Bill C-262 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Income Tax Act (capture and utilization or storage of greenhouse gases)

This enactment amends the Income Tax Act to establish a tax credit for the capture and utilization or storage of certain greenhouse gases.

The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill C-14, An Act to implement certain provisions of the economic statement tabled in Parliament on November 30, 2020 and other measures, as reported (without amendment) from the committee.

Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2020

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

There being no motions at report stage, the House will now proceed, without debate, to the putting of the question on the motion to concur in the bill at report stage.

If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes to request a recorded division or that the motion be adopted on division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.

[Steven Guilbeault, Liberal, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

moved that the bill be concurred in.

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

Madam Speaker, I believe if you seek it, you would find unanimous consent to adopt the motion.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Is it agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

(Motion agreed to)

[The Acting Speaker, Mrs. Alexandra Mendès]

When shall the bill be read a third time? By leave, now?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Steven Guilbeault, Liberal, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

moved that the bill be read the third time and passed.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and to the Minister of Middle Class Prosperity and Associate Minister of Finance]

Madam Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to take part in this important debate on Bill C-14, which is set to implement certain aspects of the fall economic statement that was tabled in Parliament a number of months ago. Before I get into the specific measures included in Bill C-14, I think it is important to reflect upon the year we have just been through and the pandemic that very much continues today.

Over the course of the past year, we have seen communities suffer in a way that I had never envisioned I would see in my lifetime. We have also seen communities across Canada respond in a way that is more admirable than I could have possibly imagined just a year and a half ago.

I remember, when COVID-19 first entered our collective vocabulary, the fear I saw in our communities. I remember what it was like to show up at the grocery store and, when the warnings were to keep six feet apart, people were doing their best to keep 20 feet apart. At that point in time, people were showing up wearing the Rubbermaid gloves meant for washing dishes and masks made of whatever they had at the house. This was before there was the opportunity to purchase them.

Perhaps what was most encouraging were the precautions I saw people taking. The behaviours I saw people demonstrating were rarely motivated by self-interest, but instead by an interest to help their neighbours and protect the integrity of our health care system. Warnings were coming through national media about the pressures that were being put on the public health care system in various provinces and the ability to take care of our communities' most vulnerable. I have never been so proud to be a Canadian and to be from the community I come from as when I saw my community members step up to help their neighbours.

I have also been very proud to be part of a government that exhibited that same attitude. I must say, I give full credit to certain members of various political parties who reached out to me in a non-partisan way to demonstrate that they also had ideas they thought would help folks in their community as we were struggling with this pandemic.

Our approach to combat COVID-19 has been first to do whatever we can to quell the spread of the virus as quickly as possible and, second, to support Canadian households and businesses so they will still be here to contribute to the recovery when it is over. The fall economic statement implements portions of that plan. Of course, in the early days of the pandemic, when Parliament was not sitting in the way that it typically does, we advanced a series of measures that were designed to keep people afloat.

I am thinking of CERB, which reached the kitchen tables of over nine million Canadians; the wage subsidy, which has kept over five million Canadians on the payroll at their work; and programs such as the Canada emergency business account, which has helped nearly one million businesses literally keep the lights on and the doors open. These are important programs that I anticipate will be viewed quite favourably when history shines a light on the economic response that Canada has put forward in this global pandemic.

I will now turn my attention to the specific bill before the House of Commons, Bill C-14. There are a number of specific measures included in this bill, but largely they play into the strategy that I described at the outset of my remarks, which is to help diminish the spread of COVID-19 in our communities, particularly among vulnerable members of the public, and to support households and businesses as we continue to weather the storm, so they can contribute fully to the economic recovery when the time is right to do so.

The first policy I will draw members' attention to is the Canada child benefit. This was a marquee campaign commitment from our 2015 election. I will point out that I have recently seen data that indicated that the Canada child benefit has now helped lift more than 435,000 Canadian children out of poverty. That is something I am extraordinarily proud of, but there is still work to do.

When I look at the child poverty numbers in my home province of Nova Scotia, I find it unacceptable that any child goes without the food they need, or are in a household where parents, through no fault of their own, may not be able to afford the very basics so many of us take for granted. That is why I am supportive of this particular measure to increase the Canada child benefit up to $1,200 per child under six this calendar year.

Importantly, the pay periods of January and April have now passed, which means that as soon as this bill achieves royal assent, we can expect the increased child Canada benefit payments will flow to Canadian families this year.

This is the kind of thing that not only helps lift children out of poverty, but also helps with the increased cost of child care, which many families are dealing with. I can speak first-hand about the difficulty in trying to arrange ad hoc child care with a five-year-old at home who attends the pre-primary program in Nova Scotia some days of the week but not others. Finding someone to step in can be a challenge for parents. I know that this increase of up to $1,200 to the Canada child benefit this year would make that a little easier for a whole lot of families.

I also want to draw attention to the change to the regional relief and recovery fund. In my mind, one of the strengths of our pandemic response, and I have heard this from constituents from the early days of the pandemic, was a willingness to consider the initial policy design and make changes as we realized the circumstances demanded such changes.

At the outset of this pandemic we launched a number of programs that have developed over time. A great example of this is the increase of the initial version of the wage subsidy from 10% to 75%. I am thinking of changes such as increasing the Canada emergency business account, which was initially from $40,000 with $10,000 forgivable, and is now $60,000, of which $20,000 is forgivable.

Some of the changes we are looking to make in the scale and scope of the Canada emergency benefit require a legislative change to help those businesses that may not have been eligible to seek access to the regional relief and recovery fund through regional development agencies. The bill would align those two programs to ensure that if a business did not access CEBA, but could access the regional relief and recovery fund, it would benefit largely from the same terms under either program. We heard testimony at the finance committee specifically indicating that as soon as the bill achieves royal assent, that money could flow to businesses in need to help them keep their lights on.

There are a few other programs I would like to draw to members' attention, and before I turn to certain public health measures, perhaps I will look at one other along the lines of direct support for individuals. Long before I came into federal politics, my first foray was as a university student. I was the student union president at my undergraduate university, StFX. One of the things I took on in that role was to become an advocate in federal politics for policies I felt would benefit students. I remember sitting across the table from MPs in Ottawa when I was a student in Antigonish asking for certain measures to be adopted that would make life easier for students and young professionals.

One of the things we always looked for was relief on the interest that accrued for students who had Canada student loans. A similar issue faces students at community colleges or polytechnics who may have accessed a Canada apprenticeship loan. One of the changes in the bill would put an end to interest accruing this year on the loans they may hold through federal programs.

Given the disproportionate and negative impact that COVID-19 has had on the economic prospects of young people right across Canada, this is good policy. This is something that is going to make life a little more affordable for young people as they embark on their careers.

I want to turn the House's attention to some of the public health measures included in Bill C-14 because we know they are the right thing to do to fight the virus, but they are also the smart thing to do from an economic perspective. Recent data indicate that the best economic strategy we can adopt is to advance a significant public health response and try to achieve a zero-incidence rate of COVID in our communities.

I point out in particular, being from Nova Scotia, that we have had some real success in managing the COVID-19 pandemic compared to some of our counterparts in different regions of Canada. In my community, I can still take my daughter to swimming lessons. In fact, I have to do that this evening after we wrap up in the House. I can still visit with friends up to our gathering limits without social distancing and without masks. We still choose in many instances to take those precautions.

Businesses by and large remain open, despite very serious early shutdowns and the public response has really shown that they have bought into the idea that we need to continue to take care of one another during this time of emergency. While I say it is also a sound economic policy, members do not need to take my word for it. We can look directly to the recent labour force survey results, which come out each month. The reason I argue this is because it is true.

Nova Scotia has now reached 100% of its pre-pandemic job levels. That would not be possible if we did not have such a strong public health response to COVID-19. It makes sense, of course, that when businesses must close down in order to protect the public's health, the jobs located in those businesses will disappear from the labour force survey. However, if they initially took the smart step to lockdown when it was appropriate to do so, and then continued to monitor community spread diligently, then there would be the opportunity to safely operate in their communities.

Those strategies benefit from serious federal investments through the safe restart agreement with the provinces. They benefit from serious investments and things such as rapid testing and personal protective equipment. They seriously benefit as well from some of the economic measures we have extended to support households and businesses. Those measures, collectively, have allowed certain provinces to do what may have seemed like a difficult thing at a time, but what was the right thing and ultimately has been proven to be the smart thing.

Specific to Bill C-14, there are certain public health measures that will continue to enhance the public health response to COVID-19 across Canada, but will also contribute to our ability to enter the recovery phase more quickly. Specifically, I want to draw members' attention to the issues around long-term care.

The deaths we have seen in our long-term care facilities across Canada have been nothing short of a national tragedy. I think everyone in the chamber, whether present virtually or in person, knows someone who has been impacted by the spread of COVID-19 in long-term care facilities. I take everyone at their word that they want to address this issue when they say so. This bill is going to advance in excess of $500 million toward our long-term care facilities. It will help reduce the spread of COVID-19 among the vulnerable populations who live in those facilities.

However, that is not the only public health measure included in this particular bill. Before COVID-19 was something that we had heard about, health care was the number one priority for my constituents. By and large, after being asking time and time again, this was an absolute priority. In particular, mental health and access to family doctors were at the very top of that list.

This bill would not necessarily solve the shortcomings in the provincial health care system when it comes to accessing primary care or expanding support for mental health, but it will make a difference in the short term in a few very particular ways. This bill specifically is going to advance $133 million toward virtual care and mental health care.

One of the things that I would urge people to do is this. If someone has never used virtual care, telehealth, or an online portal for mental health, it is easy to dismiss them as being less than having a person in the room with them. For some people, in-person care is essential, but there are others who will be able to access the quality of care they need virtually.

I will give an example of telehealth, in particular, that I heard from my own community recently. It was in response to a comment about how these 1-800 numbers for certain health care do not really make the difference that certain people would like to see. The response came from the executive director of a local non-profit. She cited Kids Help Phone as one of those mental health supports offered through a 1-800 number.

She explained to a room filled with people who were actively questioning the value of these telehealth opportunities that when a child calls Kids Help Phone, they often do not know where to turn. They do not have any other options, but they are not met with an operator or a robot on the other side who does not understand what they are going through or what resources may exist locally. In fact, in this instance, the person on the other side of that call said, “I know of a local non-profit in your community. It's a few blocks from you. You can go down and speak to a person who's going to find an adult who can help with the situation that you're dealing with.” I will reserve any details about who these individuals were for sake of their privacy.

At the end of the day, access to that telehealth option provided a young person in my community with access to a professional who they were able to deal with and they continue to maintain a relationship with today. That is a positive outcome from embracing telehealth.

I have spoken with many people who have now dealt directly with a physician over a video call or through a simple text or phone call. The Wellness Together portal, which has been advanced with the support of federal money through this pandemic, has provided access to a huge number of Canadians who can conduct self-assessments and gain access to a professional if needed. I would encourage anyone who might be struggling with mental health or substance use to check out the Wellness Together portal that has been made available online through this pandemic, because it has helped a significant number of Canadians already.

My hope is that some of the measures outlined in this bill and our pandemic response actually survive the pandemic. I am from a province that has historically had fewer family doctors than we would like to have, and I envision one day being able to create the opportunity for someone who lacks access to primary care in Nova Scotia to reach out to a doctor in western Canada who is looking for patients, and to access their services for basic prescriptions or referrals virtually. These are the kinds of innovations that may stem from this pandemic that would provide a long-term systemic benefit for Canadians right across our country.

Our pandemic response has been expensive, but inaction would have been more expensive. We know that to do the right thing, we had to make serious investments to keep businesses afloat, keep workers on payrolls, keep families fed and ensure that provinces had access to the testing or personal protective equipment that they needed.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel now, as we get closer to vaccine appointments. I think my parents are scheduled for theirs later this week, which is deeply encouraging, I must say, though I live in an area that has a relatively low number of cases. To see family members, friends, neighbours and particularly the most vulnerable members, front-line workers in the health care system and in retail, start to see the end coming is deeply encouraging.

However, we are not there yet. We need to continue to advance the kinds of supports that are outlined in Bill C-14. It has been a pleasure, once again, to speak on this important piece of legislation. My hope is that this will pass unanimously in Parliament so that Canadians can access the supports they so desperately need. It would help protect our health and our economy in the long run.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Madam Speaker, one of the very important aspects of this bill that the member neglected to comment on is the fact that it would actually increase the country's debt limit from roughly $1.1 trillion to $1.8 trillion. This is a sum equivalent to Canada's total combined debt in history, from Confederation to 2020.

Does the member not think, in the spirit of good governance, that a matter of this import should be debated and voted upon in a separate bill?

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Madam Speaker, the short answer is no.

The long answer is that I agree it is important, but I do not think its inclusion in a fairly modest piece of legislation, which has only a few parts, diminishes the ability of parliamentarians to debate it, particularly given the extensive debate that it has received on the floor of the House of Commons and the delay that has cost about four months in its passage.

Good governance demands that we monitor the spending of the Government of Canada, and that we plan for it accordingly.

If the member is arguing that the debt limit should not be increased because we should be limiting government spending, I would ask the member to make that argument directly. It is clear to me, frankly, that the Conservative position seems to be to cheapen the economic response to the pandemic when our decision has been to invest in Canadians.

The reality is that the pandemic created serious costs. The government made the decision to cover those costs and is planning accordingly for the future. We laid out all the details, by the way, in our fall economic statement—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The hon. member for Berthier—Maskinongé.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the parliamentary secretary for his speech. We will absolutely vote in favour of this bill because action is needed.

However, we all know that this bill does not address everything. We could speak at length about health transfers, but I want to call the parliamentary secretary's attention to the tourism and cultural sectors, and in particular the sugar shack sector, which have received little to no support so far. I have already asked the parliamentary secretary about this issue, and I appreciated having a meeting to discuss it.

Where do things stand? Is progress being made? Can the parliamentary secretary give us any hope ahead of the upcoming budget?

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Madam Speaker, this piece of legislation includes certain measures that were included in the fall economic statement. It is not meant to be a comprehensive outline of the government's public health response throughout the pandemic or going forward. Of course, the budget will have more to say. I note in particular the recent announcement by the government to advance $4 billion directly to the provinces for the provision of health care, given that this burden has rested on the provinces.

The tourism and transport piece is perhaps a separate conversation. The crux of his question was about the ma cabane à la maison initiative, which I did have the opportunity to meet with him on. I can spoil no secrets about the upcoming budget. I will mention that I had the opportunity, following our meeting, to connect directly with the Minister of Finance's team. I have seen the Prime Minister drawing attention to the initiative, and I would be happy to continue to work with my colleague as further updates become available.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Madam Speaker, the government typically puts in measures that help with the pandemic and then it overreaches. The overreach is in one of its first pieces of legislation: It asked for unfettered spending for almost two years. With this particular piece, there is absolutely important support. However, then it asks for $1.8 trillion in terms of the debt level. This is much more than it says it plans on borrowing to fund its activities for the next few years.

How can it justify asking for the ability to borrow $1.8 trillion when, according to its plans, it is not going to need that kind of money? Are the Liberals being disingenuous in terms of their plans, or are they again overreaching like they typically do?

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Madam Speaker, I do not view this to be an overreach in any way, shape or form. The details of our spending plan have been laid out in the fall economic statement, including a variety of different potential scenarios.

I point out that in 2016, we passed a piece of legislation in Parliament that mandated a review periodically of the federal government's borrowing limit. The time has come to consider that limit and frankly, given what has transpired in the past year, it is obvious to me that we should be planning for the future and not setting the buffer exactly where the intended spending ought to be. That would not be a sound policy decision.

We know the COVID-19 pandemic has created an immense cost. The government was better positioned to cover some of the costs to society than individual households or businesses would have been, and I would stand by the investments we have made to keep households and businesses afloat through this pandemic.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I want to ask the member about the clause in Bill C-14 that is authorizing a health-related payment of about $64 million for mental health and substance abuse. Investment in this area is very welcome, especially for communities like mine. However, it seems that when the government has opportunities to do big, bold things to finally tackle the opioid crisis, such as declaring a national health emergency or even Bill C-22, the recent justice bill, they are full of half measures.

To this day, with all the statistics in place, why has the government not taken the big, bold steps to finally confront and put an end to the opioid crisis, which is ravaging so many small communities like mine?

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Madam Speaker, I sincerely appreciate my colleague's advocacy on this issue, not just today but over the past number of years. It is important to reflect upon the opioid crisis, which is a massive problem that is perhaps, in some regions, underappreciated in its severity. We may not see the concentrations of case numbers they have in his community, but nevertheless we are suffering serious consequences as a result of addiction.

We have been trying to work with the provinces to advance funds for mental health support. In Nova Scotia alone, as part of our 10-year agreement, we reached a funding arrangement that saw $130 million that must be spent directly on mental health in the province. If the province believes tackling the opioid crisis with that money is the best thing to do, then we will be there with them. We do not want to substitute exclusively our own priorities for those of the provinces but we will—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Thérèse-De Blainville.

[Louise Chabot, Bloc, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the parliamentary secretary for his speech.

I noticed that he described the work that has been done since the start of the crisis as admirable. I would not want to underestimate certain measures that have made a difference since the crisis hit, but, with all due respect, I find it less admirable that the government has been unable to adapt to the changing situation. The economic update came out last fall, and now it is spring. The pandemic has evolved and some sectors, such as aerospace and tourism, have received no direct assistance. They were forgotten then and are being forgotten now.

What solutions will the government offer in the next budget to help these sectors be part of the recovery, as the parliamentary secretary was saying?

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Madam Speaker, it may be outside the scope of Bill C-14, but that does not mean it is outside the scope of what the government is working on. When we tabled the fall economic statement, I did not anticipate there would be a need to continue to debate the fall economic statement in the following spring. Unfortunately, there has been a series of delays for this bill, which I believe were for largely partisan reasons, although the member's party agreed with us in that regard.

For sectors such as aerospace, transportation and tourism, certain measures have had significant benefits. The wage subsidy is a perfect example, and we put forward HASCAP to specifically tackle some of these problems.

We know more work needs to be done. I had the opportunity to meet with the aerospace sector, and I meet frequently with tourism associations in my own community. I will be looking forward to the upcoming budget to identify further opportunities for assistance to those hardest-hit sectors.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to add a little more to this debate.

I just wanted to begin by sharing with the parliamentary secretary that what we as parliamentarians are doing in the House in debating and reviewing Bill C-14 is scrutiny and oversight, which is the role of the official opposition, and we are unapologetic about doing that. I want to start off by saying that we fully support parts 1 through 6 of Bill C-14, which would continue to provide Canadians with the critical support they need as they try to make it through this pandemic. The challenge is that, as Liberals are wont to do, they have also added the most massive borrowing increase in Canada's history to that bill. The parliamentary secretary suggested that these social program modifications are fairly modest and really should not prevent us from debating this, but this is the largest, most historic increase in Canada's debt ceiling and borrowing capacity ever, so that should provide Canadians with the context in which to judge this bill.

