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

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

Yes, Madam Speaker, I am sharing my time with the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

Madam Speaker, we have the worst record for climate action and emissions reductions in the G8 and in comparison with the European Union. We have increased our emissions by more than 21% over 1990 levels, while the U.K. has reduced emissions by 40% and, on average, all countries in the EU have reduced emissions by 25%. Canada has signed on to nine international agreements on climate change and agreed to a set of targets for each of those agreements. However, Canada has had only one plan to meet those targets, under the Martin government, and we have met none of the targets we agreed to.

Our response to climate change is pathetic, but at least we have not triggered a constitutional crisis. Climate change and pandemics do not understand jurisdictional boundaries.

Now I will get back to the fall economic statement.

There is a serious need for additional support for small and medium-sized businesses. According to the research done by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, 180,000 companies are on the verge of closing their doors forever. Small and medium-sized businesses are the engine of our economy and hire far more private sector employees than big businesses do. They are asking for the government to extend and expand COVID relief programs for small businesses until the entire economy can reopen, including our borders, and small businesses can once again serve customers in person. The most recent lockdowns in Canada’s four largest provinces are testing the limits of small business operators.

The same thing can be said for the non-profit sector, which also needs continued support. We know that women have been heavily impacted by this pandemic, and it has set back advancements in the workplace by decades.

We need a just recovery that begins with serious funding for early childhood education and a universal child care program. The Green Party has been calling for universal child care for years.

We need increased support for the organizations that work with women who are facing intimate partner violence. Funding for these organizations was inadequate to begin with, and the pandemic has demonstrated why they need more support.

The work-from-home and learn-from-home requirements that the pandemic created have shown that there is an urgent need for access to high-speed Internet for rural and low-income Canadians across the country.

Post-secondary students have had a difficult time during the pandemic and need far more support. For years the Green Party has been calling on the Canadian government to adopt the northern European model for post-secondary education and eliminate tuition fees. At the very least in this moment, students should be getting relief for tuition fees and should have current student loan payments written off.

Seniors have been hit particularly hard during the pandemic. They have lost the community services and supports they rely on to make ends meet. They need increases to old age security and to the guaranteed income supplement.

The tragedy in long-term care homes in Canada has laid bare the need for proper standards to ensure that our seniors are not warehoused in profit centres, but instead are provided with homes and the dignity they deserve. The Green Party has called for national standards for long-term care homes, including implementing a basic care guarantee and increasing the number of trained staff in long-term care facilities to ensure a minimum of four hours of regulated personal care per day for every resident. We have called for better standards for workers. We called on the government to take the profit motive out of long term-care and focus funding on non-profit community-based care facilities. Again on this issue, we were told that setting national standards would create problems with the provinces, even though some provinces have clearly failed to properly care for seniors.

Canada is the only country with universal health that does not include universal pharmacare, and as a result, Canadians are paying way too much for their essential prescription medicines. Too many seniors in this country have to make impossible choices between taking medications as prescribed and paying for other essentials. Seniors are ending up with health complications and hospitalizations because they cannot afford to take their medicines. People who have lost their jobs have also lost their benefits, and they are faced with increased costs for medications. It is time for a universal pharmacare program. We need to get this done.

All over the country, there are still many people who are in trouble because they lost their jobs because of the pandemic. The Financial Post reported last week that we are now at a five-year high for Canadians facing insolvency. This is a problem that will only lessen once the pandemic is in the rear-view mirror. Until then, we must ensure that we do not let people lose everything because of COVID-19, because when people fall into poverty, the odds that they will be able to recover from such a setback are diminished.

Many of the pandemic support programs left people falling through the cracks. Since 2006, the Green Party has been calling for a guaranteed livable income to set an income floor under which no Canadian could fall. A GLI would have been very helpful to have in place before the pandemic, but it is also something that will help with the changes we will experience with automation and artificial intelligence, eliminating jobs. It will also help us deal with the changes that climate change is bringing.

