Bill C-32

Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2022

An Act to implement certain provisions of the fall economic statement tabled in Parliament on November 3, 2022 and certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 7, 2022

Part 1 implements certain measures in respect of the Income Tax Act by
(a) providing that any gain on the disposition of a Canadian housing unit within a one-year period of its acquisition is treated as business income;
(b) introducing a Tax-Free First Home Savings Account;
(c) phasing out flow-through shares for oil, gas and coal activities;
(d) introducing a new 30% Critical Mineral Exploration Tax Credit for specified mineral exploration expenses incurred in Canada and renounced to flow-through share investors;
(e) introducing the Canada Recovery Dividend under which banks and life insurers’ groups pay a temporary one-time 15% tax on taxable income above $1 billion over five years;
(f) increasing the corporate income tax rate of banks and life insurers’ groups by 1.5% on taxable income above $100 million;
(g) providing additional reporting requirements for trusts;
(h) providing rules applicable to mutual fund trusts listed on a designated stock exchange in Canada with respect to amounts that are allocated to redeeming unitholders;
(i) providing the Minister of National Revenue with the discretion to decline to issue a certificate under section 116 of the Income Tax Act in certain circumstances relating to the administration and enforcement of the Underused Housing Tax Act ;
(j) doubling the First-Time Homebuyers’ Tax Credit;
(k) expanding the eligibility criteria for the Medical Expense Tax Credit in respect of medical expenses incurred in Canada related to surrogate mothers and donors and fees paid in Canada to fertility clinics and donor banks;
(l) introducing the Multigenerational Home Renovation Tax Credit;
(m) allowing access to the small business tax rate on a phased-out basis up to taxable capital of $50 million;
(n) modifying the computation of income as a result of the adoption of a new international accounting standard for insurance contracts;
(o) introducing a new graduated disbursement quota rate for charities;
(p) providing that the general anti-avoidance rules can apply to transactions that affect tax attributes that have not yet been used to reduce taxes;
(q) strengthening the rules on avoidance of tax debts;
(r) modifying the calculation of the taxes applicable to registered investments that hold property that is not a qualified investment;
(s) modifying the tax treatment of certain interest coupon stripping arrangements that might otherwise be used to avoid tax on cross-border interest payments;
(t) clarifying the applicable rules with respect to audits by Canada Revenue Agency officials, including requiring taxpayers to give reasonable assistance and to answer all proper questions for tax purposes; and
(u) extending the capital cost allowance for clean energy and the tax rate reduction for zero-emission technology manufacturers to include air-source heat pumps.
It also makes related and consequential amendments to the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation Act , the Excise Tax Act , the Air Travellers Security Charge Act , the Excise Act, 2001 , Part 1 of the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act and the Income Tax Regulations .
Part 2 amends the Excise Act, 2001 and other related texts in order to implement changes to
(a) the federal excise duty frameworks for cannabis and other products by, among other things,
(i) permitting excise duty remittances for certain cannabis licensees to be made on a quarterly rather than a monthly basis, starting from the quarter that began on April 1, 2022, and
(ii) allowing the transfer of packaged, but unstamped, cannabis products between licensed cannabis producers; and
(b) the federal excise duty framework for vaping products in relation to the markings, customs storage and excise duty liability of these products.
Part 3 amends the Underused Housing Tax Act to make amendments of a technical or housekeeping nature. It also makes regulations under that Act in order to, among other things, implement an exemption for certain vacation properties.
Division 1 of Part 4 authorizes the Minister of Finance to acquire and hold on behalf of His Majesty in right of Canada non-voting shares of a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Canada Development Investment Corporation that is responsible for administering the Canada Growth Fund and to requisition the amounts for the acquisition of those shares out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
Division 2 of Part 4 amends the Bretton Woods and Related Agreements Act to increase the maximum financial assistance that may be provided in respect of foreign states.
Subdivision A of Division 3 of Part 4 enacts the Framework Agreement on First Nation Land Management Act .
Subdivision B of Division 3 of Part 4 contains transitional provisions in respect of the enactment of the Framework Agreement on First Nation Land Management Act and makes consequential amendments to other Acts. It also repeals the First Nations Land Management Act .
Division 4 of Part 4 amends the Government Employees Compensation Act in order to fulfil Canada’s obligations under the Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America concerning Cooperation on the Civil Lunar Gateway.
Division 5 of Part 4 amends the Canada Student Loans Act to eliminate the accrual of interest on guaranteed student loans beginning on April 1, 2023.
It also amends the Canada Student Financial Assistance Act to eliminate the accrual of interest on student loans beginning on April 1, 2023.
Finally, it amends the Apprentice Loans Act to eliminate the accrual of interest on apprentice loans beginning on April 1, 2023 and to clarify when the repayment of apprentice loans begins during the interest suspension period from April 1, 2021 to March 31, 2023.

Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2022

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Madam Speaker, will the hon. member be able to tell us what the interest payment will be on just the $38-billion deficit we are carrying this year?

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Madam Speaker, that is an important question, because interest payments are a significant amount for most deficits throughout the history of Canada. However, the member may remember when the pandemic started and the long-term interest rates were close to 0%, we changed the composition of the Canadian federal debt from about 12%, if I am not wrong. We took the long-term debt close to 0% to about 46% of the debt.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Madam Speaker, I respect my colleague a lot, but in the fall economic update, we have this incredibly irresponsible approach by the Liberal government. As members know, $30 billion every year goes to overseas tax havens and tax evasion. Large corporations, some of the ones that have profited the most from greedflation, and the ultrarich benefit enormously. What the Liberals did in the fall economic statement was close, of that $30 billion, a scant 2%. They are continuing to allow 98% of it to go offshore and to go to tax evasion.

I want a comment from my colleague, whom I have a lot of respect for. How can he tolerate, as a Liberal member of Parliament, the Liberals giving 98% freedom to take money overseas through tax loopholes and overseas tax havens?

[Chandra Arya, Liberal, Nepean, ON]

Madam Speaker, tax evasion is bad. Tax avoidance, under the rules, is okay, but tax evasion is bad. We have invested an enormous amount, I think close to $400 million, in the CRA to target the tax evasion tactics of various corporations. For every dollar invested in this, I think the return is more than five dollars in normal circumstances, but it can go as high as $20 for every dollar invested to control tax evasion.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to thank the people of Don Valley East for providing me with the privilege of speaking in the House.

My riding is a remarkable community. It is very diverse culturally, in education and in professions. There are so many differences in my community, but despite all of these differences, we have the same set of values. We believe in values that unite us, like that hard work pays off; that education is and should be a top priority; that if people are sick, we come together and pool our resources to make sure they get the help they need; and making sure that our country remains clean and our environment is protected. The most important value I have picked up over the years is that, when we stick together, we are stronger and better for it. These are the values that make Canada and my community work.

I have the opportunity, due to my community's support, to come into this chamber through the democratic process and reflect those values in the House. We put those values into action by making decisions. Each of us has a choice we can make every single day. It is about choice. When we really cut away everything else, at the end of the day we are sent here to make decisions and choices for our communities. The word “choice” is important when it comes to democracy. It is an important word in the House, and every day those actions we take and choices we make eventually set a tone and become government policy and law.

We are here to make decisions and choices, and when our choice is not aligned with our communities, we know what happens. Communities eventually boot us out of office. We have an opportunity here to align with our communities. I can tell members that when it comes to the fall economic statement, I am very aligned with where my community is, and my community is aligned with the position I am taking in the House.

I am proud to support Bill C-32. I grew up in a community where, despite all of the big differences, people worked together and stuck together. It is a community that has many different types of housing: low-rent and subsidized housing, Toronto Community Housing and low-cost condominiums. There is an array of different styles of homes, and we all live together.