What is it that Canadians are looking for from the government, now that we are slowly moving through the vaccination stage? Canadians are looking forward and asking when the end is going to come. I would suggest that Canadians are looking for hope and confidence for their future and the future of their children and their grandchildren, of which I have 11 and another one on the way, and even their great-grandchildren down the road. Do they have a prosperous future to look forward to? That is the question I believe Canadians need answered.

By the way, they are not asking for the Prime Minister to reimagine the economy. They are not asking for the Prime Minister to build back better. Every single Canadian I have spoken to simply wants a return to some level of normalcy. They want their lives, their jobs, their small businesses, their communities and their places of worship back. They are not looking for the Prime Minister to foist a massive new social and economic experiment on them. Again, they want life to return to normal. That is it.

Would Bill C-14 do that? Would it give Canadians that hope? So far, I have sadly concluded that it does not. Bill C-14 would implement the government's fall economic statement. That statement does include additional supports for Canadians who need help to make it through the pandemic. By the way, we support those benefits, as we have every single other COVID-related benefit program the government has brought forward. We have stood shoulder to shoulder with the government in saying that Canadians need and deserve that support.

The problem is that the government has paid absolutely no attention to the long-term plan for our economy. What does our long-term future look like as a country? We know that the government failed to deliver a budget for over two years. In fact, Canada was the only G7 country not to deliver a budget over the last two years. The provinces and territories delivered budgets, yet the government's excuse was that we are in the middle of a COVID pandemic, so delivering a budget has no value. Actually, it is in the middle of a pandemic and the greatest economic crisis this country has faced since at least the Great Depression that is exactly when we should have had a budget and a plan for our economy, and sadly the Prime Minister did not deliver on that responsibility.

In the meantime, Canadians have been in the dark about what the future holds. They are asking for a plan to reopen our economy and to get Canadians back to work, and to support small businesses as they struggle to get back on their feet.

Members should know that the Canadian Federation of Independent Business has made it very clear that there are some 240,000 small businesses that could very well be permanently shut down by the end of this COVID pandemic. We know that the million-plus small businesses in our country are the great job creators. Effectively, if 20% to 25% of those businesses are eliminated, it will dramatically undermine job creation going forward.

Let me talk very briefly about the seven parts of this bill. Quite frankly, Conservatives are in support of the first six parts. For example, part 1 would implement increases to the Canada child benefit, which I am sure families would welcome. It also addresses serious design flaws in the rent subsidy program to finally allow commercial and industrial tenants to receive some relief before they pay their rent. The irony was that, in the middle of this pandemic when tenants did not have the cash to pay their rent up front, they were being told they would not get support until after they paid their rent. This legislation would address that serious design flaw. There are other things in the bill as well that Conservatives support, such as eliminating interest on Canada student loans and Canada apprentice loans for one year and authorizing the Governor in Council to make regulations to seek additional information from companies about food, drugs and medical devices.

In short, the six parts of the Bill C-14 fall economic statement effectively introduce, modify and improve programs that the government brought forward and that we as the official opposition are fully supportive of. Of course, like all things Liberal, there is always a catch. In this case it is part 7 of the bill. As my colleague from Winnipeg has just mentioned, the Prime Minister is asking Parliament to approve a historic, massive increase in the debt ceiling, in other words, the line of credit that the government has available to it. The government wants to increase that by $663 billion, almost one-quarter of a trillion dollars. That is massive.

Before any parliamentarian should ever provide their support to that kind of an increase, they should be asking what this borrowing capacity is going to be used for. We have to consider this in the context of the fact that the Liberal government has been chastised by the Parliamentary Budget Officer for not being transparent in its spending endeavours. Every time it brings forward a spending bill, it refuses to explain to Canadians exactly how that money will be deployed. Parliamentarians do not have the ability to exercise proper scrutiny and oversight. The PBO identified that and said that the government is not transparent.

Why should we trust the government when it now says it wants another $663 billion? I was at committee when we were asking questions of the Minister of Finance. We expressly asked her to please tell us what this additional $663 billion is needed for and where it will be deployed. All she did was refer Canadians to one chart in the fall economic statement. She said to go and look at that, all Canadians have that available. Most Canadians are not going to go looking for the fall economic statement to find the one chart that actually did not show where she was spending the money. It simply showed how much money she was asking to borrow. We deserve better as a country.

Another thing is signalled in this fall economic statement and that is a $100-billion stimulus fund that the Minister of Finance has suggested might be required for Canada to get through the pandemic. Again, at committee, we asked very expressly if she could tell us what this stimulus fund is all about. She talks about $100 billion, asks us to trust her and so far she had been unwilling to provide any transparency on where that money might be deployed. Now she had an opportunity. She would not tell us. Would that money go into productivity-enhancing investments like hard infrastructure? Was it going to go into soft infrastructure? She would not say. She made vague references to guardrails, supposed rules that she was going to put in place to ensure that there were triggers that would allow it to slowly ease this money into our economy. The problem is that the economists have all pointed out that she has been so vague about what those guardrails are all about that it is impossible for anyone to exercise any kind of oversight over this $100 billion of additional spending. Those same economists have also sounded a precautionary note.

The government's $100 billion stimulus must take into account inflationary pressures. When we pump $100 billion into the economy in a short period of time, it means there are more dollars chasing the same number of goods, and that could lead to inflationary pressures. When the central bank, the Bank of Canada, senses that there are inflationary pressures, it increases interest rates.

If Canadians across the country knew right now that there was a significant risk of interest rate increases, a lot of them would be panicking, because they got into this incredibly expensive housing market upon the condition that interest rates would stay low. However, if we pump more and more stimulus into the economy, that will stoke the fires of inflation, and it gets worse.

Economists have also warned the government and the finance minister that the government needs to take note of the massive stimulus that the American government is pumping into its economy. It is a $1.9 trillion stimulus plan into the American economy. Layered on top of that is a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, which adds even more stimulus to the economy. When that economy starts being stimulated, that sloshes over the border into Canada. It impacts economic growth, but it can overheat economic growth and again stoke inflationary pressures.

Layered on top of all that is something that is counterintuitive. Even though we have come through the worst pandemic in our lifetime, the worst economic crisis in my lifetime, we have a situation where we have record amounts of savings on both the household side and the corporate side in Canada, savings that are eventually going to be pumped back into our economy, injected as stimulus. Therefore, when we add all this stimulus together, the government has to be very wary of adding another $100 billion to that.

This is an unprecedented crisis, but Canadians want hope and they want confidence for the future. They want to know that the Prime Minister and the finance minister have a plan to safely reopen our economy. That includes safely reopening our common border with the United States, because we have somewhere in the order of $2 billion in trade crossing our border every single day. The U.S. is by far our largest trade partner. Therefore, I encourage the government, as it is moving toward tabling a budget, its first budget in over two years, to ensure that the budget includes a clear plan going forward to safely reopen our economy, and that will require Canadians to be properly vaccinated.

What is the plan? The current plan has been a bit of a boondoggle. I think Canadians are understanding that. We need a plan to safely reopen our economy to get Canadians back to work, to help small businesses get back up on their feet and to manage this massive new debt that the government has incurred on Canadians' behalf. There has to be a management plan, which includes strong fiscal anchors, rules and guidelines by which the government will be guided as we emerge from the pandemic and struggle to get a grip on this massive financial obligation with which we will burden future generations of Canadians.

We are fully supportive of parts 1 through 6 of the bill. It is part 7, the massive increase in borrowing, we cannot support, especially when the minister has been unable or unwilling to explain how that additional borrowing capacity, some $663 billion, will be deployed going forward.

Canadians are fair, reasonable, generous people. All they are looking for is ethical and competent leadership, transparent leadership, to help them emerge from this crisis. So far, they have not been getting it, and they deserve better.

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

Madam Speaker, it is April 12 and we are still discussing the fall economic statement that was introduced on November 30 of last year.

The member started off his speech by telling us about how important it was for the opposition to critically look at every piece of legislation, and rightfully so. There is definitely a role and a responsibility to do that. My sense is that it will only be the Conservatives speaking until this bill eventually comes to a vote.

Then the member proceeded to talk about how he supported parts 1 through 6, basically all the very important measures for Canadians, but then does not support the measure that actually pays for it all.

Could the member explain to the House how he, if he were finance minister, as I am sure he aspires to be one day given his new role, would pay for everything that he supports in the bill without having to borrow the money to do that right now?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am sad that the member did not follow the proceedings of the finance committee, where we reviewed Bill C-14.

At finance committee, we very clearly made it known that we were supportive of an increase in the debt ceiling to accommodate the current spending that the government had told us it had already blown through the previous debt ceiling, so we knew what the spending looked liked. We were prepared to accommodate the spending we are discussing today in the fall economic statement, but we said that the amount that was in excess of that, some $300 billion that the minister refused to provide any insight on, refusing to explain where it might be deployed, we just could not support—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The hon. member for Longueuil—Saint-Hubert.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Madam Speaker, my colleague touched on the issue of housing. Quebec is currently in the grips of a vicious, chronic housing crisis. Rent in Montreal is very high. It is hard to find housing for less than $1,000 a month. For families with more than two or three children, there is practically nothing available.

In Saint-Hyacinthe and Granby, the vacancy rates are 0.3% and 0.2%. It is outrageous.

Does my colleague not think it is high time for the government to invest heavily in social housing to help the people most affected by this housing crisis?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is time for us to look at how we address the current housing bubble in Canada. It is up to the Liberal government, in its upcoming budget, to come up with a plan to address the incredibly expensive housing market in Canada.

Let me add that the solution is not to tax home equity as some Liberals have suggested. We know, as we speak, that CMHC is conducting a study on taxing the equity in principal residences. The government has denied it has any plans to tax home equity. We should not kid ourselves. The Prime Minister has made many promises and denials before, but has always been found wanting.

The number one challenge with housing in Canada is, of course, a lack of supply. There are many other factors as well. It is up to the Liberal government and the finance minister to table a plan to address the housing crisis in the upcoming budget. To that extent, I agree with the member.

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

Madam Speaker, the New Democrats are also concerned about how we are going to pay back the deficit we are running right now during this crisis. In fact, I received a message from Paul, a local health worker, last night. He is worried he will end up having to pay for the costs of repayment of the deficit.

As New Democrats, we put forward a proposal to tax the super-rich, the multi-millionaires who hold wealth of over $20 million and the biggest corporations that have had excessive profits during this pandemic. We are not talking about the local bike shops. We are talking about the big banks and the largest corporations. However, the Conservatives and the Liberals voted against our proposal. They want this deficit to be left on the backs of everyday Canadians.

When will the Conservatives stop defending the big banks and Canada's largest corporations and the super-rich, who have benefited and profited from this pandemic, and get them to pay instead of leaving it on the shoulders of everyday Canadians?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I completely disagree with the premise of that member's question, but I would point him to what is the greatest generator of prosperity in Canada, and it is not going to be taxing Canadians to death. It is going to be generating economic growth, putting in place the key drivers of economic growth: investing in our productivity, investing in the competitiveness of the Canadian economy and ensuring our tax environment is one that attracts foreign investment rather than chases away foreign investment the way it has been chased away under the Liberal government.

We, as Conservatives, will be coming forward with a plan for our economy. It will be a plan that focuses on economic growth and one that is going to ensure that future generations of Canadians have a prospect of prosperity, a prosperous future for themselves and their families.

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

Madam Speaker, in listening to my hon. colleague from Abbotsford, one would be hard pressed to know the overlap between our health and COVID and the health of our economy.

I am still waiting for a vaccination. How we get our vaccination is provincial jurisdiction and how they are purchased is federal jurisdiction. In the course of this debate, how do we insist businesses reopen when it seems increasingly clear that we are in a third wave where our focus should be on public health and ensuring we stop thinking we can bend the curve but actually slam it down to zero?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, if the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands looks at the opposition day motion that asked for the Liberal government to come up with a proper plan to reopen the economy, she will notice the words “safely and gradually” prefaced the word “reopening” the economy. We are in favour of reopening the economy, but only if it can be done safely and gradually.

However, we have not seen any plan from the Liberal government at all. The one plan it had for rolling out vaccines has been badly botched. We are falling way behind other developed countries in the world. We are last in the G7. We are, I think, 52nd in the world. That is not a record of which I would be proud.

We need the government come up with a plan to restore and protect the health of Canadians and also restore—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Guelph.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Madam Speaker, I cannot help but feel the hon. member across the way is very out of touch with the business community. As past president of the Guelph Chamber of Commerce, someone who was on the board of the Downtown Business Association and was a board member on the Guelph-Wellington Business Enterprise Centre board and an Innovation Guelph co-founder, I have not found one business that says delaying talking about legislation is a good strategy to support businesses.

For four months, we have been trying to get to the point of discussing this bill. Could the hon. member maybe highlight why this was a good strategy that the Conservatives employed to try to stop us from talking about this legislation and therefore stopping supporting our businesses in our communities?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about. He is suggesting that somehow this delay happened.

I noticed today that the Liberals were debating this very bill. If they were so intent on getting this bill passed, why do they continue to debate and debate in the House? The hypocrisy is jaw-dropping. I will repeat what I included in my earlier comments. The role of an official opposition, which the member obviously does not understand, is oversight and to exercise scrutiny over the—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Joliette.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Madam Speaker, this is unbelievable. It is April 12, and we are still debating Bill C-14, which implements certain measures announced in the fall economic statement. We are still debating this many months after the economic statement was presented.

Part 1 of Bill C-14 deals with the children's special allowances program and corrects a problem regarding the Canada emergency rent subsidy. We support that.

Parts 2, 3 and 4 of the bill temporarily eliminate interest on the federal portion of Canada student loans. Quebec is being compensated. We support that.

Part 5 aims to prevent shortages of therapeutic products. Once again, of course we support that.

Part 6 authorizes payments to be made from the consolidated revenue fund, specifically for the regional relief and recovery fund, to support the economy. We support that.

Part 7 of the bill raised some questions and concerns. With that part, the government is asking to significantly increase Canada's debt limit. The current limit is $1.168 trillion, and the government wants that increased to $1.831 trillion. Those are astronomical figures.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer spoke about that at the finance committee. The answers he provided confirmed what I had read and believed: This is not about providing spending authority, but about increasing the debt ceiling. He stated that every expenditure proposed by the government should be voted on in the House. There could not be any shenanigans during an election, which could come sooner rather than later, when the government would ask the chief justice, who is standing in for the Governor General, to support other new spending. This part thus seeks to increase the debt ceiling.

This is similar to what we often see in the United States, where the Republican Party's strategy is to limit the government's spending capacity to the extent that it is no longer able to pay civil servants and has to shut down entire segments of the public service, something we do not want to do. Of course, that is not what would happen in the Canadian system. If such a situation were to occur, an election would be called. I do not think that we would want to call an election for that reason during a pandemic.

Yes, this is a hair-raising amount, but it is an authorization to increase the maximum amount that the government can borrow to cover future expenses. Now, the budget will be tabled on Monday. We expect it will include a major recovery plan. I am looking forward to studying and analyzing it to see if it will meet Quebec's wants and needs. The money is to cover those future expenses.

I would like to take the government to task for a few things. To my knowledge, setting a debt limit and making us vote on it before we see the spending plan is a relatively new approach. I am not against the idea, but I think the Minister of Finance should have taken the time to talk to all the political parties and finance critics to really clarify all this. Lawmakers who are analyzing the government's pandemic response need reassurance. They need to be certain that everything is above board, that they have a clear understanding of what is being done and that nobody is pulling the wool over anyone's eyes, which has happened since the start of the pandemic.

The government has never spent as much as it did last year, and some of that spending is certainly debatable. Did the government systematically use a rigorous approach or standard? The answer is no. We need only look at the WE scandal or Frank Baylis's high-priced ventilators, which did not find any takers because they do not suit the needs of the health care system.

Then there is the wage subsidy. There is not one word in the bill about the political parties using the wage subsidy. Using the wage subsidy to refill party coffers is unethical. The Bloc is the only party that did not touch this subsidy because we thought that would be unethical. I would remind my colleagues from all the other parties that this was inappropriate. The government has to be transparent.

Part 7 seeks to raise the borrowing limit. The government could have communicated its intention better and not dilly-dally for months. It makes no sense.

Once again, the Bloc Québécois will support Bill C-14, which clearly does not mark the end of the COVID-19-related economic measures. As I was saying, we are looking forward to the government tabling its first budget since it was elected, which it plans to do on Monday. It has been over two years since the federal government has tabled a budget, and that is unacceptable. We understand that the government was under tremendous pressure and had to react quickly to the pandemic by developing programs and holding consultations. However, the pandemic has been going on for over a year now. That may have been a reason for the budget to be a bit late, but it is not a reason for the government to fail to meet its obligations, which is what I think it has done by not tabling a budget for two years.

Obviously, in order for the Bloc Québécois to support the budget, the budget will have to meet the needs of Quebeckers, in accordance with our demands. There are no surprises there, since the government is well aware of what we want. I have already presented our demands to the Minister of Finance, and my leader will reiterate them to the Prime Minister today.

The Bloc Québécois's budget expectations include better health care funding for the provinces, with no strings attached. That is what the Government of Quebec and the Council of the Federation want too. Studies conducted by the Parliamentary Budget Officer and the Conference Board of Canada show that health care spending is skyrocketing, pandemic or no pandemic. The provinces are the ones that have to cover those costs, and Ottawa is not contributing as much as it should. We want Ottawa to play catch up. If it does not, the provinces' financial situation will be untenable in the short and medium term and will even get worse in the long term.

The amounts announced in Bill C-14 are woefully insufficient to rectify this situation. The Council of the Federation, which includes all provinces, wants Ottawa to increase its share of health care costs to 35%. When this program was originally created, Ottawa was to cover 50% of the costs, matching the provinces dollar for dollar in the interest of fairness.

Another thing we want to see in the budget and did not see in Bill C-14 is better support for seniors. This is something we have been calling for and waiting for since the last election. For decades now, old age security payments have failed to keep pace with inflation or the average salary. This benefit was originally meant to be commensurate with a percentage of the average salary, and we want to bring these payments back in line with that percentage. It is a matter of fairness and dignity for seniors. Simply put, we are proposing that old age security benefits be increased by $110 a month.

In the last election, for some unfathomable reason, the Liberals decided to do that, but only for people aged 75 and older. Come on. Why would they want to create two classes of seniors, those 65 to 74 years old and those 75 and older? It is a matter of dignity. Although seniors are not complaining, we can see in our ridings that they are struggling, especially those who depend on that income to live with dignity. Housing and food costs have gone up, especially during the pandemic, when seniors cannot go out and do their shopping themselves. We need to ensure that all seniors aged 65 and over are treated fairly.

For goodness' sake, let us stop dividing seniors into two classes. Over the weekend, the Liberals voted for that increase to come into effect at age 70. That is a step in the right direction, but it is not good enough. There is only one class of seniors: people aged 65 and older.

In addition, the Canada emergency wage subsidy and the Canada emergency rent subsidy are all well and good, but we need programs targeting particularly hard-hit sectors, such as the aerospace sector, which Canada has abandoned, unlike other countries around the world with major aerospace industries that have all set up programs. Nobody in government recognized the strategic value of supporting an extremely profitable industry.