We have an affordable housing and homelessness crisis in this country, and a whole bunch of eviction notices that are going to be coming due when the pandemic restrictions are released. We need increased government funding to deal with these dual crises, but we also need structural changes to deal with the increased financialization of residential housing and predatory investment practices. Housing is a human right, and we need to make sure that right is met in this country.

The Green Party will be supporting this bill. We want and expect better for Canadians, and we will continue to work with the government to improve the services that Canadians want and need.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, I have two quick questions for the member.

First of all, I was interested by the question he asked in question period with respect to monetary policy. In 1974, when the Bank of Canada changed its policy, the inflation rate was at 11%. Is he concerned that the policy he was advocating for in question period might lead to increased inflation? There is a lot of worry about the potential for long-run inflation already as a result of current government policy.

My second question is about housing. I heard him speak about housing. I know he tabled the petition on that earlier today as well. It seems to me that one of the key issues around cost of housing is housing supply. We can make all kinds of regulations and requirements, but if we do not increase the supply, the cost is going to continue to be very high. We could consider policies that incentivize an increase in housing supply as a way of trying to address housing availability and affordability. Does the member have ideas or a plan on what could be done in that respect?

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

Madam Speaker, in the past, the Bank of Canada managed inflation, particularly during those years, 1938 to 1974, by limiting the supply of money. It limits the supply of money that is created now through our fractional reserve system. It can be done. We just need to have policy built around that.

In terms of housing, what is happening in the housing market is that we need more affordable housing built. Companies are not building affordable housing. They are building market-rate housing, and so much affordable housing right now is being flipped into market-rate housing. We see investors coming into the market, buying up older housing stock that was affordable. Now that housing stock is being rented out at higher rates and where there is no rent control, so they can just increase—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

Unfortunately, I do have to allow for other questions.

The hon. member for Drummond.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Madam Speaker, I commend my colleague for his speech.

Despite the third wave of the pandemic, we have come to the point where the government is starting to develop a post-pandemic plan, or so I hope, for when the pandemic is behind us, as my colleague said in his speech.

I listened to my Green Party colleague, but I did not hear him talk about what should be his party's central focus, and that is the environment. For example, we are not hearing the members of the Green Party talk about the importance of a green post-pandemic recovery.

However, the Bloc Québécois recently presented a recovery plan that focuses on the forestry industry. My two brilliant colleagues from Jonquière and Lac-Saint-Jean carried out this excellent study.

Could my colleague from Nanaimo—Ladysmith talk about how important it will be to focus on the environment after the pandemic?

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

Madam Speaker, I agree that we do need a green recovery. I did not get a full 20-minute speech here, so I could not cover a lot of the issues I would like to cover. I did mention our lack of real climate action in this country. There is a lot we could be doing around that, and there is a lot that we should be doing around the crash in biodiversity as well. We have documents that we have presented for a green recovery and for a full recovery of the Canadian economy.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to congratulate my hon. colleague for his speech. Frankly, I think every single thing he mentioned is core NDP policy as well.

I want to focus on housing, because it has been said that COVID has created many crises, but it has also exposed other crises that were pre-existing, and one is the housing crisis. There is nothing in this legislation that deals with the incredible existential, foundational crisis facing so many Canadians who cannot find an affordable, secure place to live.

Does the hon. member agree with me, as a New Democrat, that we should get the federal government to restart a national co-op housing program to build 500,000 units of affordable co-op housing in this country over the next 10 years? Is that something the member would support?

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

Madam Speaker, I would absolutely support funding for co-operative housing.

Co-ops are a great model. They create community. People can age in place. People who lose their job do not lose their home because the housing cost is based on income. I would absolutely support that. It is something I have been calling for in my motions, petitions and statements in this House.

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

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to speak virtually today, and I thank my colleague from Nanaimo—Ladysmith for this opportunity to split the time.

I want to acknowledge that I am on the traditional territory of W̱SÁNEĆ nation, part of the Coast Salish nations of the beautiful area of Saanich—Gulf Islands. Over time perhaps we could change the name Saanich to W̱SÁNEĆ to spell it in SENĆOŦEN, because that is the source of the name of the Saanich Peninsula. I am honoured to represent the wonderful constituents of this area.

