Mr. Speaker, I thank my Conservative colleague for his moving and heartfelt speech. It will be hard for me to follow that, and I will not be able to convey such a deep respect for human dignity in light of the horrific events that occurred all over the country and throughout its history. I thank my colleague for his speech and I will do my best to speak to Bill C‑30, the budget implementation bill.
There are some good things in this budget, but there are also things missing from it. I will obviously get back to this, since that is part of my job as an opposition member. What worries me most about this budget is that the government still seems to be putting a band-aid on a cancer and scrambling to fill in the potholes. This budget lacks vision. It is as though the government cannot see the forest for the trees.
We have not yet emerged from the crisis we have been dealing with for the past year and a half. However, the vaccination numbers, especially in Quebec and Ontario, are reassuring. We are on track for 75% of people to get their second dose by the end of the summer. Canada is behind many other countries, but I think we are getting through this together. This crisis was a huge tragedy. Tens of thousands of our fellow citizens got sick and will get sick in the coming years. Many others died.
Over the past 18 months, we have also realized how poorly prepared we were, and I am worried that future events could catch us just as unprepared. We want to believe that we learn from our mistakes and that things will be different next time, yet we have been through SARS and other epidemics before. Each time, we were not prepared and were caught unawares.
Both our social safety net and our health care systems had flaws and weaknesses. However, instead of fixing them, at times we made them worse, including by making cuts to health transfers to the provinces, something that was started by the Conservatives and carried on by the Liberals. Outside of some one-time measures, it does not seem like the government is really enhancing our capabilities and our public services to provide high-quality services and care with the right equipment to get through a pandemic like this one.
Make no mistake, this pandemic will not be the last. Pandemics happened several times in the 20th century, they have already happened a few times in the 21st century, and they will continue to happen. Will we be prepared next time?
Will our health care system and professionals be treated well? Will we provide our orderlies and nurses with better working conditions and decent shifts? Will we collaborate to ensure that we do not let down seniors in long-term care? The death toll at the beginning of the pandemic, especially at the Herron long-term care home in Dorval, on Montreal's West Island, was appalling.
Will we change the way we work? In terms of workplace relations, will we continue to work from home, or will we go back to the office? What will we do to prepare for next time? Will we have enough medical equipment for everyone?
Will Canada have the industrial capacity to do vaccine research, but also to design, create and manufacture vaccines as well? Over the past few years, our country has lost its entire domestic vaccine production capacity, and we saw how unprepared we were for the pandemic as a result and how dependent we were on our neighbours to manufacture vaccines, medical equipment, respirators and ventilators.
Will we have enough oxygen cylinders next time? If the next virus is more aggressive, more contagious and more deadly, will we be able to overcome it and ensure that our social safety net can protect everyone and leave no one behind?
I believe that this budget addresses some but not all of the short-term needs, but unfortunately, we are not planning for the post-pandemic reality and the new society that we could collectively create if we had the resources. We could create a society that is fairer, more prosperous, more equitable, greener, and also better prepared to face these kinds of challenges, because this will not be the last time that we have to.
This will also not be the last time that climate crises could worsen because of global warming. That is another subject, but it is still related because of the public health problems it can cause, whether it be respiratory problems or the spread of certain viruses, or simply disasters that will be extremely costly to both the agricultural sector specifically and societies in general.
This budget and this budget implementation bill have flaws. The pandemic demonstrated that we had societies that were very inequitable, and these inequalities have widened considerably over the past 18 months. I have seen statistics showing that the wealth of the richest families and individuals in Canada grew by about $78 billion during the pandemic. We are talking about less than 1% of the population. While most people were suffering, losing their jobs, watching their small businesses struggle to survive or even close down, the ultrarich were lining their pockets.
The Liberal government has not included any concrete measures in this budget to attack this excessive, outrageous and indecent increase in wealth, except for a special tax on the purchase of certain boats, luxury vehicles or private planes. A super-rich person who pocketed tens of millions of dollars in profit just has to avoid buying a private plane, and this measure will change absolutely nothing in their life.
As Oxfam Canada revealed a few months ago, as a result of this rise in inequality, people from big companies, like Amazon's Jeff Bezos, made truly gargantuan profits during this pandemic. Jeff Bezos has approximately 600,000 employees around the world, which is quite a lot. If Mr. Bezos took out his cheque book and wrote 600,000 cheques for $110,000, one for each of his employees, he would still be just as rich as he was before the pandemic. Needless to say, he was already far from poor before the pandemic.
What are the Liberals presenting in this budget to reduce inequality and make the super-rich, multi-millionaires and billionaires pay their share? Not much, as I said. The budget talks about boats and planes, but that is about it.
The government could have imposed a tax on wealth. It could have imposed an additional tax of 1% on people with a fortune of over $20 million. That does not seem excessive to me. It would free up a considerable amount of revenue so we could have social programs that would take care of people and a truly public health care system that could meet the needs of the population. Why is there no tax on wealth?
I mentioned Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Why is there no special tax on excessive profits during a pandemic? In the riding of Rosemont—La Petite‑Patrie and pretty much all over Montreal, small businesses have suffered and have had a hard time making ends meet. Many of them have gone out of business even as giant Internet corporations like Amazon and its ilk have raked in the cash. Not only are web giants not yet being taxed by the Liberal government on what they earn in Canada and Quebec, but they have also been reaping obscene profits during the pandemic. The Liberal government does not have the courage to do anything about this.
Why has the government not altered its approach to tax havens? Every serious assessment of the situation, including those by the Department of Finance and the Conference Board of Canada, tells us that we are losing tens of billions of dollars every year because the super-rich can squirrel their money away in the Cayman Islands or Barbados so they do not have to pay a penny in taxes in Canada or, if they do, it is a pittance. This has been going on for years, with neither Conservatives nor Liberals doing anything about it. Most of these tax havens were created by Canadian banks, which were able to make rules that suited them so they could enable their clients and KPMG clients to avoid paying tax here by using financial schemes that no federal government has made any real effort to take down.
As professor Alain Deneault has explained, if you are injured and you have to wait in an emergency room for 10 or 20 hours to see a doctor, it is because of tax havens. When you are waiting for a bus on a street corner in the rain and the bus does not come because it is broken down, there is no one to fix it and public transit is deficient, that is because of tax havens. If our communities do not have sufficient social housing and co-operative housing, it is because the rich are not paying their fair share. It is because of tax havens.
I wish we had a government that had the courage to tackle these issues. An NDP government will do just that one day.