The same goes for our airlines, the tourism sector and travel agencies in my riding and elsewhere, whose employees I have met with. They are going through really tough times and need a helping hand. Also on my mind a lot is the cultural sector. We can be proud of our creative industry, which generates economic spin-offs, but lockdowns have hit it harder than ever. We cannot afford to lose this sector. Culture is good for our souls. It shows us who we are. We have to support this sector and buoy it up, not give up on it. Another sector having a very hard time is local and regional media, which plays such an important role. Times are tough.

To come back to next week's budget, last fall, the Minister of Finance announced $70 billion to $100 billion for her economic recovery plan. Meanwhile, in the United States, the Biden administration has a $1.9-trillion recovery plan. Again, these are astronomical figures. There is much debate over whether such a plan is justified or not. The Bloc Québécois position will depend on what we see in the plan and whether this plan sets the stage for tomorrow's economy.

I am thinking about the green economy. Quebec is all set for this shift. The climate crisis is the most significant crisis, and we have to pivot to a green economy. We need to see that in the finance minister's budget and her recovery plan. There also needs to be support for our flagship sectors and our regions, of course.

The past year and next week's budget are going to cost a fortune, a colossal amount. Over the past few decades, or even the past century, economists have taught us that the least painful solution during a recession or a major crisis is to take carefully targeted action in order to relaunch the economy and eventually reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio. We know that Ottawa's debt has exploded during this pandemic, which is concerning, and I would like to take the government to task over that. It will have to act on this sooner rather than later, starting with a fairer tax system.

The pandemic gave an unprecedented advantage to web giants like Amazon, which were the big winners last year. While our local businesses struggled and fought to survive, many people began buying from web giants by ordering online for home delivery.

However, the Liberal government in Ottawa is still not taxing transactions with web giants. Come on. There was an announcement about this, but no action has been taken yet. Consequently, throughout the entire pandemic, Amazon and the other web giants were able to benefit from this advantage. Furthermore, these giants do not pay income taxes. Discussions are being held about potentially instituting a levy that would be equivalent to an income tax, but this measure is even further off. The pandemic gave all the advantage to web giants, and Ottawa did not even ask them to contribute. That must change, and it must change now. We can never make up for what was lost this past year because of a failure to take responsibility.

Local businesses here in downtown Joliette and all across Quebec and Canada are struggling or shutting down. It makes me sick to see the Prime Minister acting like he is down-to-earth while putting web giants ahead of small, independent businesses that are struggling. It makes no sense. We should be putting local businesses first and, at the very least, requiring web giants to follow the same rules. How has this not been done yet? This is unacceptable, and it needs to change.

Speaking of missing revenue, I think the government should be taking a harder stance on tax havens than it has so far. The fight against tax evasion and tax avoidance is a global concern, but Canada has made no progress in a little over five years, since the current Liberal government and Prime Minister came to power. Notwithstanding the lofty rhetoric from the Minister of National Revenue, Canada has an abominable record and is in a class of its own compared to the rest of the world and other countries in the G7 and the OECD. This needs to change. It is ridiculous.

I will give an example that was reported on by the CBC about a week ago, I think. Five years ago, the Panama papers came to light. Every country conducted an investigation into this worldwide scheme, leading to criminal charges and convictions. As I recall, the United Kingdom recovered over $300 billion and Germany recovered nearly $250 billion. The Panama papers therefore made it possible to recover hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. However, Canada recovered only $21 million. How many cases here resulted in criminal convictions? The answer is a big fat zero, which is rather shameful.

Revenu Québec managed to recover more money from the Panama papers than the Canada Revenue Agency did. I feel a bit resentful about that because it seems to me that everyone pays, everyone has a hard time, and the country goes into debt when some people who should be contributing do not. The government's role is to make sure that things are fair, but it is asleep at the wheel. This does not make any sense, and it has to change.

When I introduced my bill on a single tax return, one of the arguments that the Liberals put forward against it is that it would hinder the fight against tax evasion and tax avoidance. Quite frankly, Revenu Québec is doing a better job than the Liberals just for Quebec.

Clearly, Canada is an international laughingstock when it comes to the fight against tax avoidance and tax evasion, and the current Prime Minister and the Liberal party are largely to blame. The Prime Minister likes to project an image of himself as a progressive leader, but he is allowing the inequality gap to continue increasing by allowing access to tax havens. This is unacceptable; it has to change.

Of course, I am also thinking of the abuse associated with the big banks on Bay Street, which all have subsidiaries in tax havens. They artificially and virtually divert funds and declare their most lucrative activities in those countries so they can pay less in taxes here.

Throughout the pandemic, the government has been asked a number of questions in this House about companies that use tax havens to avoid paying taxes here but are supported by wage subsidies and other measures they are entitled to. The Prime Minister said this was necessary to save jobs and support the economy. That is a good argument, but if we do this, we must ensure that everyone contributes according to their means, without giving a free ride to the wealthy who use schemes and tax experts. There must be fairness for everyone.

Canada will soon have an unprecedented opportunity. The United States Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, announced plans to crack down on tax avoidance and tax evasion. She is calling for a more vigorous and coordinated international response. I hope Canada will answer the call, reverse its permissive approach of recent years and decades and stop pandering to those who use tax havens. This is an opportunity, and people can count on the Bloc Québécois to keep an eye on things and make sure Ottawa alters its approach to this issue. This is not a trivial issue.

Anyone who checks out the website for Morneau Shepell, former finance minister Bill Morneau's family business, can see that the company offers to advise insurance and pension funds on how to take advantage of tax havens so they do not have to pay tax in Canada.

That brings to mind another Liberal finance minister, Paul Martin. He owned a fleet of ships called Canada Steamship Lines, which he had purchased from the Desmarais family. These ships primarily navigated the St. Lawrence but were registered in Barbados, a country that had just become a tax haven under new income tax regulations brought in on the sly. That example involves the highest political office in the country.

The entire tax haven system needs to be replaced, and it always has. Sure, we needed an economic development and support plan during the pandemic, but at the very least, things need to be fair and everyone needs to contribute their fair share. Web giants, multinational corporations and the big banks are using tax havens, and this needs to stop right now.

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

Madam Speaker, through some great work by the Auditor General and the PBO, we have known for a fact that many of the COVID support programs were very poorly targeted and, even more shocking, friends of the Prime Minister got single-source contracts shaped by the PMO staff, which is totally illegal. We sent money to people in businesses who should not have received it. We overpaid so much that the finance minister had to create some media spin, calling the overpayments “preloaded stimulus”, so she is clearly in damage control mode.

Knowing all these facts, does the member really expect Canadians to have any confidence that the Liberals will be good stewards with further massive borrowing capacity?

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would first like to thank my colleague for her question and comments. I would also like to tell her that it is a pleasure working with her on the Standing Committee on Finance.

In a recession, an economic recovery plan is obviously the best or the least bad solution. However, in that case, there must be full confidence in the government and the measures must be very well targeted. A business or individual should not receive money they do not really need. In fact, we know that taxpayers will have to pay back this money, and that is why it is important to properly design the measures.

As my colleague mentioned, corners were cut in some cases. The Liberals attempted to award contracts to their friends or even did so, but this was not done to serve the common good or Canadians. It is our role to be watchful.

The government must change its approach because Canadians must have confidence in it. In my opinion, the government made serious mistakes that are undermining this confidence. That is why we continue to be watchful and monitor what the government does.

I would like to tell the Prime Minister and the government that there will be no more Frank Baylis ventilators.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Madam Speaker, we are well into the third wave, and we are in a situation where many small businesses and Canadians on the whole are very worried about their economic future.

The small business community is calling for the extension of the wage subsidy and the rent subsidy, to be extended until the end of 2021. Is that something the member will support?

Further, would the member support sector-specific funding? For example, he mentioned the live industry sector and the cultural sector. We really need to be dedicating resources to those communities so they can survive the pandemic and thrive beyond the pandemic.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Vancouver East for her question.

I completely agree with her. We need to help our SMEs and our businesses for as long as the crisis lasts. Often, we are talking about businesses that have been operating for decades, family businesses, people who do not have a ton of money and who contribute to their community and to society.

We do not want to wake up tomorrow morning and see our city centres deserted or repopulated with soulless American retailers. We therefore need to support these measures for as long as it takes.

I also want to reiterate to the Minister of Finance that our SMEs need predictability. If the announcements are made month by month, these individuals and businesses will not necessarily make the best decisions for their survival and for the stability of the economy. They need predictability, and special measures are needed for the hardest hit sectors.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Madam Speaker, my colleague from Joliette is a brilliant economist who knows how to explain complicated things in a simple way.

When we invest in something, we usually expect a significant return, one that is larger than our investment. Last June, I asked the Minister of National Revenue about the $1-billion investment to combat tax havens.

In my colleague's opinion, has that investment yielded a good return for taxpayers?

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Madam Speaker, I want to acknowledge my colleague from Beauport—Limoilou and thank her.

Before the last election, there was plenty of talk in the House about how the billion-dollar investment would tighten the net. We saw what happened with the Panama papers: $21 million were recovered thanks to that $1-billion investment.

Of course the Canada Revenue Agency needs the resources to investigate and put a stop to wide-open access to tax havens. That means investing and developing expertise. Despite the minister's claims, the Liberal government has completely missed the boat so far.

I just want to remind my colleague that, two years ago, on the very day the minister signed off on a report detailing the recovery of tens of millions of dollars, the minister said the government had recovered $25 billion. We therefore have reason to doubt her competence.

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

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague and friend from Joliette for his speech.

That is a key issue. We are in the middle of a pandemic, a public health emergency. At the same time, we are in a climate change crisis, a climate emergency.

The Canadian government continues to give large subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

Would my colleague from Joliette agree that we need to eliminate these multi-billion-dollar subsidies, like the ones paid for the Trans Mountain pipeline?

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague and friend from Saanich—Gulf Islands. I want to congratulate her on all the work she has done for so many years to save the planet.

We are in the midst of a pandemic, a terrible crisis. However, the real crisis of our time is the climate change crisis. We must do everything we can to stop it. In order to succeed, we must indeed take measures to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Subsidizing pipelines and incredibly polluting fossil fuels is wrong, for we are now living in a new era. Obviously, we need to consider the people who live in those regions and we need to offer them alternatives. Let us all work together to develop the green economy.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Madam Speaker, I note that in the comments made by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, he spoke pretty much about every aspect of Bill C-14 except the one that actually touches on his portfolio, which is the increase of the debt limit to $1.8 trillion.

First, does the member think this is a matter that should be debated under a separate bill? Second, is he concerned that there is a lack of transparency by the government in bringing such an extraordinarily large measure in a bill with many other things?

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague. Until recently we had the chance to work together at the Standing Committee on Finance and it was always a great pleasure.

As I said in my speech, part 7 of Bill C-14 is problematic. It calls for increasing the debt ceiling. We had questions about that, but I was quickly reassured when my questions were answered, including through the responses from the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

The problem I have is that the government brought this in out of nowhere, as though it were a foregone conclusion. We are being asked to say that the government can borrow up to $1,831 billion. The Minister of Finance could have taken the time to sit down with representatives from each party to explain where things stand, take questions, have discussions and address the challenges. Instead, here we are. In my opinion, this is the government's fault. We could have split the bill because this part is quite different from the other parts. I completely understand the concerns of my colleague and his party.

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

Madam Speaker, I want to follow up on some comments my colleague made about the energy sector in my province. The reality is that we are not going to have an economic recovery unless we are prepared to work to revitalize our critical sectors in this country, which includes resource extraction and manufacturing. It baffles me that some political parties think we can have a strong economic recovery without attending to those elements, which of course supply transfer payments to the member's province and have been key for the prosperity of the whole country.

I wonder if he has a comment on how Quebec would do without the benefit of the transfer payments it has been receiving from energy-producing provinces for a long time.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Madam Speaker, climate change is the defining issue of our time.

We must transition our economy to a green economy. I know that it is quite complicated and is causing hardship for families in his riding and province who work in these sectors. I know it is not easy. However, I believe, as does my party, that we do not have a choice.

Can we afford not to shift to a green economy and—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Order. Resuming debate.

The hon. member for Courtenay—Alberni.

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

Madam Speaker, I am hopeful that if you seek it, you will find unanimous consent for me to split my time with the member for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Does the member have unanimous consent?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

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

Madam Speaker, it is a huge honour to rise on behalf of the people of Courtenay—Alberni and as the critic for the federal NDP on small business, tourism, fisheries and oceans, and economic development.

As we know, the third wave is among us, especially here in British Columbia. I would not be surprised if further measures are announced by the provincial government today, but right now we know that restaurants are closed for the better part, unless they are serving on a patio outside. Many small businesses are restricted in what they can offer right now. It is having a huge impact on everyone in all of our communities, on their mental health and well-being, and on economic opportunities. People are scared. People are wondering how they are going to survive the pandemic, especially those in the hospitality and tourism sector. We know that small business owners have done the right thing. They have closed their doors or they have adhered to public health measures to protect public health. They are truly the unsung heroes, I believe, of this pandemic.

In my riding, tourism alone is almost 10,000 jobs, so it is having a huge impact on people in our communities. Right now we still are not seeing any supports for start-ups, for example. There is a brand new bakery called Wildflower Bakery. It really is a wildflower. It is a fabulous and great eatery that has just opened up. The bakery is employing people, creating economic development and prosperity in our community, offering diversity of cuisine. It is a new start-up and it has not been able to access the wage subsidy, rent program or the CEBA loans program, yet it is still paying rent. There are common-sense provisions that the government could provide so that it could qualify for the wage subsidy and the rent program, but the government has chosen to leave them out. It has been abandoned by the government.

We know that there is a group that started savestartups.ca that is building momentum. This is a generation of businesses that we could lose if the government does not amend the programs and create more flexibility. We are hearing from a lot of people who have fallen through the cracks who cannot access these programs, whether it be the HASCAP or many other programs that are being offered. They might be off a basis point or two, or somehow fall through the cracks in terms of the timing of when they started or whatnot. The government needs to create more flexibility to support these businesses or we are going to lose them. The cost to the Canadian economy is much greater than saving them right now.

We are calling on the government to come up with a program. I asked the Minister of Finance about this very concern. She said that the government understands that this is a problem and that it is looking into it. The government has been looking into it for months. Meanwhile, people are losing sleep or losing their businesses and wondering how they are going to survive it, if they can.

The other thing that we are hearing from businesses is that they want certainty. Whether it be the wage subsidy program or the rent program, we know that there is a commitment from the government until June. We need the government to commit that it is going to be there, in place, until the end of the pandemic. We just met with the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, which is deeply concerned. We know that this summer, for example, regardless of how quick the vaccine rollout is, it is very unlikely that we are going to have international tourists coming to our region. If one's business relies on international tourism, it is going to lose a second summer. We need the government to commit that it is going to be there right until the end, instead of actually doing segments like we are doing. This uncertainty is killing business. Also, it is very difficult for business owners to go out to seek financing and get the leverage needed to continue to get through these difficult times.

The other thing is with regard to the CEBA loan program. The expected repayment date is the end of next year. It will be nearly impossible for small businesses, given that there is a third wave coming with such force and with the new variants spreading so quickly. We need the government to extend those repayment periods. In fact, I know when I had a loan with a community futures development corporation in my riding that it was a 10-year loan for $40,000, so to expect that repayment date to be the end of next year is completely unreasonable. Businesses need to be certain that they are not going to be gouged with a high interest rate should they have to repay it. As well, the government needs to increase the loan. I know the government just extended it to $60,000, but it needs to increase it to $80,000.

Given that it is the third wave, it is the third round of impact that these small businesses are going through, and it is just impossible for many of them to survive without better support. In increasing that $20,000 that they do not have to repay if they repay the loan in a certain period of time, the government could help absorb some of the costs that they are incurring.

Also, the government is talking a lot about a child care plan. Here in British Columbia, we have a provincial government that is investing in child care, and it needs a federal partner to create accessible, affordable, universal child care for everyone. The chambers of commerce in my riding are calling for that, and were calling for it before the pandemic. In fact, the Comox Valley Chamber of Commerce cited that as its number one priority before the pandemic. We know that it is needed now more than ever before, given that women have been disproportionally impacted by the pandemic, and many of them are struggling with how they are going to get back to work and how they are going to get the support they need.

As well, the government continues to not want to tackle the merchant fees. We are paying some of the highest merchant fees in the world. There is a voluntary rate of 1.4% based on the big players, whether it be Walmarts or large multinational corporations paying an even lower rate, which means that the smaller businesses are paying a higher rate. However, in Europe, they are paying 0.3%.

We know that this is not a priority of the government. In fact, in the last government, Linda Lapointe, a former member of Parliament from Quebec, made commitments to the Quebec Convenience Stores Association and other groups in Quebec to take on this issue. She moved debate on her bill 16 times. Clearly, the government did not want this bill to be debated, and it does not want to tackle merchant fees. I was appreciative of the spirit of her efforts, but it got shut down, and the government needs to take this on. The Conservatives do not believe this is an issue that they should intervene on either. We heard from their finance critic that they do not want to see government intervene. However, government does have a role and a time to intervene, especially when small businesses and merchants are being gouged by large corporations.

I have met with Visa and MasterCard and they say that it is not their issue but the big banks' issue. The big banks are getting record profits right now, which is public information, and they are not paying their fair share in this pandemic. We are calling on the government to hold them to task and make sure that they pay their fair share.

Members have also heard me speak about the wild salmon emergency and how critical it is that the government invest in wild salmon in this upcoming budget. However, there is nothing in Bill C-14 for that, despite the fact that we had the lowest return in the Fraser last year and the year before.

One thing that is really close to me and the people in my riding is the lack of investment in affordable housing. With the rapid housing initiative, the government committed $1 billion. Out of the hundreds of billions of dollars in COVID support, there are people who are most marginalized, there are people who are falling through the cracks more now than ever. They are being isolated are dying on our streets.

We have an opioid crisis. I was talking to Julia Mewhort from Qualicum Beach, who has now joined up with Moms Stop the Harm. She lost her son, Stephen, to a preventable opioid overdose that resulted from fentanyl poisoning, a drug source that was tainted, which has killed over 16,000 Canadians, yet the government still has not declared a public health emergency. We know that it requires a national public health emergency declaration from the federal government under the Emergencies Act so that we can manage and resource this issue to reduce and eliminate deaths that are preventable. She is calling for action so that more sons like hers do not die due to tainted drugs.

The current war on drugs has clearly been grossly ineffective and has resulted in widespread stigma for addiction and those who use illicit drugs. We know that the government's new bill still carries with it the stigma and is not solving this issue. Criminalization of particular substances has resulted in the establishment of a drug trade that now trafficks dangerous and lethal products such fentanyl.

We need new law reform, and the Liberals are not doing enough to end the stigma. We need to decriminalize and regulate to ensure safe sources and proper measures and supports that will reduce the number of deaths that are happening in our communities. We did not see anything in Bill C-14, but I am hoping that in the next budget the government is going to make it a priority, declare a national public health emergency and invest a lot more than $1 billion in rapid housing. We are watching the sons and daughters of our communities die on the streets, and it is all preventable.