I am taking a different approach to looking at Bill C-14, and I am afraid that I may end up being very boring. That is because we have before us really important legislation. I wish it had been passed long ago, when it first came forward, because it does provide important supports, as my colleague from Nanaimo—Ladysmith just said, that we will support from the Green Party: supports for low and middle income Canadians; relief on student debt; more support for virtual care, mental health and substance abuse programs; and help for businesses with their rent. These are things that we would like to see passed, but that does not mean that we do not have some significant concerns about the fall economic statement and the upcoming budget.

This is where I am afraid I am going to perhaps be boring. I would love to give a speech to make the point that my colleague from the Bloc Québécois just made, that our recovery needs to be focused on renewable energy, on a green economic recovery and the need to actually hit our Paris commitment to hold to 1.5°. The current government legislation in Bill C-12 does not come close to ensuring that we have anything like accountability for this.

I want to focus on the question of what our role as parliamentarians is when we look at budgets. What is our role as parliamentarians when we look at the fall economic statement? What is our job? In theory, parliamentarians are responsible for the public purse, and some will know that when I start speaking in the House of Commons about what is supposed to be happening in theory, members can be pretty sure it is not what is happing in practice.

We are responsible, as one of our core jobs as members of Parliament, to control the public purse. If we are going to control the public purse, it suggests that we should actually know about the measures we are voting for, be able to analyze the budget and get enough information to be effective and responsible parliamentarians.

I will be speaking in general first and then zooming in on the specifics. In my experience of reading budgets, and that goes back to well before I was honoured to be elected in this place in 2011, I used to go to pre-budget lock-ups. This was when I was the executive director of Sierra Club Canada and was one of the founders of something called the green budget coalition, and I sat down with the minister of finance and worked through budgets after the fact. In pre-budget lock-ups I would usually bring previous years' budgets with me so that I could quickly reference which department was getting more money, which department was getting less money and what this looked like in terms of our accountability and where the money was going.

I have been trying to remember the last time I saw a budget that actually included the numbers. This will strike Canadians as odd. How can we have a fall economic statement or a budget that does not include the numbers? Well, there are numbers there, but they tend to unrelated one from the other.

In preparing for this speech, I found a column from December 2015 that was written by three friends of mine: Kevin Page, our former parliamentary budget officer; Bob Plamondon, a noted Conservative commentator; and former MP and friend, Pat Martin. They penned an article for the Globe and Mail on this very point. Members of Parliament do not have enough information to actually do the job we are supposed to do, which is controlling the public purse.

To quote my three colleagues, in the article they wrote, “It is well nigh impossible for mere mortals to follow money.” It is well nigh impossible. We used to have budgets where we could actually add up the various departmental budgets and get to the number that the government was going to spend.

Departmental budgets stopped appearing in the spring budgets some time after Stephen Harper became prime minister. I have been trying to remember the last time I actually got a budget to read that included what most people would consider a budget. For some time, I have said that we should stop calling it the budget, which we will see next week, April 19, or the fall economic statement, or the spring budget, Unless the new Minister of Finance is going to do something remarkable and actually give us the numbers, what we have had for many years now has been what I have referred to as “the big thick spring brochure”. It is about party policy. It is about governmental policy. It sometimes announces how much will be spent in an area, but there is nothing we can use for purposes of comparison. Is that new money? Is that from a departmental A-base that they had last year and is just being reallocated? Can we track what is being spent, where the priorities are and can we add this all up and get a number we can count on?

On top of that general statement of a lack of transparency around numbers, now we have gone from what was spent in the 2019-20 budget frame, which was $363 billion, and in 2020-21 we are spending something in the order of $642 billion. Now, this was all approved by us as parliamentarians and mostly by unanimous consent. Because of the nature of COVID, we worked fast, and goodness knows, I have nothing but praise for all the hard work of civil servants and I include our ministers. Everyone has worked very hard to roll out the programs. However, by this point, more than a year into the pandemic, we should know how those programs are doing and where the money has actually gone.

