not mean it is right because he is saying it.

The reality is we had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. We had the lowest unemployment rate in over 40 or 50 years, and we are investing in Canadians now so we can get back to that on the other side of this.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Madam Speaker, I would remind Canadians that the Liberals ran an election platform in 2015 of balancing the budget in year four, which would be 2019. By the time we got to the end of that mandate, they were nowhere near that. They had given up any pretense at all of ever aspiring to balance the budget. Yes, the economy was strong during their first four years. That is the heritage of the good fiscal management leading up to their being elected in 2015.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Madam Speaker, I asked a question earlier of a Conservative colleague of the member who is speaking right now. I talked about the nine million Canadians who have had to go to predatory alternative lenders who are charging between 30% and 50% annually in interest, despite the Bank of Canada's base rate of less than 1%. The response from the member was that we needed to create better paying jobs. I cannot agree more that we need to make sure there are more jobs with a better living wage for Canadians and that we are tackling inequality.

Do the Conservatives believe that we should be putting in federal legislation to safeguard and protect vulnerable Canadians from these predatory lenders? I would actually call them vultures. Legislation would ensure they are protected and are not paying these abhorrent rates that are completely out of control. Anyone who is in that cycle, which I will refer to as being on a hamster wheel, knows exactly how difficult it is to jump off. It does not matter how good the job is; the government needs to intervene. I hope my colleague will support the call for the federal government to implement legislation and cap these predatory lending rates.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am happy to hear he agrees with the answer my colleague from South Surrey—White Rock gave. I listened to the answer and thought it was very good. We want to get Canadians back to work. We want to get away from a credit card economy and move to a paycheque economy. I am sure all Canadians agree with that. People should not have to go into debt just to stay alive and keep their families operating.

That said, I am sympathetic to anybody who ends up in a debt cycle and I would be interested in carrying on that conversation with my colleague from Courtenay—Alberni.

[Luc Thériault, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Madam Speaker, would my colleague do the honourable thing and consider that, with regard to the disastrous impact of the pandemic being linked to the fact that health care has been underfunded for years, his government's cuts from 6% to 3% when it was in power were inappropriate?

The Prime Minister of Canada says that he will deal with health transfers after the pandemic. Does my colleague believe that that is a responsible attitude?

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Madam Speaker, health care is obviously a very important aspect of people's lives, and certainly during a pandemic. I think there is a misconception that the Conservative Party would cut health spending. It would not. We recognize how important it is and we will be there to help Canadians when they need it.

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is great to have this opportunity to participate in the debate today. I have listened intently to previous speakers. It is very interesting to hear the Liberals' questions and the different types of points they are trying to make in the debate.

We heard the member for Yukon a little while ago talking about the Harper record going back to the economic meltdown in 2008 and criticizing the Harper government's spending, which was many times less than what we are talking about right now. I was elected in 2006. The hon. member was around during that time as well. He might recall that during that time we could not spend enough to make Liberal members of Parliament happy. Certainly, one of the absolutely critical things we did was to lay out a road map during a very difficult time to get back to balanced budgets. We had a surplus leading up to that point, very different circumstances from what we find ourselves in at this point, and we laid out a seven-year plan to get back to budget balance. I had the opportunity to serve on the cabinet subcommittee that evaluated plans from departments and ministers to get back to balance, and I am pleased to say that by 2015 we maintained that schedule and got back to balance. There are no conversations right now with the current government on the long-term impact of the spending we are now undertaking.

There is a lot of talk about deficits and previous governments' deficits. When we take a look at the deficit cycle of governments from 1968 until today, it is easy to trace back exactly why we wound up having the fiscal situation and debt we have right now. We can go back to 1968 when we had almost no debt in this country. We had the Pierre Trudeau government at that time, which made a very deliberate decision to run deficits in 14 out of 15 years.

We ran those deficits in 14 out of 15 years, and then by 1984 the country was in crisis. Rates were through the roof. Interest rates were in the high teens and 20s. In the previous years the Liberals, like the current government, had run an absolutely disastrous energy plan, which was devastating to the people of my constituency in Alberta. Yes, in the Mulroney years the deficits were even higher, but if we look at those Mulroney years, those deficits were actually almost entirely made up of interest on Trudeau's debt. It is very important to understand that. Because interest rates were so high, the Mulroney deficits were almost entirely the interest on Trudeau's debt.

Then we fast-forward to the late nineties and another Liberal government, the Chrétien-Martin government. That generation of Canadians had to pay for the debt that was accumulated back in the seventies and early eighties under the Trudeau government. It was a generation later, and we can see there is a parallel here and a predictor of the future. The impact then was that the Trudeau-Martin Liberal government cut $35 billion from health care, social services and education transfers through the Canada health transfer and the Canada social transfer. There were devastating cuts down the road because of the spending that happened in the late sixties, the seventies and the eighties.