[Lloyd Longfield, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Madam Speaker, I always enjoy the interventions from the member across the way, specifically mentioning businesses and people who he is serving in his community. He is obviously well in touch with the people he is working with.

I am wondering whether the hon. member could comment on the delay tactics that have been used to bring this legislation forward and whether the NDP could help us to move forward debates in the House so that we are not delayed by four months to deal with legislation such as we have in front of us today.

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

Madam Speaker, it is frustrating. We have seen the Conservatives continue to delay legislation. They have not brought any new ideas forward to help in this crisis, and it has been challenging at best, but the Liberals as well are delaying. They are delaying every time that they put out programs with timelines like June. We are looking for the government to commit all the programs, whether they be the wage subsidy or the rent program, to the end of the pandemic. The small businesses need certainty. Like the member, I ran a chamber of commerce. I was deeply involved in the small business community where I come from, and they are saying they need certainty and a stronger commitment from the federal Liberal government.

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

Madam Speaker, does the member have any explanation as to why the HASCAP, a program that took forever to happen and was supposed to support those in highly affected industries, is yet again another massive failure? Why on earth would the government allow banks to deny HASCAP loans to small businesses because they cannot provide a revenue statement? How can they provide a revenue projection when they have no certainty they can reopen in 2021, due to the pathetic vaccine rollout? How can this program be so dysfunctional yet again?

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

Madam Speaker, that is an excellent question. We are also asking the government to fix the broken HASCAP. People cannot access the liquidity they need right now. These businesses are running out of time. I will go back to the certainty of the wage subsidy and the rent program. They need a commitment that the government is in it for the long haul, right to the very end, and will fix the broken program. Start-ups and other businesses are being left out by small slivers of the current program; programs need to be amended so they can capture these businesses and protect them. It is absolutely critical, so I appreciate her question, and we are looking to the government to answer that.

Why is there such a slow rollout on the HASCAP, especially when businesses are desperate right now?

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

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague from Courtenay—Alberni for bringing attention back to the critical public health emergency of the opioid crisis. He mentioned the extraordinary work and the courage of Moms Stop the Harm. Leslie McBain lost her son; she is one of my constituents from Pender Island. It reaches every community. It is not so much overdoses as fentanyl poisonings that are occurring, and it is urgent. I just wanted to thank him for raising it and join in his hope that we will see real movement in the upcoming budget to address the opioid crisis, if he wants to comment further on what needs to be done.

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

Madam Speaker, everyone across the country is being impacted by the opioid crisis, and it is preventable.

These are fentanyl-poisoned drugs that people are using right now, when they need a clean source. The member asked about some of the solutions. We need therapeutic treatment centres like those in Portugal. We need the government to actually declare it a national public health emergency and to build affordable housing, so that we can get people in stable housing and get them the wraparound supports they desperately need. It is the only way we are going to resolve this issue.

I appreciate the pilot project in Vancouver and Victoria that is happening right now, but they need to broaden that right across the country. In rural communities, like where I live in Port Alberni, I have seen three of my friends' kids die in the last six months. I have not seen them, but I have known them, and these are lives that are lost that are all preventable deaths. That could have been done with common-sense policy, and instead the government is right now playing politics. That is costing people lives, and it is unnecessary. The Liberals need to take urgent action. They need to listen to Moms Stop the Harm. They talk about listening to public health, emergency and medical experts. Why are they not doing that right now, when it comes to the opioid crisis?

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to give a shout-out to the member for Courtenay—Alberni. We are in neighbouring ridings on Vancouver Island, and I always appreciate his interventions in the House and the work that he does on behalf of his constituents.

I am also pleased to be participating in today's debate to represent the good people of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford and give some of my thoughts on Bill C-14, which is coming back to the House after its long journey through committee and is to implement certain provisions of the economic statement that was tabled in the House all the way back on November 30, 2020. I have a feeling that the bill, in a week's time, is going to be greatly overshadowed by the federal budget: the first one we are going to have seen in two years. It is going to be interesting to see what the government does with its budget implementation act and with Bill C-14, because it has taken a long time for us to get to this stage.

This is important to underline because a lot has changed in our country and around the world since the economic statement was delivered in November. In those days, we were just starting to get into the throes of the second wave of the pandemic. A lot of people were hoping that, by the spring, public health measures would have taken effect and we would largely be getting out of this ordeal, but that has not come to be. We are now very much in the grip of a third wave, and this one is very concerning because of the dangerous spread of variants of concern. Provinces such as Ontario and my home of British Columbia are seeing very worrying spikes, and this is certainly not a time for us to let up on our guard. It is certainly not a time, in particular, for the federal government to contemplate anything like an election, but it is a time to make sure the government is still there for individuals and for small businesses until our public health experts give us a clean bill of health. Until they declare that this pandemic is over, it is very important that all levels of government continue to focus on getting us through this.

I want to underline that people are exhausted. Pandemic fatigue is very much in place. We have been going through this for over a year. People are scared. They are worried about their futures, and people are wondering how much more we can go through. That underlines the importance of the federal government still being there.

I want to give a shout-out to communities like Port Renfrew, Lake Cowichan, Chemainus and Crofton, all the way down through the Cowichan Valley to its southern tip and the great city of Langford and the District of Highlands. The story is the same no matter which one of those communities people are in. Businesses have closed or they are operating on a razor's edge. People have lost their jobs. Front-line health care workers in hospitals in the region are dealing with so much. I want to give a shout-out to their efforts and say that we are certainly not all in this together, but we are in the same storm. Some of us have had a far greater ability to get through this than others, and for those who have been less fortunate it is very important that we collectively look after their interests.

In order for us to get through this pandemic, Canadians are looking for some semblance of normalcy. I agree with that, but I also think they are looking for innovative and ambitious measures to fight the pandemic and to get us on to the recovery. While there are a lot of things in Bill C-14 that I can support, unfortunately there are a lot of half measures. I want to see far more commitment to strengthening our communities over the long term.

For example, I know there have been commitments made recently by the finance minister with respect to strengthening our child care system. Unfortunately, this is a promise that we have seen all too often from the Liberal Party and, while in Bill C-14 we see measures to increase child benefit payments, it remains to be seen what kind of measures will actually be in next week's budget about strengthening the child care system. When I speak to many parents in my riding, the biggest concern aside from cost is availability. There simply are not spaces.

If we truly want parents to have full economic opportunity to participate in the workforce, particularly women who have been among the hardest hit in this pandemic, it makes economic sense to have those child care spaces so that small businesses are not losing valuable employees. When businesses are working with a staff of four or five people and they lose one, it can be devastating. It makes economic sense to be putting in these measures.

I want to go over a few things in Bill C-14. One helpful thing it would do is lift the interest on student loans for a full fiscal year: from April 1, 2021, through to March 31, 2022. However, this clause is a perfect example of how the Liberals like to govern: It appears they are tackling a problem, but they are really only paying it lip service.

Students have been particularly hard hit by this pandemic. I recently spoke with the Simon Fraser University Student Society. They are reporting that many of their members are using the food bank and skipping meals every single day to make their monthly budgets stretch.

Why not be bolder? Why not eliminate the interest on student loans altogether and give young people a real chance and opportunity at a time when society expects them to be at their most productive?

The federal government should not be profiting on the backs of students, through loans. We should be bold and get rid of the interest on student loans altogether. Let us give young people a real hand up to make their way in the world once they exit post-secondary education.

A part of Bill C-14 refers to payments from the consolidated revenue fund toward some regional development agencies. That is good to see, but members will recall that the federal government recently made a big announcement about British Columbia getting its very own regional development agency. That is a great thing. Our province is unique. It needs to be split off from the other western provinces to recognize our unique needs.

However, since the announcement, we have heard nothing else. The details on how this new B.C. RDA is going to come into being remain scarce. I certainly am hoping for much more detail on it.

In the final bit of my speech, I want to speak specifically on the opioid crisis. In Bill C-14, there is an authorized payment of $64.4 million for mental health and substance use in the context of COVID-19. I want to be very clear that I think any investment in this area is welcome news. My main problem is with the amount: $64 million of investment.

I acknowledge previous investments have been made, but $64 million spread across the country is very much a drop in the bucket. Communities like mine of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford are suffering under the opioid crisis. Every single death from fentanyl poisoning is preventable. I really need to give a shout out to the small business owners and front-line health care workers who are in the middle of this every single day. I live in a province that has been dealing with this crisis for many years, but last year we had a record number of deaths. The problem is not going away.

We do not need just $64 million of investment. We need a federal government that is going to step up to the plate, declare a national health emergency, and work with full decriminalization of personal amounts. I know the government has introduced Bill C-22 with a declaration of principles, but that is not going to go far enough. When the Province of B.C. and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police are both asking for decriminalization and the federal government does not deliver, that is a very big problem.

The federal government needs to step up to the plate. The time for half measures in this area is well and truly over. We need bold policy.

There is a lot to speak to in Bill C-14. It is quite a big bill. At this point, I would welcome any comments and questions from my colleagues.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The questions and comments for the hon. member will come after Oral Questions.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-14, An Act to implement certain provisions of the economic statement tabled in Parliament on November 30, 2020 and other measures, be read the third time and passed.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford has five minutes remaining for questions and comments.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan.

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

Mr. Speaker, I was listening to my colleague's remarks before question period began. He spoke about the opioid crisis in great detail, and I share with him the sense of urgency in needing to take action. I would also say that the urgency should direct us to make sure that the action being proposed is the correct action. It is not enough to take action if we are not relatively certain that the action proposed moves in the right direction. It would seem to me that there was a great risk in his proposal for decriminalization at the present time, especially when the treatment available simply is not adequate, as I think he would acknowledge. If we undertake measures that would make it easier for people to access dangerous drugs without having treatment in place, it could create much greater risk in terms of people being exposed and getting addicted.

Would the member agree that a better approach emphasizes public health as well as an opportunity for intervention when somebody may be vulnerable? Intervention could encourage them to seek help and treatment.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question from my hon. colleague.

Decriminalization is not being called for just by the NDP. I made mention of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. I made mention of the provincial government of British Columbia. The chief medical health officer of British Columbia and countless experts in the field have all identified decriminalization as an important step out of many that we need to take.

The stigmatization with the ongoing criminality of drug use is a major barrier to people getting help in the first place. I agree that we need a lot of treatment options. This is one step in a continuum of care, but I would argue that it is a very important step, especially for people who are suffering from ongoing stigma and who may not get the help they need because of it.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, my question is regarding the issue of timing. This is a piece of legislation that has been before the House since last year. In fact, we can go back to when the Minister of Finance tabled the economic statement at the end of November last year. I wonder if my friend could provide his thoughts. Given the importance of this legislation and getting it passed through the system, why does he believe it has taken as much time as it has?

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am sure there are many reasons, but if I look at how the Liberals have been scheduling House business over the last couple of months, it has been a bit of a scattergun approach. There does not seem to be any rhyme, reason or logical following for which bills are being brought up for debate. As for delay, when the Liberals decided to bring in a motion accepting Senate amendments to Bill C-7, it led to a whole new round of debate on a bill that the House had already presented its opinion on. This, of course, sidelined many other important pieces of legislation.

I just wish that in the weeks ahead we would have a little bit more reasoning behind the scheduling of House business. I would agree with him that Bill C-14 has some important measures, and that Canadians would like to see some of the measures passed.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, in 1970, a national child care system was recommended by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada. Moving forward to 1993, the Liberals, in their platform, promised a national child care strategy. We have now been waiting 28 years for something that has been called for by child care workers across the country.

How critical is it for the Liberal government to address this matter if we truly are going to honour the “she-covery” everybody is calling for?

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I share my colleague's concerns with Liberal promises of decades that have gone by. Hopefully this is one promise that we will see an absolute commitment to, because it is incredibly important.

I speak to young families in Cowichan—Malahat—Langford. Often the complaint is that it is simply not affordable or not worth it for a person to get a second job because they would not be bringing in enough money to deal with the cost of child care. Aside from the cost, availability is also a huge issue.

We really want both partners in young families to have an opportunity to join the work force and increase their economic opportunities. That is something that has been backed up by multiple chambers of commerce. The smart economic investment for families and their well-being is substantial investment in child care.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Revenue]

Mr. Speaker, it is great to see everyone virtually as we start the next few weeks of Parliament sitting. I hope all my colleagues are doing well, and I wish all the best to them and their respective families.

Today, I am speaking to Bill C-14, which we know contains many valuable measures to assist Canadian families as they continue to battle through COVID-19, just as the country and the world continue to battle through COVID-19. Thankfully the vaccines are arriving, and people are receiving their vaccinations. It is great to see the increase of the daily vaccination count here in the province of Ontario and to see people wanting to receive the vaccine.

Before I begin my formal remarks, I would like to say a quick thank you to all the front-line workers, including the individuals at Canada's Wonderland, and at the new Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital here in the city of Vaughan, who are getting people vaccinated, doing it for hours and hours a day, and doing it with a smile. It is great to see.

That is what Canada is about, our ability to rise to the occasion. That is what Canadians are doing on a daily basis, and what they expect from the 338 members of Parliament. They expect us to do the good work we are sent here to do and make sure we have their backs. We always need to think about that.

Bill C-14 would implement several measures from the 2020 fall economic statement that would provide critical support to Canadians and businesses during the pandemic. These measures are targeted and offer a lifeline to Canadians who need them most at this critical time in their lives, and at a critical time for the country.

Allow me to outline some of the key measures that this bill would put in place. There would be immediate support for families with young children. Families have been facing uncertainty with cancellations of in-person classes at schools, as well as day care closures. As a result many families with young children have had to find temporary alternatives to their regular child care arrangements. This is often at higher and unanticipated costs for Canadian families with children. It has also placed an undue burden on caregivers, the majority of whom are women.

The government is committed to helping the many families who have been struggling with a wide range of unexpected expenses. Bill C-14 would provide immediate relief for low- and middle-income families with young children who are entitled to the Canada child benefit, or CCB. We are calling it the young child supplement. For these families, we are proposing to provide up to $1,200 in 2021 for each child under the age of six. This would represent an increase of almost 20% over the current maximum annual CCB payment and would have a meaningful impact for families in need of this support during the pandemic.

As I was about to begin today's speech, we received news here in the beautiful province of Ontario that the Minister of Education would be indefinitely postponing in-class learning for students across Ontario. My understanding is that means two million children will now be at home for an additional few weeks. It is the delayed spring break this week. My two daughters are at home, and I now anticipate they are going to be home for several more weeks.

I implore all members of the House to get this legislation passed. Let us get it to the Senate and let us get royal assent on it, so that we could provide assistance to all these families here in Ontario and, of course, across Canada, so they can ensure their kids are looked after and any additional expenses are covered. Frankly, individuals should not be faced with tough choices for their families, in terms of food or school supplies or anything of that nature that we do not even want to imagine or think about.

Again, I ask all members of Parliament, and I ask the official opposition, to join us in passing Bill C-14. Specifically, if there is one measure in here that we could all agree upon, it is the Canada child benefit. Let us get this entire bill done and through Parliament.

Families entitled to the CCB who have a net income above $120,000 would receive a total benefit of $600 for each child under the age of six. The support would automatically be delivered or deposited over the course of 2021 into the bank accounts of families entitled to the CCB. Those who have a net income at or below $120,000 would receive the maximum of $1,200. These payments would start to roll out shortly, after the passage of Bill C-14.

This temporary assistance would directly benefit about 1.6 million families, which represents about 2.1 million children, during a period when families are still grappling with the financial impacts of the pandemic and the recent third wave, which has closed schools and day care centres in some provinces and territories. Again, I am alluding to the news we had here today in the province of Ontario. It is clear that this important assistance to families in their time of need should be approved as soon as possible.

The pandemic has also been particularly hard on young people. We know that. We see that in the labour force statistics. We see the elevated unemployment rates for young men and young women, who are unfortunately not working at this time. We see it in the lower participation rates for these cohorts of people. Internships and summer jobs have become scarce, as Canadians did the right thing and stayed at home. The government is working to ensure the pandemic does not derail young Canadians' futures.

In addition to proposed measures from the fall economic statement that would provide more opportunities for young people to gain work experience, our government is also proposing to ease the financial burden on recent graduates. Bill C-14 would ease the burden of student debt by eliminating interest accrual on the repayment of Canada's student loans and Canada apprenticeship loans for 2021-22.

This important message and measure, which has received praise from the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, would bring $329.4 million in relief to up to 1.4 million Canadians with student debt who are looking for work or are otherwise in the early stages of their careers. It would also help graduates from low- and middle-income families, who tend to have higher levels of financial need. The government also proposes to build on the employment job skills development and educational supports provided to youth and students over the summer.

I want to remind all members of Parliament that our support for students is not just this one-time measure. Since budget 2015, and really since budget 2016, I have received some questions in prior debates about what we have done for students. Budget 2016 alone provided $2.7 billion over five years of investments into the Canada student loans program.

One measure that I want to make sure we all remember is that of increasing the repayment assistance plan eligibility thresholds starting on November 1, 2016, to ensure that no student had to repay their Canada student loan until they were earning at least $25,000 per year. I can spend a few hours speaking about our supports for students, but I want to ensure that all parliamentarians are aware that we have supported students since the first time we were elected, in our first mandate, and we will continue to do so through COVID and as we exit the pandemic.

Let us speak about the Borrowing Authority Act. Beginning in 2017, in recognition that we needed to restore the requirement of parliamentary approval of government borrowing, the government enacted the Borrowing Authority Act. This important piece of legislation sets out a legislative maximum amount on total borrowing by the government and agent crown corporations and requires the Minister of Finance to update parliamentarians on how borrowing needs evolve on a regular basis.

In recognition of the impact of COVID on the government's borrowing, the Minister of Finance proposed in the fall economic statement to amend the Borrowing Authority Act to increase the borrowing limit. This proposed measure in Bill C-14 would increase the maximum borrowing amount to $1.831 billion to cover projected borrowings out to March 2024 and include extraordinary borrowings made because of COVID-19. Including these extraordinary borrowings in the new maximum will provide greater transparency on the government's debt program to Canadians.

I want to address something related to this, and I wish to be very precise here. It is something that the Deputy Prime Minister raised during FINA's consideration of Bill C-14. The increase in the borrowing authority is in no way a blank cheque. Every single expenditure by the government needs to be authorized by Parliament, by the 338 individuals who have the privilege of sitting in our Parliament.

The borrowing authority sets a transparent and accountable maximum limit as to how much the government can borrow. Passing Bill C-14 would allow the government to continue to take decisive action to provide the support to people, businesses, our friends, our neighbours and their families. This support is needed to weather this pandemic. The action the government has taken and plans to take will help Canada come roaring back from the COVID-19 recession and prevent the long-term economic scarring that would weaken our post-pandemic recovery.

We are seeing the benefits of the programs that were put in place. For example, the Canada emergency wage subsidy, which allowed us to maintain the attachment between employer and employee and has seen us through to the reopening throughout the country. Our March labour force statistics show over 300,000 jobs were recovered and created here in the country. That is something great. Our unemployment went down to 7.5%, if I remember correctly. Our participation rate went up and this is a direction we are happy to see, but we know how much the work continues and is needed.