We now have, believe it or not, over 90 different new COVID emergency programs. Can we trace them? Can we track them? Do we know where the money is going? In big numbers, in the rough sense, we do, because we know how much went to CERB, wage supports and so on.

Again, I turn to Kevin Page, whom I referenced earlier. He was our first parliamentary budget officer and is now the president of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa. In December, he put forward an opinion piece looking at the fall economic statement and identifying the transparency gaps. Kevin Page said that “...There is limited disaggregated administrative data related to people, sectors and regions, and virtually no data and analysis on the monthly flow of supports.”

My colleague for Nanaimo—Ladysmith mentioned other countries that have done better at getting to zero on COVID as opposed to trying to just flatten the curve to avoid having our emergency rooms overwhelmed. Other countries decided to actually try to eliminate the virus. Well, here we are. Some of those countries that did better than us have also done better on financial reporting. New Zealand publishes very clear visuals that any citizen can use to track and understand where the money is being spent. Australia publishes detailed monthly reports explaining their statistics, and so does the U.K. All of these countries provide more information. The United States provides a detailed dashboard so that any citizen can track all government programs from one place. Canada does not have any of that in place for people to track where the money is going by sector. We know in general that this kind of money went to individuals because it was the CERB, this kind of money went to businesses because they were employers, but we do not have details.

On the fall economic statement, our current Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, commented favourably on the fact that the fall economic statement does include clarity around some essential fiscal planning information, such as the detailed five-year fiscal outlook, but Mr. Giroux also commented, as had—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

I would remind the member that she is not to use names of individuals who sit in the House of Commons.

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

Did I use the name of anyone sitting in the House of Commons, Madam Speaker?

I am sorry, but I referred to Mr. Giroux, the Parliamentary Budget Officer. His comment was that “the Statement falls short on transparency in several areas, such as: the absence of a fiscal anchor; the lack of clear thresholds for the fiscal guardrails; and the lack of detail related to the Employment Insurance Operating Account”.

So these are areas that I hope—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

I do want to apologize to the hon. member. I thought she had mentioned someone in the House of Commons. That is what it sounded like, but it was Mr. Giroux and not the Prime Minister's name I had heard.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Cloverdale—Langley City.

[Tamara Jansen, Conservative, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Madam Speaker, it appears that Bill C-14 is specifically designed so that the government would be able to operate without tabling a budget, which seems to be how it seems to keep working.

We have watching unhinged borrowing by the Liberals, which the finance minister described as pre-loaded stimulus, to cover up the fact that COVID support programs by far overpaid those who did not even need the help.

Part 7 of Bill C-14 is an alarming blank cheque for the Liberals. Does my colleague believe that the government has the capacity to lead us out of this economic disaster without unnecessary new levels of debt?

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

Madam Speaker, I cannot agree with my hon. colleague that part 7 is a blank cheque. It is a borrowing limit, but it is not authority to spend. That is a very important distinction to be made.

I am troubled, as I think many MPs are, as many Canadians are, by the fact that we are in a third wave. I live in a province where the P.1 variant has become extremely prevalent. A member of my family was diagnosed with COVID today. I am extremely worried for all of us.

I have to have confidence in us as a people, which means I do not want to take potshots at my government. We can get through this, but we need financial transparency. We, as MPs, need to do our jobs. It has been a long time since we have actually studied the supplementary estimates before passing them by rote. We need to do our jobs.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands. I always appreciate her speeches. They are always very interesting, and the arguments are sound.

I heard her say that, as parliamentarians, we are responsible for the purse of Quebeckers and Canadians. That is true, and I agree with her. She also said that the government lacked transparency. Again, I agree with her.

However, we know where the money went these past four years, to which sectors. Take, for example, the oil and gas industry. The Liberal government's strategy was to invest $24 billion in oil and gas when it injected just $900 million into the forestry industry.

As Theodore Roosevelt said, it is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. I would like my hon. colleague's take on that quote.