When we listened to question period today, it does not seem to matter what question is asked. All three main opposition parties can ask very legitimate questions about vaccines, testing or spending programs, and they are almost always answered with derision and condescension by the Prime Minister and other ministers, but particularly by the Prime Minister. Almost every question is met with an accusation of our playing political games, and again, it does not matter which party asks. Then we get this sort of throwaway line, without the ministers ever really answering the question about when vaccines might be coming, or answering the legitimate question today about how many Canadians would need to be vaccinated, and what the evidence shows, before we can start to come out of the lockdowns. These are things that my constituents desperately want to know.

We hear this throwaway line that the government has Canadians' backs. What does that actually mean? First of all, it is a line that gets used for almost every question without the person actually giving a response to the question. It is very calming. It is presented in a very calm fashion by someone who has clearly been trained in delivering lines, but it does not say anything.

If we look closely at that, when they say the government has Canadians' backs, it is not really the government that has Canadians' backs, it is not the Prime Minister who has Canadians' backs, but our kids and our grandkids who ultimately have Canadians' backs right now, because our kids and grandkids are going to be paying for the deficits we are running right now. It does not mean we should not be doing it. Absolutely, I think members from all sides, from all parties, believe that we should be spending and running a pretty significant deficit right now.

However, as we are putting forward these plans for spending, there needs to be some hope, some vision for the future, and a consideration, an acknowledgement at least, that the spending we are undertaking right now is a trade-off. There is going to be a trade-off from that spending down the road. In other words, future generations of Canadians are going to forgo a certain level of their quality of life because this money will have to be paid back, or money will have to be spent to pay for the interest charges on the debt we are incurring right now. That money will not be able to be spent on other things.

The previous speaker eloquently brought up the member for Carleton's question about interest rates, which has been asked a lot. I remember the night we had a debate with the finance minister and the opportunity to ask him those questions. There was a complete refusal to acknowledge that interest rates can go up at some point in the future and that there might be a cost to that.

If we take a look at the interest rates in the situation we saw in the 1970s, there is a clear lesson in this. Back in August 1971, the interest rate in Canada, the overnight rate, was 5%. By August 1976, the interest rate was 9.25%. That was very high, obviously. However, it was nothing, because by August 1981 the interest rate had risen to an astonishing 20.78%.

The lesson for us here is that in August 1971 the Trudeau government would never have envisioned an interest rate of 20.78% as it was just starting on the road of ramping up its deficits. In 1976, things had started to get out of control; things had changed in the energy market and there were all sorts of factors that were leading to that interest rate going up, but the government had kind of lost control a little.

By 1981, we were in a spiral. At the same time, there was a national energy program that was devastating on the revenue side. I will not have enough time to get into that. Maybe someone could ask me a question about it and the parallel it has with our policy today. I would love to have that opportunity.

By 1981, we had a 20.78% interest rate, and ever since that time, governments have run deficits or we have had significant debt in this country, and we have been making interest payments on the debt that was run up during that time and forgone the opportunity to pay for things that we could have used those revenues for.

I have lots of other things I could say. I could talk about the government's absolute inability to generate innovation or take advantage of the substantial innovative capacity here in Canada around testing and the development of rapid testing, the development and procurement of vaccines, and the possibility that spending on those things early on might have resulted in a decreased need to spend the $30 billion a month we are spending on support programs right now.

I will wrap up here and look forward to taking questions from my colleagues.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, talk about cherry-picking the data. The member talked about the debt that Liberals ran during the last three or four decades; for the nearly two decades that Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper were in this place, they ran only two surpluses in those nearly two decades. I got a real kick out of how the member justified that by saying that they had to make the interest payments of the previous governments. No, they did not have to. As a matter of fact, Stephen Harper decided that he was not going to run a deficit, and what happened in his minority Parliament? He almost got taken down by the balance of the members of this House. Then he decided that maybe he needed to play ball. That is actually what happened.

If the member is so concerned about the supports that have been given to Canadians over the last 10 months and the debt that these supports created, why did he vote in favour of them, quite often through unanimous consent motions? All he had to do was stand up and say no, he would not give unanimous consent, but he never did that. He voted in favour of them. Why?

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, AB]

Madam Speaker, I love how the member talked about cherry-picking data and then cherry-picked his own data. He criticized the Harper government for running deficits and then, in the same sentence, accused the Harper government of being reluctant to run deficits.

It is almost as though he has talked to some of his colleagues who were around at the time and may have reminded him that, yes, it did go against the DNA of the Harper government to run deficits. We did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do at that time and, as I mentioned earlier, we could not spend fast enough to satisfy Liberal members of Parliament at that time. In fact, they threatened to band together with the separatist Bloc and the NDP to bring down the government because the deficits just could not possibly be high enough for them.