We believe that we will return to recovery, but we are not there yet. The government will continue to provide support to Canadians and ensure the economy can get back on track. The measures I have mentioned are just part of the government's pandemic response and plans for recovery.

I wish to touch upon the long-term care situation that we have seen across the country. Thankfully, through the vaccine procurement and rollout, our long-term care situation has stabilized, and I thank the minister from the riding of Oakville on the wonderful job she has done. However, we know we need to continue to make investments, and part of Bill C-14 is to provide funding of up $505.7 million as part of the new safe long-term care fund to support long-term care facilities, including funding in support of care facilities to prevent the spread of COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths.

I wish to thank the Canadian Armed Forces. They came to the riding I represent, Vaughan—Woodbridge. They went to the Woodbridge long-term care facility and stabilized the situation. It was a very drastic situation in the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many residents, unfortunately, lost their lives. The Canadian Armed Forces have been called upon again and again, and they have done their duties with exemplary service. I wish to thank them again.

Finally, Bill C-14 would enable the government to move forward with implementing the important measures from the fall economic statement, which will help bridge the country to the other side of the pandemic. I urge all members of this House to support this important legislation at this most extraordinary period of time we find ourselves in. The world continues to face this, as every country and all leaders continue the vaccine rollout and get the vaccines to their citizens. We are seeing it here.

I am so happy to see the millions of doses arriving in Canada on a weekly basis, and that Canadians are doing their part in getting vaccinated.

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

Mr. Speaker, the member spoke much about part 7 and, as always, the devil is in the details. Part 7, the Borrowing Authority Act, would increase the amount of borrowing by an astronomical figure, but with a qualifier. In the Financial Administration Act, in paragraph 46.1, the wording permits the government to borrow any amount to pay back debt, and Canadians are very concerned that this is just a blank cheque.

Please tell us how you expect Canadians to believe you are not going to just continue spending on things we should not be spending on.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

I would remind hon. members to direct their comments to the Chair.

The hon. parliamentary secretary.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we as a government, in collaboration with all provinces, have put in place a number of programs to assist Canadians. I was looking at the numbers today. We speak about what the government is investing in for Canadians, and right now we have Canadians' backs. We have their backs during this most extraordinary period of time.

We must be able to utilize various measures to fund these measures, including the recovery benefits, and this includes the Borrowing Authority Act. That is at page 141 of the fall economic statement. It is very detailed in terms of what these borrowings are being used for. They are being utilized to support Canadians during this most extraordinary period of time.

Nearly two million Canadians have applied for the Canada recovery benefits during this time because they continue to be impacted due to COVID-19.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out to my colleague a big issue with the Canada recovery benefit.

Hospitals in Quebec and Ontario are currently in triage mode, and surgeries have been pushed back because of the pandemic. As we know, EI sickness benefits were not extended to 50 weeks. There are people who are not eligible for the Canada recovery benefit, and since their surgery has been pushed back, they are left with nothing. People in my riding are being forced to dip into their RRSP to survive. This provides further proof that EI sickness benefits should be extended to 50 weeks.

What does my colleague think of that?

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as a nation going through COVID-19, our government has put in place a number of programs to assist Canadians at this very important period of time. If we look at the number of programs put in place, including the safe restart agreement, the flexibility we have afforded the EI system and the recovery benefits, we have strengthened our social safety net when it is most required and timely to do so. Those measures are assisting Canadians to the best of our ability today. We can look at how we can strengthen the EI system going forward.

I look forward to having that debate with my hon. colleague from the riding of Jonquière and all other members of Parliament.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member spoke about students and all the wonderful things the government had done for them. He mentioned that the government had forgiven $2.7 billion, but he failed to mention the fact that in 2016, the government collected $635 million; in 2017, $662 million; and in 2018, $862 million. Students owe $28 billion to the federal government from which it is making a profit. Therefore, the forgiveness he talks about is ultimately coming off the backs of students.

We know that when we invest in education, we get $7 for every dollar we invest. Could the member talk about something that would show some more political courage? The New Democrats are talking about eliminating student loans entirely. We are talking about making post-secondary education free, because we see the value that this has for our future. Maybe he could talk about that and show some political courage.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for London—Fanshawe for her passion and obvious advocacy for students across the country.

We know that Canadians are one of the most educated peoples in the world. Our education system is second to none. As a government, we will continue to fund education on the post-secondary level in terms of research grants and by investing literally hundreds of millions of dollars in our institutions. We will continue to do that.

We will also continue to assist students with respect to the affordability of receiving education. There have been increases in grants from the Canada students grant program. There have also been many actions to ensure that once students finish university or college, they can actually start working. Once they achieve a certain level of income, which is above the $25,000 mark, then they can start to repay their student loans. That is a very diligent and judicious manner of investing in education, supporting our students and supporting our overall post-secondary education system.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, does my colleague not think that the government's failure over the years to meet its responsibility to increase health transfers, as Quebec and the provinces have unanimously been calling for, and the fact that the health transfers have not been properly indexed contributed to the overall decline of health care systems in Quebec and the provinces during the pandemic, forcing the government to take measures that it probably could have avoided if the health transfers had allowed the provincial governments to do their job properly with their own health care systems?

It is very disappointing to me to see no mention of permanent, unconditional health transfers in the economic statement.

I would like my colleague's opinion on the effect this may have had on our health care systems during a crisis.

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians from coast to coast to coast very much cherish and value our health system. We need to continue to invest in it. We have worked with the provinces collaboratively through the safe restart agreement and through utilizing the Canadian Armed Forces to assist individual provinces in their time of need. We will continue to do so. We will continue to make those investments in individuals such as our seniors, but also directly in our health care system.

I look forward to those negotiations in terms of what the Minister of Finance lays out in the budget, with measures to assist all Canadians to grow our economy and fund our social safety net. We need to do so.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague across the way talked about child care. While the child tax benefit increase is seen as a good first step, it does not create any early education child care spaces. On average, parents pay $800 to $900 a month for child care, so $1,200 for the entire year does not help parents effectively pay for one of the highest costs they have, which is second only to housing. The Liberal government promised in the House to immediately put in the $2 billion that the child care sector required. I hope we will see that in the budget. When can we expect to see that immediate investment of $2 billion in child care?

[Francesco Sorbara, Liberal, Vaughan—Woodbridge, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as an economist, having accessible and affordable child care for all Canadians from coast to coast to coast is something near and dear to my heart. We know it increases labour force participation rates and is a very large benefit to our economy. I look forward to continuing this conversation about how we can improve the lives of all Canadian families, so they do not have to make the decision to go back to work or to stay home.

I personally know about the costs of child care. Affordability aside, when we lived in the city of Toronto, the waiting period for us to obtain accessible child care was almost a two-year window. I know what Canadian families go through. Therefore, I will continue to advocate for continual investments in affordable and accessible child care for not only the residents in my riding of Vaughan—Woodbridge, but for all Canadian families from coast to coast to coast.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-14, An Act to implement certain provisions of the economic statement tabled in Parliament on November 30, 2020 and other measures, be read the third time and passed.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, before I get started, I wish to offer my deepest sympathies to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on the passing of her strength and stay, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, her husband of 73 years. Canada mourns for this tremendous loss in the royal family, and on behalf of my constituents, I wish them strength during this incredibly difficult time.

I am thankful for the opportunity to put words on the record today regarding Bill C-14, the economic statement implementation act, and I will be splitting my time with the member for Lévis—Lotbinière.

The bill, introduced this past fall, would implement a boost to the Canada child benefit, which we know is a popular program for Canadian families that originated under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Our new leader, the MP for Durham, championed this boost when he was running for leadership of our party. I am glad to see the Liberals agreeing with our Conservative party leader on this provision.

The bill would also make changes to the rent subsidy, which the Conservatives have been calling for since it was first introduced last summer. In fact, I personally questioned the former minister of finance on the original program, which was deeply flawed and failed to support thousands of small businesses in need, including many in my riding.

The Conservatives agree that most of the financial supports contained in the bill are needed to continue to support Canadians while lockdowns and restrictions continue to ravage our private sector, drive our small businesses to bankruptcy and leave millions of Canadians unemployed. Unfortunately, Bill C-14 also includes some very worrying provisions. It seeks to increase the maximum borrowing authority from the current $1.1 trillion to $1.8 trillion for the next three years. This is $700 billion of potential spending in the next three years, all of which would be financed through deficit. It includes $100 billion for discretionary stimulus spending, but no one really knows what that means because details have yet to be provided. As a result, the bill has inspired very little confidence in Canadians that the Liberal government has a plan to get us out of this health crisis and recover our damaged economy. Ultimately, this increase is far greater than the government needs for getting through the next fiscal year and would authorize a massive expansion of the national debt without any fiscal anchor or scrutiny of the dangers this new debt would create.

Overall, the COVID deficit that Canadians are inheriting is truly astounding. At over $336 billion in a single year, it will take a Herculean effort, a lot of hard work, to get it under control.

The C.D. Howe Institute, a highly respected non-partisan Canadian think tank, recently put out a strong warning to the Liberal government about the financial perils Canada faces if we cannot get the debt and deficit under control in the near future. In its report, it said the “Canadian governments’ deficits in fiscal 2020/21 will total about 20 percent of Canadian GDP, the highest among all advanced economies and seven percentage points higher than the average for G20 countries”. That is pretty shocking. The report goes on to say, “Year upon year of expenses exceeding revenues and the resulting deterioration of the federal government’s net worth—in other words, an accumulated deficit that keeps rising—signify an ongoing deterioration in Ottawa’s ability to deliver services to Canadians.”

The Conservatives have long sounded the alarm of the perils of unchecked spending. If interest rates go up, which we know they will, the more Canadians have to pay on our debts, which would means less to spend on critical services like health and education transfers to provinces, defence and infrastructure, and the critical social safety net that the federal government provides to Canadians on behalf of taxpayers.

We know the entire world is facing the same issues that Canada is facing as we battle COVID-19. Canada has spent more money per capita than any other country in the world, yet at the same time as other countries like the U.S. and the U.K. have presented plans to reopen their economies safely and permanently based on data, Canada is entering its third wave of lockdowns. Furthermore, despite astronomical spending, we are hovering between 40th and 50th, and sometimes even lower than 50th, in the world for vaccinations. Only 2.1% of our entire population has received both doses of the vaccine to date. More vulnerable and elderly people will die as a result of the poor vaccine procurement strategy of the government. I cannot stress how serious this is. It is a national shame and a strategy that could have been avoided.

The Liberals wasted 100 days on the Chinese company CanSino before signing contracts with other vaccine companies. That is a fact. They put all of our eggs in one basket. They bet the entire future of Canada on the Communist Party of China, and within a week of the Prime Minister announcing to Canadians the vaccine contract with CanSino, the Communist Party of China cancelled it, which left Canada scrambling to sign other contracts in August. This was months after the pandemic started.

By that time, other countries in the world had, long before us, signed contracts with Pfizer, Moderna and others. That is one of the reasons that we are so far behind our G7 allies and countless other countries for vaccination rates. The Liberals wasted 100 days betting on one contract.

Just this week, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention admitted that some Chinese-made vaccines offered low protection against COVID. Those vaccines do not even work. The Prime Minister's decision to waste time pursuing a vaccine partnership with the Communist Party of China will haunt Canada for generations and may cost thousands of vulnerable lives, but the government's horrific mismanagement does not end there.

By and large, Canadians recognize this as a wartime effort. Although the Conservatives would have been much more respectful and considerate of the long-term damage of record deficit spending than the Liberals, we have fully and proudly supported the emergency spending measures for Canadians in their greatest hours of need, which have helped them get through these incredibly difficult times. We recognize how important those critical measures are. The difference, though, lies in how the Conservatives would have prepared Canada before the pandemic hit, as well as what we would be doing now and after the pandemic is over.

The Conservatives would not have shuttered Canada's highly regarded international early warning pandemic system, which the Liberals did in May 2019. They broke their promise to run three modest deficits of $10 billion annually and instead ran up a $100-billion deficit, in a relatively stable economy, during their first term. They broke their promise, ran up the debt and spent the cupboards bare in the good times. They justified this spending by promising it would create incredible economic growth, yet Canadians experienced sluggish economic growth during the Liberals' first term. The bottom line is that the Liberals left Canada vulnerable before the pandemic hit, and that is on them.

The question many people ask is what the Conservatives would do if they were in the driver's seat. I would like to talk a bit about that as I wrap up.

In addition to calling on the federal government to bring forward a data-driven plan to support the provinces in a safe, gradual and permanent reopening, our Conservative leader was the first leader on the national stage to present a recovery plan to Canadians. He was the first and only leader on the national stage to present a plan to get Canada back on track, and he provided a top five list of priorities.

The first is to secure jobs. Our plan is to recover the million jobs that were lost during the pandemic. That would be priority number one for a Conservative government. By unleashing the power of our private sector, and using Conservative ingenuity and a can-do attitude, we will ensure that every region and sector of our economy is firing on all cylinders. That is priority number one.

Second is to secure accountability. After years of corruption, embarrassment and ethical scandals from the Liberal Prime Minister, such as the Aga Khan's billionaire island, SNC-Lavalin and the WE Charity, to name a few, Canadians deserve the strongest anti-corruption laws this country has ever seen, and we will deliver that.

Third is to secure mental health with a mental health action plan. I am particularly proud to see our leader bring this forward, because I have spent countless hours on the phone with constituents who are in very desperate situations. I have had parents call me to tell me their little children do not want to eat because they are depressed. I have had elderly women cry to me on the phone that they do not want to spend their last months or years on this earth locked up in their apartments away from their grandchildren and families. I could go on about how devastating this is. I am very proud to see mental health as the third priority on our top five priority list.

Fourth is to secure our country by creating a strategic stockpile of essential products and building capacity to manufacture vaccines at home. I know that every Canadian wants to see that and never again wants to see our people left vulnerable and dependent on other countries during a pandemic.

Fifth is to secure Canada's economy by balancing the books responsibly over 10 years. I spoke at length today of the perils of Liberal spending. I believe Canadians agree that we need a competent government to handle this and get our economy's finances back on track after recovering from the pandemic.

Ultimately, Canadians know that the Conservative Party is the party best able to manage jobs and the economy. It is what we are known for and have been known for for decades. We will provide steady, reliable and competent leadership in our country's greatest time of need. That is my commitment.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her speech.

I listened carefully while she explained a number of things, and I heard her say what the Conservatives would do. However, she did not mention whether the Conservatives would commit to increasing health transfers, something that is sorely absent from Bill C-14.

Will the Conservatives commit to increasing health transfers to 35% of health care costs, as the premiers of Quebec, the provinces and the territories are calling for?

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, Conservatives by and large agree that health transfers must be stable and that they must meet the needs of Canadians, but the difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that we believe health care transfers should be provided to the provinces with no strings attached. We repeatedly see Liberal governments attaching various provisions to this spending. That is not something we agree with. We do not always agree that Ottawa knows best, and health care should be delivered by the provinces. We are looking to increase that autonomy for provinces with health care transfers.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague who spoke about how the Conservatives introduced the child tax benefit, a benefit with a discriminatory structure for families with precarious immigration status, including refugee claimants, who are prevented from accessing this critical benefit even if they are legally working and filing personal income tax.

The recommendation from the Campaign 2020 report states, “For some children, their parents' immigration status is a barrier to accessing the...[Canadian child tax benefit].” To address this, “Amend the Income Tax Act by repealing s. 122.6...which ties eligibility for the CCB to the immigration status of the applicant parent.” It continues that, “Every parent in Canada who is considered a resident for tax purposes [should be eligible] for CCB regardless of immigration status.”

Does my colleague agree with that recommendation?

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I would have to further look into the provision she is talking about. It sounds very interesting. What I can say about refugees is that the Conservative Party strongly supports humanitarian efforts to support the world's most vulnerable. When I was shadow minister for immigration for the Conservative Party, I was most shocked to see that although the Liberals' narrative is that they are the party of immigration and the most compassionate party on this topic, under their watch in immigration was a lack of dignity, compassion and respect for new Canadians: for new immigrants and prospective Canadians trying to come to Canada to join their families. I was completely appalled by how they treat immigrants, and I will continue to stand up for new Canadians.

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

Mr. Speaker, we have been watching unhinged borrowing by the Liberals, which the finance minister has 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 black Amex card for the Liberals.

Does the member believe that Canadians should be concerned about the undisciplined spending that just seems to keep happening?

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am personally very alarmed at the spending. We recognize that in these difficult economic times with these shutdowns, because the government shut down small businesses and the private sector, that the government has the responsibility to support Canadians. My concern is that it is looking for unfettered access to increase the debt burden by $700 billion in the next three years with very little parliamentary oversight. I think all Canadians are concerned about that.

Further to that, I am quite concerned that the Minister of Finance has never really indicated that she is at all concerned about her financial management of this country. I would expect a bit of humility and concern for the future on what is being done and how much work it is going to take to get us back on track.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on Bill C-14, an act to implement certain provisions of the economic statement tabled in Parliament on November 30, 2020 and other measures.

Every time I have the privilege of rising in the House, I make a point of reminding members of how diligent the Conservative Party of Canada has had to be, since 2015, in monitoring and critiquing this Liberal government, which was spending recklessly well before the pandemic hit. We have witnessed many ethical breaches, even though we have been in the grip of an emergency, the pandemic crisis, for months. We need to continue to be very critical of the COVID-19 spending measures and this Liberal government's lack of transparency.

The Conservative Party of Canada is much more than the official opposition party in the House. We are committed individuals with a sense of duty who take action. Not surprisingly, we support the main COVID-19 emergency programs, including the Canada emergency response benefit, the Canada emergency wage subsidy and the Canada emergency business account, which total nearly $175 billion.

Let me be clear: We will make sure there is a solution for every vulnerable individual and every business during this pandemic. We have consistently said that seniors, who have been forgotten during this crisis, should get more help.

However, there comes a point when we have to take a firm stand against skyrocketing deficits that will end up creating an unprecedented crisis if we give this Liberal government a blank cheque. Giving it another term in office or, worse still, a majority in the House would be a fatal mistake for our country, which has been more destabilized than ever since the Liberal government took office in 2015.

A sensible, realistic approach would be to give the government sufficient borrowing power to cover prior expenses related to COVID-19 and the proposed new measures that will take us to the next fiscal year. We should not blindly support $100 billion worth of new debt-financed recovery measures. It would be irresponsible to believe we can have that money for free.

No voter who cares about the debt we will pass on to future generations would want Conservatives to support $100 billion in additional debt for unspecified initiatives, even if the government says those initiatives will stimulate the economy. The Liberal Party is a master of corruption, favouritism, cronies and sole-source contracts, so we need to be prudent and find out what those initiatives are. The fact that the government refused to split the bill and take out part 7 clearly shows that it is acting in very bad faith. It is asking us for blind trust, which is totally unreasonable because it just does not deserve it.

I would like to take this opportunity to highlight the courage that each of us has shown, in our own way, since the beginning of the pandemic. At home, at work, in our sports and leisure activities, all areas of our lives have been disrupted for several months now.

I salute the courage of my constituents in the riding of Lévis—Lotbinière. They have managed to adjust, reinvent themselves and prioritize what is most precious to us: family, health and safety. I thank them for their trust. It is always with a sense of duty that my team and I come up with solutions to the challenges we face. We are all patiently waiting for the return of better days, which has become synonymous with being closer to one another, physically, in complete safety.

Many people in my riding have told me this and, like them, I miss their presence, our warm interactions, working closely with community stakeholders and with our businesses that were thriving. Nothing is the same anymore, and we have to accept that. Many people in my riding are also writing to me to denounce how slow the Liberal government is to act, if it acts at all, and of course the insecurity they feel. There are many concerns about the government's lack of foresight, vision and leadership.

As I was saying, Canada became much more vulnerable well before the pandemic as a result of the Liberal's new carefree and spendthrift ways with no sense of responsibility for the consequences.

Placing unconditional trust in the government has put us in the worst position ever in Canada's history, including the post-war period. Our level of debt is unfathomable, and it is imperative that we start investing in targeted measures that will pay a return on our investments in time, experiments and money.

There is no denying that, since 2015, Canada has been regressing and is no longer evolving. After two elections chock full of fine promises, the living conditions of our seniors has not changed at all. Seniors built and enriched our country with their hard work, and it is inconceivable that we are letting them live in poverty. They deserve to live with dignity and serenity given their unwavering dedication to our community. Those who lose their spouse, especially women, find themselves in a precarious situation that is unacceptable and that their family cannot always remediate. We must act.

In addition, violence against women and children is reaching alarming proportions, and then there are the pimps who go unpunished for exploiting child pornography. What about our young people since the government legalized marijuana? It still makes me sad to see the lines outside the Société québécoise du cannabis, often well before it opens.

I am also against the Liberal government's quiet attempts to decriminalize hard drugs and prostitution. We need to put ethics and common sense back into our values.

I want to see young people, who were paid to do nothing over the past few months, once again be able to have rewarding work experiences and opportunities to learn and grow in our communities. There is no greater accomplishment than finding a sense of purpose, contributing to our collective wealth and helping to strengthen our communities.

The environment has also seen lofty promises and no action. We must urgently create programs to secure our green shift, which includes expanding access to electric vehicles and finding new ways to market green and energy-efficient innovations.

The pandemic has also shown us that we need to focus on food sovereignty if we do not want to be short of resources. When we look at the chain of production and collaboration that puts food on our tables, we realize that transport is a key component of that. Transportation and travel mean fuel and gasoline. We cannot yet do without those things in our daily lives.

I am very invested in creating a large national commission on our energy future with the input of our youth, of course. They must be part of the equation. Our safety and security must never be threatened by our consumption, and, realistically, we need to come to a common understanding about the best way to transport the oil and gas delivered by pipelines.

We all have a role to play in future changes. I am confident that the third link between Lévis and Quebec City will be good for everyone in Lévis-Lotbinière and for our environment. Our future depends on our respect for the values that were passed down to us by our ancestors and our parents.

Our language and culture are part of that, and we need to continue to protect them so that our future still reflects who we are. French is our most precious right, and the right to be served in French is simply not negotiable. We need to continue to exist as a francophone nation within a united Canada, while respecting provincial jurisdictions.

Finally, there is a critical need for labour that cannot be overlooked and cannot be blindly entrusted to the Liberal government if we want our economy to recover. The global market is waiting for us, and we must continue to allow our seniors who wish to work to do so without being penalized financially.

For all these reasons, we must stand together and work together, with a responsible government. We cannot and must not give a blank cheque to the Liberal government, which refuses to remove part 7 of Bill C-14.

Now is the time to work together and work better for the future. My aim is to continue doing just that for a very long time for my constituents in Lévis—Lotbinière and for all Canadians.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very fond of my colleague from Lévis—Lotbinière.

In his speech just now, I heard him speak about the French language and Quebec's traditional demands. On the issue of French, we know that there is a little problem that has tripped up the Conservatives. With respect to the single tax return, they supported it, but then voted against it. We do not understand why.

At this time, there is something that my colleague can do for me. He can tell me if he agrees that there must be an unconditional increase in health transfers. Does his party agree with an unconditional increase in health transfers demanded by the Legault government?

It is easy and very simple. The answer is yes or no.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question, and I unreservedly accept his great fondness for me.

With regard to culture and the French language, the Conservative Party has made major advances. The difference between the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois is that we will act for Quebeckers. We will give Quebec more power with respect to the French language. We will have federal institutions comply with Bill 101, as requested by the Government of Quebec.

We, the Conservatives can do it. The Bloc Québécois can talk about it and the Conservative Party can do it.

We just saw, here in the House, that the Bloc Québécois failed to move forward its EI bill because it required a financial effort. A private member's bill cannot be passed by the House.

It is unfortunate, but we see here the difference between the Conservative Party, which can take action, and the Bloc Québécois, which can only talk about taking action.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, the last few Conservatives to address the House have often referred to their concerns regarding the debt and deficit. On the one hand, they want to be very critical of the government on the debt issue, which seems to be the issue that will prevent them from allowing Bill C-14 to pass quickly, yet on the other hand, they seem to want to support the many programs being financed in good part by borrowing money.

I am wondering if my colleague could provide some clarification on whether he sees a disconnect there, where they are, on the one hand, supporting the need to borrow money and, on the other hand, criticizing the government for borrowing money.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives are also willing to help society's most disadvantaged, who have suffered heavy losses during the pandemic. However, we are not willing to give the Liberal government a blank cheque.

From an ethics perspective, when the Liberals have spending power, there are plenty of cronies who benefit, unfortunately.

If we give the Liberal government the power to borrow up to 1.8 trillion, and if interest rates climb to 3%, 4% or 5%, what kind of situation will we be in by 2025-26?

Conservatives do not want to hand over a blank cheque. We want to know what initiatives are in the next budget. Then we will vote on the ones that deserve to be passed in the House.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a very simple question for my colleague.

The parliamentary secretary, who just asked a question, said that we cannot say “yes” to the government for subsidies but “no” to the Liberals.

As my Conservative colleague said, the fact is that it is very hard to trust this government. By way of comparison, if a spouse asked to spend the equivalent of $600 billion from the family budget, would the parliamentary secretary hand over that money no questions asked?

The government's job is to help people, and we help the government do that. However, the opposition parties' role is to make sure that money is spent properly.

Can my colleague give us some examples of improper things the government has done in recent years?

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my friend hit the nail on the head. Allowing the government to spend hundreds of billions more dollars without any oversight is unacceptable to this side of the House. I am sure that even the Bloc Québécois and the NDP would agree with us.

We are prepared to pay what was owed until the next budget, which is right around the corner. After that, we will take a close look at all the initiatives proposed in that budget for the post-pandemic economic recovery, one by one. We want this pandemic to end as quickly as possible for the benefit of all Canadians.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, earlier today I was part of a wonderful Zoom discussion. It was a great recognition of the importance of some health care workers, while at the same time a celebration of Canada's diversity. We also had some special guests.

On the call we had our Prime Minister, health care professionals from coast to coast, and a number of other special guests, all there to recognize a couple of things. The first was the fabulous work that our health care providers are providing Canadians in all regions of our country, day in and day out. We also recognized something important to the people who were participating in that call, and in fact to many Canadians, and that is the celebration of Vaisakhi.

It was really quite nice to be a part of that discussion, where we recognized our diversity and, at the same time, the Prime Minister listened to first-hand experiences of what is taking place at the ground level of our health institutions dealing with the coronavirus.

Having said that, it is important to recognize that from day one this Liberal government has been listening to Canadians. It has not been making political discussions as much as it has been listening to what health experts have had to say and following that advice, so Canadians would in fact be protected. From day one, the Prime Minister has been there to assure Canadians that, as a government, we will have their backs. We have done that in so many tangible ways.

Nothing has changed. We continue day in and day out to look at ways to support Canadians, the people and their businesses, get through this pandemic. We have seen a lot of highs and lot of lows. We could talk about the wonderful people who have made life that much easier for us during this pandemic and the difficulties we have had to overcome, which at times can be very hard on a person, whether mentally or physically. Through this pandemic, we have seen life and death.

It is so encouraging that we could finally see, in the not-too-distant future, things coming back to a new normal. I suspect I speak on behalf of all members of Parliament when I say that we want things back to that new normal as soon as possible.

I want to provide some thoughts, and some of them are a little critical of my Conservative friends. I have been listening to what they have had to say today. I must say that I am not surprised. I am a little disappointed, but not necessarily surprised.

I gave a little tease when I asked a member about the deficit. The Conservatives are once again becoming preoccupied with Canada's deficit at a time when Canadians in parts of the country are in lockdown situations and are looking for the government to demonstrate ongoing leadership. What we have clearly demonstrated is that we are working day in, day out with Canadians. From a national perspective, we are there for Canadians in tangible ways.

However, before I get into that, I want to hold the Conservative opposition to task for some of the things they have said, this whole preoccupation of theirs. On the one hand, Conservatives say they like the CERB program, the rent subsidy program and the wage subsidy program, which account for billions and billions of dollars in spending. That is, in good part, borrowed money. They are telling us that this is good stuff and we need it. Then, on the other hand, they are talking about the debt and saying there is too much spending from the government.

I can envision two or three years from now, the Conservatives will forget about the pandemic, even the fact that it occurred, and focus 100% of their attention on the deficit. I would like to suggest to my Conservative friends that, had we listened to the Conservative Party of Canada and its leadership within the House of Commons, Canada would not be doing anywhere near as well as it is today in its position to recover from the pandemic. I genuinely believe that to be the case.

If we asked people to reflect on what has taken place over the last number of months, I believe we would find a fairly even consensus among Canadians about their fear for the manner in which the Conservative Party would have managed us through this process. This is based on the types of questions Conservatives have been asking and the type of support they have been providing to legislation. I argue that in the last seven months, they have been more of a destructive force inside the House of Commons, rather than providing a proactive, constructive critique of the government and the policies we were making.

The member for Kildonan—St. Paul made reference to the Liberal Party and the Liberal government doing a terrible job pre-pandemic on the deficit and that we had a sluggish economy. If one wants to get a sense of the Conservative spin out there, all one needs to do is read the member's speech and listen to some of the other points that have been made. In many ways, nothing could be further from the truth.

In the first four years of our mandate, going into the fifth year, we had record highs in employment rates. We very much had a manageable deficit situation. We had created well over a million jobs. It took Stephen Harper, the former prime minister, nine years to accomplish what we were able to accomplish in four and a half years. We did a much better job on the financing of Canada than Stephen Harper did.

The programs, initiatives and impact we were having by working with our partners, whether they were Canadians, businesses or members at the provincial level, were having a profoundly positive impact on our economy. The numbers clearly demonstrated that.

Prior to the pandemic, Canada was doing exceptionally well. Then when we were hit by the pandemic, we took specific actions to protect Canadians. As we have gone through the pandemic, we have brought in important pieces of legislation, including Bill C-14. I find it truly amazing that Bill C-14 still has not passed the House of Commons, whether it is because of the Conservatives and their filibustering tactics or even other opposition parties that are at times preventing this legislation from ultimately being able to receive royal assent.

The economic statement was presented by the minister of finance back in November of last year. The bill was introduced in December so that members would be able to go over the bill during the late December-early January break. There was plenty of time for Conservative members to have discussions and raise it with ministers or whomever they chose to have a dialogue with. They come up with so many ways to prevent the legislation from even getting to a vote. They did not even want it to get out of second reading. They had to be shamed into doing it.

I remember the day the Conservatives put forward a concurrence motion that I believe was on human trafficking, something that could have passed by a unanimous vote. Who in the chamber did not support it? There are so many reports, but they used that report and that issue to filibuster, preventing Bill C-14 from passing. Here we are, in mid-April, still debating a bill that was based on the Deputy Prime Minister's speech back at the end of November. It is not because we have not attempted to put it on the agenda. We do not have the same sort of luxury as opposition parties in terms of opposition days where, at the end of the day, there is a vote because there is a process that enables a vote to occur.

In a minority situation, we have to give a lot more attention to what the opposition is doing, and it only takes one opposition party to prevent something from passing. I remember well how the Conservatives resisted the bill passing. Today, as I listen to my Conservative friends speak, they say they do not like the debt and so forth. Is that going to be their excuse for not wanting to pass it today or tomorrow? Are they going to say it is a whole lot of money and they want hours and hours of debate?

Do members remember Bill C-3, a non-controversial piece of legislation? It was actually a Conservative bill. There were hours and hours of debate on that bill and we debated it for a number of days, when we could have been debating other legislation. It would have freed up more time, so that when Bill C-14 came up for debate, there could have been more time to debate it. How about the MAID legislation? My colleague from Ontario asked for leave on several occasions to extend the debate in the evening so we could, in essence, free up more time for other government legislation that had to get debated. The MAID legislation was life-and-death legislation. It was a Superior Court decision that had to be dealt with.

The government has a number of pieces of legislation that have to be dealt with, yet the opposition continues to want to play games. Conservatives tell Canadians they are being a responsible opposition because, after all, it is worth billions of dollars. They are right that it is worth billions of dollars, but they are not recognizing the urgency. We have provided opportunities to get this bill through much earlier, and the Conservatives find one way or another not to, to the point that here we are debating it on April 12.

This legislation was brought in months ago, and the bill is finally in a position where it could pass. It has taken a long time to get this far, and I encourage Conservatives to pass it, as I did at second reading. It was not until the Conservatives started to feel embarrassed that they allowed the bill to pass. I think they need to be shamed into passing it at third reading or they will not do it. If they are not told to wise up and recognize that this bill is going to have a positive impact on the lives of Canadians during this pandemic, they are not going to pass it. They need to be held accountable for not recognizing how important this legislation is to Canadians.

We have indicated that our government will do whatever it takes. We are going to invest wherever it is necessary. We want to be helpful, and we will support Canadian families and businesses. This is very important legislation, and it would do all of that.

For example, this legislation introduces a temporary and immediate support for low- and middle-income families that are entitled to the Canada child benefit, over $1,000 in 2021 for each child under the age of six. It would ease the financial burden of student debt. It would provide for over half a billion dollars as part of a new strategy to deal with safe long-term care, funding to support long-term care facilities, including funding to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection, outbreaks and deaths in supportive care facilities. The vaccines have really helped, but these are the types of measures.

There is no reason this House could not have passed this bill back in February. It is not that the government did not want it passed, but every time the government would bring it up, the Conservatives would give some indication that it was not going to pass and would continue to be debated.

There is other legislation as well. I am the parliamentary secretary who is ultimately there to support the passage of Bill C-19, which is on the Canada Elections Act and the impact of the pandemic on elections, to ensure Canadians would be healthy. This is a minority government, and we never know when there is going to be an election. Bill C-19 is the responsible thing to do, but it is incredibly difficult to get legislation passed with the official opposition taking the approach it has during the pandemic, and it is unfortunate.

We understand and appreciate how difficult it has been for Canadians from coast to coast to coast over the last 12 months. The federal government, by working with Canadians and health care experts and listening to what is taking place, has done what is necessary in order to ensure that Canadians can have hope.

Contrary to the member for Kildonan—St. Paul, who was trying to marginalize it in terms of the number of doses earlier in her speech, we should listen to what the Minister of Public Services and Procurement stated earlier today in question period: “Canada now stands eighth in the G20 in terms of doses administered per 100 people. We have received 10.5 million doses in this country to date. We are on track to receive 44 million doses by the end of June”. We are a country of 37.5 million people.

The Conservatives love to twist the facts and give misinformation to Canadians. However, we have been consistent. Members can go back to December, when we were saying that we have targets and a portfolio to ensure that we will get the vaccinations. We have compensated as much as possible for not having that immediate manufacturing capability here in Canada. We understand the importance of the issue, and we will continue to have Canadians' backs throughout this process.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Before we go to questions and comments, it is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 38, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, Health; the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, Ethics; and the hon. member for Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, Health.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I do enjoy the fame and dignity that the member for Winnipeg North brings with every speech he delivers here in the House of Commons. I have a little bit of an update for the member. Do you know that he has spoken for a total of an hour on Bill C-14 himself?

For him to bring up that other members should not be allowed to come into this debate is beyond comprehension of what a member should or should not be doing. To have the audacity to talk down to members of the House of Commons because they want to bring forward their constituents' concerns when that member himself speaks for an hour on this bill is just unbelievable.

To the member for Winnipeg North, if you are able to speak for a total of an hour on a bill, why do you think you should be able to talk down to members from across the country when they bring forward their constituents' concerns, and tell them that they should not be able to stand and represent the people who voted them into the House of Commons?

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

I would remind hon. members to direct their questions and comments through the Chair.

The hon. parliamentary secretary.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it was an interesting time in this very chamber when the member for Carleton chose to speak on the federal budget. It was an entire budget, a major platform. More MPs will speak to that than to almost anything else. That is where the highest demand is, and the member for Carleton spoke for over 14 hours on that particular motion about a budget bill. He sat down at the very last minute so that the New Democratic member would be able to also say a few words.

We all play different types of roles. I like to think that, in part, I am trying to hold the Conservatives a little accountable for a lot of the irresponsible things they say inside the House. There are a lot of things that could be misleading or vary a little bit from reality. I take that role very seriously.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy debating with the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons.

In my view, we cannot talk about Bill C-14 without talking about long-term care, and we cannot talk about long-term care without talking about health care funding. It goes without saying. I have had this discussion with the parliamentary secretary in the past, but I never got an answer. I will therefore ask him for a straight answer. Is he familiar with the concept of fiscal imbalance, yes or no?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I do understand what a fiscal imbalance is. I have served for almost 20 years as an MLA, a good portion of that dealing with the issue of health care. I have also now served as a member of Parliament for just over 10 years, dealing with the same subject matter of health care.

I understand the difference, but I also understand that we need to recognize that there are Canadians from all regions of our country who want a national government to ensure that there are roles for us to play in health care, such as standards for long-term care homes. We saw that amplified in the last 12 months.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I do not often agree with the member for Winnipeg North here in the House, but I would agree with him in his analysis that the Conservatives have done little or nothing to help Canadians during the pandemic over the last year. I am happy to hear that he thinks Canadians have done reasonably well and have weathered this storm fairly well. Where I diverge from that analysis is his assumption that it has been the Liberals who have provided those supports.

At the start of the pandemic, when three million Canadians were suddenly out of work, the Liberals said, “We will tinker with EI to fix this.” It was the NDP who stepped in and said, “No, we have to provide real supports for all Canadian workers affected”, and CERB was born. When the Liberals wanted to bring in wage subsidies to help businesses, they suggested 10%. It was the NDP and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business that said we need 75% subsidies, and the wage subsidy program was born. Programs to support seniors, students and people with disabilities were all forced on the government by the NDP. The government was dragged kicking and screaming to actually provide those supports.

Would he not agree with me—

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We will have to go on to some other questions. I think the hon. member was just finishing up.

The hon. parliamentary secretary.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I can assure the member that within the Liberal caucus there was a very active discussion in the early days looking at ways in which we could support Canadians. The Prime Minister continued to challenge every member of Parliament, but in particular members of the Liberal caucus, to reflect with their constituents on ways in which we could improve programs because many of the programs that we brought in started from nothing. An immense amount of lobbying had taken place that went far beyond any one individual or any one minister, and I attribute a lot of the changes to members of Parliament and outside stakeholders.

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

Mr. Speaker, if the member for Regina—Lewvan actually thinks that anybody believes what he was saying about needing to come here and properly give the word from his constituents on this very important piece of legislation, and that this has nothing to do with a political party playing games, I would encourage him to get on the phone and call his whip's desk and ask them if they plan on letting this go any time soon.

The reality is that we are seeing what we saw earlier from the Bloc Québécois and now we are seeing from NDP members. Members see the need for this: for getting supports out to Canadians. This bill was introduced on November 30 of last year. It is now April 12. This has been going on because the Conservatives have been playing this game. Rather than trying to hide behind this veil of pretending to be here to represent the word of their constituents, why do they not just stand up and say they are not going to support this because they do not want this piece of legislation to get through? That would be more honourable, in my opinion.

Would the member agree?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the member brings up some valid points and I support what he is saying. As I said, in November of last year the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance brought in the need for this legislation, which followed in December and then began second reading in January. There is no justification, other than Conservative games being played, to prevent important legislation that would have a profoundly positive impact on lives during this very difficult and challenging time. The only way we had it passed last time was because we shamed them. The member who posed the question stood and challenged them to allow extended hours of debate on another piece of legislation, which would have freed up more time for this debate. That is a good example. That debate was flatly turned down. They introduced—

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

We are going to try and get one more question in here.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Calgary Centre.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the passion with which my colleague on the Liberal side of the House has addressed this issue and I see he did it without noticing he was going on about what was going wrong with this side of the House on that matter. I have been in the House as much as I can through this pandemic and I have not seen this bill advance as much as it should have. It has been here since November. I have been here a number of times since then, and I have not seen this bill coming forth in the form it should at the time it should.

I also appreciate that all members of the House have something to bring forward, but if somebody wants to tell me that, economically, running a $27-billion deficit prior to this pandemic when we have full employment is success, frankly that person is not looking in the mirror and being honest with himself. I am going to question whether he was honest with himself throughout his speech. This whole issue is about buying jobs through the economy. I will ask him if he believes that the whole nature of an economy is that in good times we do not have to subsidize jobs. We have to make sure we put money away so we are prepared for a pandemic.

How much spending has been for pandemic-related issues and how much of the spending has been what seems like pre-election spending ad nauseam?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure how much time you would give me to answer that question. I might require leave. At the end of the day, the opposition parties have talked more about the election than Liberal members of Parliament. I can assure everyone of that. During this whole ordeal the Conservatives have been playing games. I would welcome a discussion with the member and maybe a university classroom, or we could even arrange something on Zoom. I have attempted to do that in the past. I know the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan and I have talked about it. It might be nice to have a political studies class and talk about what takes place in the House. I do not have enough time to explain it in more detail, but I do not have any problem looking in the mirror and saying that we are doing a good job by working with Canadians and we are having a real, positive impact.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague, the hon. member for Regina—Lewvan.

I am not sure if any of our colleagues from either side of the chamber remember, but I spoke to Bill C-14 in February while the bill was still at second reading. I am not going to repeat my speech from second reading, but all of my remarks from back then still stand.

The last time I spoke to the bill, I discussed a tendency that the government seems to have to procrastinate in moving bills through this place. I listed a few examples, all of which are from this session of Parliament, but I used those examples to hammer home the idea that the government left this bill on the back burner for a few months. I still stand by that assertion, and it should be pretty obvious why. In a week we are finally going to get our hands on a new budget, and I would not be surprised if this bill had not even cleared the other place by then. I do not have any words for how utterly bizarre this is.

The last time I spoke on this, I thought I did a pretty good job of showing the delay by talking about how we only debated the bill about 10 times between when it was tabled in November of last year and February of this year. This is getting ridiculous. I do not want to sound like I am supporting the government on this, but this is for the fall 2020 economic update. We are almost a month into spring of 2021 and the bill has not passed third reading yet. We heard the member for Winnipeg North blaming the Conservatives for that. It is a shame.

The bill has seen more seasons than it has readings. We know that Canadians need support now, but the government's delay on the bill is not doing anything to help any Canadians across the country who were counting on the changes that the bill would make if it were implemented. I do not know what the government is thinking with this. I hate to say it, but when it comes to helping Canadians, it needs to start thinking a little less like the tortoise and a little more like the hare. Five months to get a bill like this through this chamber is not something to be inspired by. As a matter of fact, this is a shame.

Again, the budget is supposed to come out in a week. I have to wonder how long the implementation act will take to get through this place. Will it take another five months, or maybe longer? After all, it would cover a whole year of financial decisions. Maybe it would take 20 months, and we could all have gotten both of our jabs for the COVID-19 vaccine by the time we get the bill through third reading. I know that my colleagues in this place are familiar with the vaccine procurement issues that the government has had, so that is saying something.

I digress. I am here to talk about Bill C-14, not the upcoming budget. I know it has been the main part of a lot of my speeches recently, but I would like to stress how much the constant procrastination on these important bills is hurting Canadians. COVID-19 has been in Canada for about 14 months now. Tomorrow will mark month 13 of restrictions being present in Alberta. Not even two weeks ago, those restrictions tightened again because we were looking down the barrel of a third wave of this pandemic. I am obviously not as familiar with Ontario's restrictions as I am with Alberta's, but I know that the province of Ontario increased its restrictions on the same day as Alberta did. I think Quebec has increased its restrictions again.

Throughout all of this, businesses are still closing. Canadians are still being furloughed or losing their jobs. I have spoken with some of my constituents who have been laid off by their work three times now because of this pandemic, and they are not alone.

I know I have mentioned this in previous debates, but over 200,000 Canadians have lost their jobs over the course of this pandemic. Two hundred thousand is equal to the population of two ridings in Alberta. That is equal to nearly 600 people per riding across Canada, and that is not counting all of the Canadians who have seen their hours cut, those who have gotten sick and had to take time off work or those who have balanced working, whether from home or not, with trying to figure out home-schooling or child care during this pandemic. It also does not count those who have left their jobs to take care of sick family members.

I really hope that, despite our many policy disagreements, the Liberals will finally realize the effect their dilly-dallying has on hard-working Canadians from every province and territory who are struggling during this pandemic for the reasons I just listed and countless others. I have said it before, and I will say it again: We need a plan to get out of this pandemic. We need a plan to safely relaunch our economy to support Canadians as life returns to normal, so that all of our constituents can get back to work and school and return to life, but the Liberals do not realize that.

As I said, COVID-19 has been in Canada for about 14 months now. That is 14 months in which the Liberals have not made a plan. That is 14 months in which they messed up buying rapid testing kits or vaccines. That is 14 months in which Canadians have struggled during the pandemic. The Liberal government has had to introduce a billion stopgap solutions, such as this bill and so many others, because it is more concerned with trying to figure out if it can get away with winning a snap election than in hunkering down and doing what is best for Canadians. That is why I honestly wonder if we will ever pass this bill, or if the government will be able to table a budget, because it clearly does not have a plan and is clearly trying to hide that fact. After all, why would we need to spend months debating stopgap measures such as this bill if the Liberals had a plan?

Canadians deserve better than this. They deserve better than waiting around for five months and hoping to see promised supports they were counting on to support them through the second wave and now through the third. Hopefully the government realizes this, and hopefully next week's budget will not turn into an unwanted sequel to this bill, because Canadians cannot afford for it to. We know the government is busy preparing for an election. It does not care about what is going to be coming or the finances of the country. The member for Winnipeg North mentioned that the Liberals have been financing Canada throughout their history. I hope we are not going to end financing for Canada at the end of this Liberal mismanagement.

With Bill C-14, it is in the hands of the government to figure out what it can do with it, and stop blaming the opposition and stop blaming the Conservatives. It is time for the government to stand and take responsibility for its actions and stop blaming others, because that is the right way to do it.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I am wondering if my friend can tell us whether he believes this is like when the Conservatives bring in a motion on supply or an opposition day motion. They know, whether it is three hours of debate or two hours of debate, that a small percentage of the members of Parliament will actually speak to it, but it will come to a vote on that very same day or the vote might get deferred for a couple of days. The same principle does not apply to government legislation, and the Conservatives have gone out of their way to prevent it. I saw it first-hand, as the member would have, earlier this year, when they just would not pass the bill out of second reading until they were shamed into passing it.

Will he provide his personal assurance that he is prepared to see this bill pass, whether it is today or tomorrow?

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is very funny expecting the opposition to offer this to the government. Imagine this, a reverse action of legislation and of doing the job.

I said at the end of my speech that the government needed to take responsibility. It needs to stand like proper managers, like proper responsible CEOs of the country.

Regarding delays, the Liberals have been filibustering committees for the last months. This is a government standing in the way of itself to do business. At the end of the day, the irony of it is that its members blame the opposition. I do not think this is the right way. I know the member for Winnipeg North realizes and understands that and I hope he will start thinking differently.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

I think we cannot talk about or debate Bill C-14 without addressing the elephant in the room. That elephant is the absence of health transfers in the bill. Quebec and the provinces have been calling for these transfers for a very long time now.

We know where the Liberals stand on this. We have long known that they do not agree, that they never will and will never increase transfers. They made idle promises that they have never kept.

As for the Conservatives, they tell us they are listening to the provinces when it comes to health transfers. The most fascinating part is that ever since I have started asking them questions, not one member of the Conservative Party is able to tell me whether they agree with increasing health transfers to 35% of the total cost of health care, as Quebec and the provinces have been calling for. Does my colleague agree with that increase?

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Mr. Speaker, what is fascinating is that the Bloc Québécois cannot pull out any magic with the government, as it has been doing here and there to pass and serve the Liberal government on bills and other legislation.

To see a bill that is incomplete is something I spoke about in my speech. This legislation has dragged on and on for months and months. The elephant in the room is the government. If it had the will, the government could have done it a long time ago, but I do not think it has that will. This is something we have experienced in the last six years now. It seems to be the notion of how the Liberal government does business.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I share some of the member for Edmonton Manning's concerns about the delay in House business. The cynical part of me believes the government would like nothing more than to hold some of these bills back to run an election campaign on.

Aside from that, on Bill C-14, I want to ask the member about the section dealing with interest on student loans. The bill would only provide relief for a fiscal year, from April 1 of this year until March 31 of next year. Edmonton is home to a great university. Does he not believe the government should be bolder on this and maybe get rid of interest on student loans all together, so we give them the financial chance we can at what we expect is the most productive part of their lives?

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have spoken in support of our students. We have great universities in Edmonton, in Alberta in general, and the support has to be there. The problem is that the government speaks loud but does nothing. It never walks the talk. It just wants to get the votes of the youth and students but does not want to provide anything.

I have spoken in support of our students the last month and that there is something that can be done to help them. As far as details in the bill on this, it is not clear how the government will move on it, but at least this should get the support as a matter of principle.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to join the debate on Bill C-14 for the first time. Unlike some other members who I see on the Hollywood squares and who have joined this debate once or twice, it is the first time I am able to add my comments on the bill.

Despite what the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands said in his response to my question, it is my job to enter into these debates, talk about government bills and add some context on what people in Regina—Lewvan think of them, what they would like to see different and what they agree with.

As many of my colleagues have stated in their speeches, there are aspects of Bill C-14 with which we agree. There are programs that need to be funded. As the hon. shadow minister for finance from Abbotsford said, there are points on which we and colleagues on all sides of the aisle agree with the Liberal government, but we have some fundamental problems with it. One of them is that the debt ceiling will be raised by $660 billion.

Despite some of the misgivings I had when I listened to my hon. colleague from Winnipeg North speak about spending money, I do not think there is a Canadian who does not believe the Liberals are very good at spending money. I do not think they have seen a dollar they did not want to spend.

Therefore, when it comes to that aspect, he and I are in total agreement that the government would spend every dollar it has. That is one of the concerns I have with the government raising the debt ceiling. I have talked with businesses and individuals across the country. The questions I am being asked in my riding are related to the concern they have with the Liberal government and its inability to control spending as well as the ability of the Prime Minister and finance minister to get our finances under control when we come out of COVID-19. That is a big concern. If I took a poll in Regina—Lewvan asking people if they wanted to give the government a blank cheque to spend what it wanted and raise the debt ceiling, there would be a resounding no. They would say that there needs to be checks and balances put on the government because it has an out-of-control spending habit.

I appreciate listening to the different aspects of other colleagues. Most of the day I have listened to the member for Winnipeg North and the questions from the member for Kingston and the Islands. When another parliamentarian stands up in the House of Commons and says that he does not think there is any ability for members to talk on behalf of their constituents, that this is not what this conversation is about, that political games are at play, that impugns the integrity of members, which is something we should not do as colleagues across the political divide. We are all here for the right reasons, trying to represent our constituents. Therefore, I would never call members out, saying that they are not trying to represent the views of their constituents.

I have some concerns with respect to Bill C-14 and the transparency of the government's spending. The PBO said that the government was not being transparent when it came to spending. We see it with the Infrastructure Bank. Thousands of projects are not accounted for. The PBO and independent offices have said that they have concerns when it comes to infrastructure spending by the Government of Canada at this time. There is a big concern with our ever-increasing debt and financial picture. Do not just to take my word for it. This is not a bashing of conservativism from the C.D. Howe Institute, whose chair was the former finance minister, Bill Morneau, the last finance minister to deliver a budget two years ago and counting. The report from the C.D. Howe says:

The 2020 Fall Economic Statement contained little to enhance Canada’s growth prospects and much to raise anxiety about mounting debt and exposure to adverse events, notably rising interest rates...

For my Liberal colleagues, this is not coming from me; it comes from an independent body. The C.D. Howe Institute was chaired by the former finance minister. It is not as if it is spinning Conservative talking points. However, there is concern among businesses about the end goal of the government. When is there going to be a plan to get spending under control?

Three weeks ago, I was able to speak to our opposition motion about a safe plan to reopen Canada, which is very important. The member for Winnipeg North has spoken about leadership and the leadership the government has shown to Canadians during this pandemic. Last fall, we all did get together to talk about bringing in programs to ensure people were getting through COVID-19. However, now that there is a third wave coming, it can be attributed to a lack of action by the Liberal government.

The fact is that the Liberal government signed a contract with CanSino for 100 days, and the Communist Party of China reneged on that contract. We were 100 days behind in getting contracts with other companies. The fact is that the member for Winnipeg North said that we would have 44 million doses of vaccine by June, and he can correct me if I am wrong. However, there are 38 million Canadians and if there are two doses per Canadian, 76 million doses would be needed. By his own words, if we have 44 million doses by June, we are still quite far behind if each Canadian needs two shots of either Pfizer or Moderna. Therefore, there are some issues around the vaccine rollout, and we need to talk about that when we are trying to reopen our economy safely.

President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson have both talked about a safe plan to reopen. I believe President Biden said it would be by Memorial Day. Prime Minister Johnson talked about an irreversible plan to reopen the economy, and that is important. We need to have scientific data points to safely reopen our economy and ensure we can get Canadians back to work.

Canadians are looking for hope and optimism. They are looking for leadership, which is lacking right now, on when they can get their lives back to normal, when kids can get back into the classrooms and not do their learning online. Many families have told me that it is very hard to be at home. These are difficult times for mothers, fathers, children, caretakers, educators, friends and playmates. We need to have leadership on the national stage. I know that Liberal colleagues will say that it is provincial jurisdiction, but there needs to be a national plan on how we reopen.

When we are talking about Bill C-14, I am hoping that national plan does not mean that there is going to be more and more debt to be carried by the next generation. My wife and I have three young children, and we always work hard. We got into public service so we could make life better for that next generation. There have been reports that this is one of the first times in our country's history where there does not seem to be as much hope and optimism. People do not think their lives are going to be as good as the generation before them. That scares me as a father and as a public servant for people in Saskatchewan. We need to work hard and show that leadership at the national level, to show that we will make things better for people when we come out of the pandemic.

We have to work together. The Liberals have totally abandoned a team Canada approach and have not taken any reasonable amendments to legislation that the Conservatives have brought forward over the last couple of months. It is time for us to really look at ourselves and at the people around us, the people we represent, and ensure they know we have their best interest at heart, that we will bring forward a plan to safely reopen the economy. I call on our Liberal colleagues to do that. It is time for us to work together, safely reopen our economy, get the programs out there that are needed and then get jobs delivered to people across the country. It is time that Canadians start earning paycheques, not receiving pink slips.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I would like to provide some clarification for my friend. It is 44 million doses by the end of June. Ultimately the provinces will determine when that second dose will be given. Health experts say that it can range. I believe it is at least three months between doses. I have confidence and faith that the provinces will do what is in the best interest of their populations, knowing what health experts are saying and the number of doses available. For example, we will be getting millions of doses in July, which could also be applied if we want to try to stretch it out so that the majority get the maximum benefit.

I wonder if the member could provide his thoughts on why the provinces play a critical role in the delivery of the doses.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Madam Speaker, I think the member knows that I was an MLA for almost eight years, so I know that health is provincial jurisdiction. In Saskatchewan, there are currently many drive-through vaccination sites. They are waiting for more vaccines because the federal government has failed to secure and deliver the vaccines that the provinces have been waiting for.

The Liberals talk about the 44 million doses that should be here by the end of the June. I say “should be” because the government has made a living off of making promises and not delivering. It is very good at under-delivering. It did this when it promised to plant a billion trees and hardly any were planted. The government promised to have small deficits during the good years, and in 2015, 2016 and 2017 it did not deliver. The Liberals promised to end drinking water advisories in first nations communities and they did not deliver.

Forgive me if I take what the member for Winnipeg North and the minister are saying with a grain of salt. The Liberals have been fantastic at breaking promises in the first five years of their government.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Madam Speaker, earlier, I asked a Conservative member from Quebec a question. Since I did not get much of an answer, I will try again with my colleague from Saskatchewan.

As members know, Bill C-14 contains provisions regarding long-term care. There is no question that seniors' homes have had some issues during the pandemic.

The appropriate solution here is health transfers. Could my colleague from Saskatchewan tell me whether his party agrees with the provinces' valid request for unconditional increases in health transfers? The importance of this cannot be overstated. After all, the Conservative Party claims to be a party that respects jurisdictions.

Does my colleague agree that health transfers should be increased to 35%?

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Madam Speaker, my colleague's question is hypothetical, but I am sure when the Conservatives form government, and we have a prime minister who respects jurisdiction and health ministers can get together, there will be a collaborative approach to ensuring that long-term care issues across the country are looked at.

I know that long-term care issues have been top of mind for many provincial governments. When I was in government in Saskatchewan, there were a lot of long-term care concerns. We worked hard to try to make sure that we could provide the best service possible.

I know that all provinces are looking forward to having conversations and respectful dialogue with the federal Minister of Health and the Prime Minister. I do not want to foreshadow anything, but when a Conservative government is in place, that respectful relationship will continue.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, my colleague mentioned how difficult the pandemic has been on families. The National Union of Public and General Employees has called on us to put in place a national child care system for Canada that is accessible, affordable and high quality. This means investing in a national workforce strategy, ensuring that people have professional wages and so on.

Does the member's party support a national child care strategy that is accessible, affordable and high quality, as called for by the National Union of Public and General Employees?

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Madam Speaker, as has been talked about before, the Conservative Party of Canada takes child care very seriously. We did implement the child care program that the Liberals have now taken on as their own.

When it comes to child care and good-paying jobs, we need a plan to reopen our economy so that people can get back to work and can look after their families. The Conservative Party will have platform planks that look at making sure people get back to work and have the ability to care for their families.

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

Madam Speaker, it is an honour and privilege to rise today from the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation and to serve the community of Nanaimo—Ladysmith in the traditional territories of the Snaw-Naw-As, Snuneymuxw, Stz'uminus and Lyackson First Nations.

There are many things that I would have liked to see covered in the fall economic statement, but first I want to address some concerns about the Canadian response to the pandemic. The countries that have done a good job of beating the spread of COVID-19 have all had a national approach. During an adjournment proceeding debate about the need for a more coordinated national effort, the response I received was that the government did not want to create a constitutional crisis.

More than 23,000 people have died. The economy has been driven into the ditch. We have racked up the deficit to astronomical heights. About 180,000 small and medium-sized enterprises across this country are on the verge of closing permanently. Millions of Canadians are financially stressed. We have a mental health crisis and a shadow epidemic of intimate partner violence and murder. I am hearing more about suicides. We are in the third wave of the pandemic, with new records being set for daily case counts. We have another series of lockdowns in Canada's biggest provinces and people are fed up. Our governments have done a poor job of working together to fight this pandemic, but at least we have managed to avoid a constitutional crisis. We are on the yo-yo “close, open, close again” plan rather than a “get to zero” plan, and it has been a huge mistake.

During the early days of the pandemic, members of Parliament worked together to get programs in place to help Canadians get through the economic lockdown. Early in the pandemic, the Green Party called on the government to look at what other countries were doing to successfully stop the spread of COVID-19, save lives and protect the economy, including mask mandates for indoor spaces, widespread testing and limiting travel. Multiple times, starting at the beginning of the pandemic, the Green Party advocated for the government to invoke the Emergencies Act and use the provisions meant for public health emergencies. It is a very reasonable and well-written piece of legislation, and it was drafted at a time when the government was not dealing with an emergency.

Invoking the Emergencies Act would have allowed the government to create a federally coordinated response with the provinces to close the border, mandate quarantines for people returning to Canada, control interprovincial and inter-regional travel, and create green zones for opening the economy and red zones to control areas where there was community spread, with lockdowns. These are all things that were done in New Zealand, Australia and a list of other countries, and they successfully stopped the spread of the virus. However, our calls to invoke the Emergencies Act were rebuffed.

When the variants arrived in Canada, we called for an emergency debate and for the development of a strategic plan to deal with the strains that are more virulent. There was no dice. Now we have three highly contagious variants spreading rapidly across the country.

Our dysfunctional federal system also affects our action on climate change, or lack thereof.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I want to interrupt for a second. The member may have said he was sharing his time, but I am not quite sure. Maybe he could remind me.

[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 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, NDP, 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 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 WSÁNEC 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 WSÁNEC to spell it in SENCOTEN, 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, NDP, 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, NDP, 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.

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

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Bloc Québécois.

I completely agree with him. The current government thinks it can become a leader in tackling the great challenge of climate change and still maintain the massive subsidies for the fossil fuel industries. One such example is the $17 billion allocated to the Trans Mountain pipeline alone.

We need to abolish these subsidies, which are designed to protect industries that represent a real threat to our future.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, my question relates to Canada's vastness. It is a very large country with many different regions. There has been a very important role, and this is something quite different from other smaller European countries. There are provincial responsibilities, in terms of lockdowns, different warnings and so forth.

Could the hon. member provide her thoughts in regard to the importance of federal-provincial co-operation in combatting the pandemic?

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

Madam Speaker, as my friend from Nanaimo—Ladysmith just said, we have real challenges in federal-provincial relations.

The European Unio, with separate nation-states, does a better job on trade within individual nation-states than we do interprovincially. Those frictions have really lost lives in this pandemic, because the federal government and the provincial governments have not worked as well together as, for instance, the state governments in Australia worked with their national state government. That is a tragedy.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, can I just begin, just start speaking? I do not have to fill out a form or get permission from an agency or a department or some other authority? Are we not in Canada here? Do we not need to fill out a form or get permission before we make anything, even if it just making a speech? Well, we need permission for everything else and have to wait an awful long time to get it.

According to newly released World Bank data, Canada ranks 36 out of 37 nations for the time it takes to get a building permit. One cannot just go out and build something, create jobs and support one's local economy, one has to wait for the gatekeepers in order to get permission.

One does not have to ask the World Bank that, one could just drive 25 minutes from here and ask Tim Priddle, who runs a lumber mill near Manotick. That lumber mill opened a big warehouse about 40 years ago. Guess how long it took to get approved? One week, one form, one stamped document from an engineer; one and done and away we go. That big, beautiful building is still standing safely to this day.

Tim wanted to build another warehouse with similar dimensions and doing similar things. This time it took six years and 600 thousand dollars' worth of consultant fees, charges and other obstructions. In fact, he had to hire an arborist to write a report on each little poplar tree he cleared, which was actually just useless ditch brush that had never been used for anything before or otherwise and had not been planned to be used for anything else. It took six years, $600,000 and 1,500 pages of paperwork for him to do that, money he could have spent creating real jobs.

He experienced what so many experience in this country: Life behind the gatekeepers. These are the people who are among the fastest-growing industry in the country. They are the bureaucracies, lobbyists, the consulting class, the politicians and the agencies who make their living by stopping other people and charging them excess tolls to do anything positive at all.

In fact, the Liberal government personifies the gatekeeper economy. The very first decision it made on taking office was to veto the privately funded expansion of the Toronto downtown island airport, an expansion that would have allowed Porter airlines, a Canadian company, to buy $2 billion of Bombardier jets and land them there, creating jobs for another Canadian company, but also reducing traffic by landing business people in the business district rather than having to travel between Pearson and downtown, adding to pollution and delay and killing jobs.

In this case, who were the gatekeepers? Of course the competitor airlines that did not want to add convenience to the customers who would go to the downtown airport if this were approved, and of course the wealthy waterfront condo owners, almost all of them millionaires, and by virtue of their wealth having an excessive amount of political power. They killed all the opportunity for the people who would have worked on that project, the customers who would have saved time and the people who now have to sit on the roadways between a distant airport and a downtown destination.

Not far from there are some more gatekeepers in a place called Cabbagetown. This is a well-off community, a leafy neighbourhood with beautiful old Victorian brick houses. Along came an entrepreneur who said that a day care would go well on a street corner in a very large brick building. It had enough space for 80 kids to go to that day care. He was prepared to put all of his own money in it and did not need a cent from the government.

Suddenly, the uber-progressive, wealthy elite Cabbagetowners who were against this construction rose up in protest. One man said, “This is standard-issue capitalism run amok.” This man, it turned out, was a mining executive. Columnist Chris Selley actually called him a “Marxist mining executive”, hilariously.

One can imagine this gentleman trying to get a mine approved if he thinks that a day care is “standard-issue capitalism run amok”, but I guess mines are in someone else's neighbourhood. Another neighbour said that this is a slippery slope for this iconic neighbourhood. What next, a playground, children laughing? One other person complained about the noise. One lady said that these kids will be walking within two metres of her house, and she signed her submission with “Ph.D.” Quiet, children, there is a genius at work in that house.

Another signatory was a gentleman named Tiff Macklem. He happens to be the governor of the Bank of Canada, who has been lecturing Canadians on the need for taxpayer-funded day cares, the same kind of day cares that he made a submission to the City of Toronto to try to block. This is typical of the progressive left. They want government to block the provision of a service, and then they claim that the government needs to provide that service directly.

However, it is not just day cares, airports and lumber mills. It is more essential than that; it is the houses in which we live. A C.D. Howe report produced recently showed that government barriers add between $230,000 and $600,000 per single detached unit of housing in this country. While the government brags that it is spending $70 billion of taxpayer money on housing, governments are blocking the very construction of that housing.

I want everyone to think about how insane it is that we live in one of the least densely populated nations on planet earth. There are only four Canadians for every square kilometre in this country, and yet we have some of the most expensive real estate. There are more places in Canada where there is no one than there are places where there is anyone, and yet Vancouver is the second and Toronto is the sixth most expensive housing market in the world when we compare median income to median housing price. It is more expensive than New York, more expensive than L.A., more expensive than London, England and more expensive than a tiny island nation called Singapore. All of these places are vastly more populated and even less expensive to live in. Why? It is because while our central bankers print money to goose demand, our local governments block the construction and, therefore, constrain supply. With demand up and supply down, the price rises. It is pretty straightforward.

What are the consequences? It is good for the rich. For those who already own a mansion, they are getting wealthier every day because their house price is going up. They can sit back and have rocking-chair money. Their house makes more than they do. However, for those who are poor and cannot find places to live, like the young people who just told a survey that came out today that one-third of them have totally given up on ever owning a house in their life, those people are out in the cold. In Toronto, a social services organization said that 98% of homeless shelter space is occupied. Over 300,000 people in one city are on a waiting list for subsidized housing. There are 10,000 people in that one city who are homeless.

A lot of people worry about what happened to the homeless in Toronto during this pandemic. In fact, one carpenter took matters into his own hands. Khaleel Seivwright, a carpenter, said that these people are going to freeze to death because they cannot stay in a shelter where they will catch COVID, so they are out on the street. With his bare hands, he built mini-shelters for them. He put in insulation, a smoke detector, a carbon monoxide detector. He said plainly that this was not a solution; it was just something he was doing to save people's lives until we can finally find a way to house people in this, one of the wealthiest countries on planet earth.

What did the city say? It did not say, “We are going to give this guy a hand. Let's give him a round of applause and let's see how we can help him do even better.” No. It did not say, “Boy, this guy is taking action that we should have taken long ago. He is making us look bad. We had better perform better than we have before.” No. It hired lawyers and got an injunction against him.

All of a sudden, the one guy who is selflessly trying to help solve the problem caused by city hall and by the bureaucracy is the villain. How typically this is of the story we see in our country.

Another poverty fighter is Dale Swampy, the head of the National Coalition of Chiefs, which has as its mandate to fight and defeat on-reserve poverty. That is its mission. It came up with a plan to support a brand new natural resource project that would ship western Canadian energy to the coast where it could be delivered to the fast growing and energy hungry markets of Asia, thus breaking the American stranglehold on our energy exports, creating jobs for steelworkers, energy workers, logistics and transportation workers and delivering $2 billion of wages and benefits to indigenous communities. The CEO of the project was going to be an indigenous person, and 31 of the 40 indigenous communities along the route supported it. That is more than 75%.

The environmental agency responsible took a look at it. It spent three years, heard from 1,500 witnesses and read 9,000 letters. It reviewed over 100,000 pages of evidence. It went to 21 different communities. It concluded that the pipeline was safe and in the public interest. However, the Prime Minister took office and he killed the project, denying those first nations communities their constitutional right in the charter to be consulted. He did not consult with any of them. What happened? Those indigenous communities lost the $2 billion. Now we are keeping toll. There will be these green jobs that the government will deliver. I asked Mr. Swampy how many of these green jobs had shown up since the pipeline was killed. It was zero, nada, nothing. In fact, he said that the so-called environmentalists did to him what they did to his father's generation 20 or 30 years ago. They came then and campaigned against hunting, trapping and fishing. Once they were done with their politics and they had won their political battle, they were gone. They left behind impoverished communities with less opportunity than they had before. That was the result.

One of the gatekeepers who comes to mind is Gerald Butts. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars working for the World Wildlife Fund, which is a supposedly an environmental organization. Instead of spending money on the environment, on preserving wetlands and so forth, it was paying him a multi-hundred-thousand dollar severance for quitting his job and coming to work for the government, where he has helped to block pipelines ever since.

We live in a country where we cannot even trade with ourselves. Maybe our friends in the Bloc, who want to create their own separate country, like it that way. I do not know, because we do not even treat our own interprovincial trade the way we treat foreign trade. Someone can be arrested or charged for bringing alcohol across an interprovincial border.

I will quote from our Constitution, “All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall...be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” That was promised us back in the time of our Constitution, yet to this day someone can be charged for bringing liquor or maple syrup in from another province. They can be charged for working in construction in the wrong province.

According to Statistics Canada, the effect of these barriers on trade between Canadian provinces works out to a tariff of about 7%. According to the World Trade Organization, the tariff that Canada charges on foreign imports to Canada is 4%. In other words, we charge 7% on goods that travel between provinces and only 4% on goods that come from abroad. If people order something from Alibaba to be delivered to their doorsteps, it is likely tariffed at a significantly lower rate than if they went and bought a product that was made in their neighbouring province. This is economic hara-kiri that we would punish our own businesses with higher tariffs than we would apply to Chinese businesses that sell within Canada.

It raises the question, could we even build the Canadian Pacific Railway today? I am not sure we could. What about our national highway system? Could we build that today? There would be some gatekeeper wanting to block it. If we cannot even transit goods across our borders without some parasitical interest group claiming there needs to be a tariff or regulation keeping it out, why would anybody allow a railway or a highway to be built? Forget transmission lines or pipelines; I am not sure we could get anything done as long as this gatekeeper economy continues to stand in the way.

We forget that there was a time when we got things done in this country. This is the country that discovered and isolated insulin, for God's sake, saving the lives of millions of diabetics. We discovered stem cells, which treat cancer and countless other conditions, and have the promise to repair spinal cords and bring sight to the blind. We created a mechanical arm that can go into outer space and move hundreds of thousands of kilograms of weight with a remote control, the Canadarm.

We conquered Vimy Ridge. We liberated the Dutch. We fought and succeeded at Juno Beach. Of course, that was at a time when if people said they had been triggered, it did not mean they heard a comment that hurt their feelings. It meant they had been shot at by enemies on the battlefield. That was the generation of that time.

We are a country that once had a government that would stand up and lead the world against apartheid. Now we have a government that is too terrified to speak out against the genocide of the Muslim minority in China. We have, today, a country where some people seriously talk about banning local kids' sports organizations from keeping score for fear of hurting the losing team's feelings. This is the country of Paul Henderson, who scored the winning goal in the summit series with less than a minute left to electrify the world and send a signal in favour of freedom and against communism, back in 1972.

One day, I believe we will knock down these gates and remove these gatekeepers altogether, to make Canada a place that is the easiest place on planet Earth in which to build a business, the fastest place to get sign-off to build something, the freest place on Earth in which to do commerce, to buy, sell, work, build, hire, take risks and, yes, to even win.

How about a budget bill like that?

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

Madam Speaker, I really hope the member for Regina—Lewvan was watching that, given our conversation earlier.

This member did not even speak about the bill that we are talking about. He went on and on. This last 20 minutes served no other purpose than for the member to take that clip and put it on Facebook. That is all he wants out of this. He did not spend any time talking about the bill.

The member talked about building permits, which are run by municipalities, under the municipal affairs department that sets the rules and regulations for that. When I was mayor, we put together a task force to look at how to increase the speed of things going through the building department. I do not know if the member is putting out a call that he is going to run for city council in Carleton or maybe for MPP so that he could try to fix those regulations, or perhaps, more likely, he is trying to position himself with a good speech so that he could prepare, maybe thinking somebody is not going to be lasting much longer.

I would love to hear if the member has anything to contribute to Bill C-14.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, first of all, the member condemns me for talking about municipal obstructions to business, and then he quickly turns his attention to municipal politics in his own backyard.

If the member does not understand the relationship between the time it takes for a business to get started and to get anything built in this country, and the finances of the nation, then maybe that is why we are in the mess we are in. If the member does not understand it, yes, actually building permits are federal in nature; anything that crosses interprovincial borders requires a building permit.

The Teck Frontier mine and countless other mines that are even within one individual province require federal building permits. There are countless projects, far too many, that require federal sign-off. The fact that the member does not know that or understand the financial impact that is had when these projects are blocked is exactly why we have a $400-billion deficit today.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Madam Speaker, I must admit that I am a big fan of the member for Carleton.

Red tape, bureaucracy. I agree with all of the things that he mentioned. I can even point out to him the worst example of red tape and bureaucracy: the Canadian federation.

The federal government has never run a hospital, but it wants to tell us what to do with health transfers. What is worse, since the member spoke about pipelines, 50% of my taxes go to the federal government and get added to the $24 billion. All I have to show for it is a damaged economy. That is a phenomenon known as Dutch disease, and it has been happening for years. The member for Carleton is saying that we need to add another layer and finance pipelines, to go full throttle and build the pipeline, as I have often heard people say here.

If my colleague agrees with me about red tape in the Canadian federation, would he agree to make transfer payments that meet the demands of the provinces and perhaps reduce that red tape? I look forward to hearing what he has to say about that.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, we absolutely have to reduce the burden on all our entrepreneurs, our workers and the Canadian economy.

However, I often see a contradiction with the Bloc Québécois. Every time Bloc members rise, they say they do not want to be part of Canada, but they want the federal government to spend more money in Quebec.

My personal view is that Quebec should be part of Canada. Every time Bloc Québécois members rise, their goal is to increase their power and the federal government's burden. Only the Conservative Party wants to cut the cost of and power wielded by politicians, bureaucrats and the federal government in this country as it stands. We, the Conservatives, are the ones who want to give the provinces and Canadians more autonomy.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Carleton for that, I guess, entertaining speech. It was completely irrelevant to the subject at hand, but I will try to run with it.

He mentioned that there are a lot of interprovincial barriers to trade in Canada. My riding makes the best wine in the country and his friend, the Premier of Ontario, stopped those shipments from going to Ontario. We cannot send wine to Ontario. Doug Ford said no. He even upped the ante recently with legislation that threatens a 10-year jail sentence for someone shipping wine into Ontario. His friend and former colleague, Jason Kenney in Alberta, could regain a lot of his lost popularity. He is at rock bottom right now. He could become much more popular if he changed the rules so that we could ship British Columbia wine to Alberta.

Could the member make those calls and help us improve interprovincial trade in Canada?

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

The hon. member for Carleton is going to have some time left over for questions and comments. I will let him answer briefly so we can get on to the next business.

The hon. member for Carleton.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, that was a fantastic question. Yes, I will make those calls. Every premier should knock down interprovincial trade barriers. I should tell him the good news, though: Alberta has already done it. Alberta knocked down the barriers and does import tariff-free British Columbia wine. Every province should do that and we should let this beautiful British Columbia, Niagara and Nova Scotia wine flow freely right across the land, as the founders of this nation originally envisioned.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

The hon. member will have four minutes left for questions and comments the next time this subject is before the House.

It being 6:30 p.m., pursuant to Standing Order 30(7), the House will now proceed to the consideration of Bill C-262 under private members' business.