Some people are struggling in my community. I grew up in a neighbourhood where young people went to school without lunches. Growing up, I saw young people not getting the support I did at my house. I saw and picked up on these things. I come from a neighbourhood where many of the young men I grew up with did not graduate high school. By the time I was 21, I must have known at least a dozen young men who were murdered in my community due to street violence. I picked up on these things and took note. It was for these reasons I originally ran to be a school board trustee when I was almost 30 years old. I saw inequity in society and I wanted to take the values that were instilled in my community and look for ways to bring them into forums like this.

I saw many young people with limited opportunities. We are able, in assemblies like this, to create opportunities for people by the decisions and choices we make. I was pretty lucky. I had my mother and father, aunts and uncles, cousins and lots of friends. My lunch was packed for me when I went to school and when I went home, there was a warm meal. I was a lucky person. I did not have to think about the next meal or being safe at night. I did not have to think about those things, so I was able to look for opportunity.

It was because of government programs like student assistance that I got to go to university. I was the first person in my family to go. On whole my street, there were two guys who went to university, and I was one of them. I was lucky to have that opportunity, and it was because of government programming. Once, when I was growing up, my family was threatened with being thrown out on the street by the landlord. We went to the legal aid clinic, and because of the government programs, my family was safe.

One of the first jobs I ever had was subsidized by the government, like the student summer jobs program. I could go and get some experience and take that experience and grow. It is because of those programs that I was able to go off to university and serve my community as an MPP and then as a member of Parliament here in the House of Commons.

At the end of the day, we are opportunity-makers. What we do in this House is create opportunities for people. We create opportunities to make life better for people, and we make opportunities more abundant to them. We have choices. Eventually, with the decisions we make here and the tone we set, there is a tipping point at which it becomes government policy, so I am proud to stand in the House of Commons and support Bill C-32, because I know it is going to create more opportunities for the people who need them.

We just came out of a pretty rough financial situation and COVID. The financial sector on this planet was shocked. COVID changed the entire trajectory of how we do many things. Economically, it has been very challenging for Canadians and for the Canadian government.

Back in 2009, when we went through an economic challenge here in Canada, the Conservatives were in power, and Stephen Harper had choices to make. They decided to take a different route from the one we are taking today. The route they took was to cut programs. They sent out a blanket statement to the ministries, telling them to cut 10% to 15%, or whatever they could, from the departments. They cut literacy programs that were aimed at adult learners, and they did something that shocked Canadians during that time period, changing the rules of eligibility for seniors to receive their pension and moving the age from 65 to 67.

Here we are today in the House of Commons, and a bill is being put forward by this government and the finance minister to look at ways to strengthen people by providing more opportunity. The Conservatives have a choice. They have a choice to support people. I would say without question that the greatest resource we have as Canadians are the people who make up this great country, yet we see the Conservatives voting against things like dental care. Members can imagine having a $1,200 per family dental care program for the kinds of kids I grew up with. I would have been eligible for that program when I was a kid. The way the Conservatives have been talking, I can only presume they are going to vote against Bill C-32.

There is a $500 subsidy for some of the people who rent apartments and need help. The Conservatives are going to vote against that.

We talk about programs like child care, which can save families $10,000 a year. The Conservatives will vote against that.

In this bill is the elimination of interest on student loans. I had a student loan. The only way I could get to Carleton University was to take out a loan, which ended up costing me $57,000. I paid it back, and I was proud to pay it back, because it provided me with an opportunity to eventually be in a place like this with my fellow colleagues, representing my community. We all have choices.

When I was a very young man, I got to hear Nelson Mandela speak in the House of Commons. Yesterday I was learning a bit more about choice and politics in general, and I came across this great quote by him: “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”

The Conservatives need to stand up and align themselves by choice with their communities, stop using fear as the motivator to separate people and use hope, as I think Bill C-32 does, to bring people together. We should create opportunity and hope, so the next generation of young Canadians, and Canadians today, have the opportunity to build a better country.

[Eric Melillo, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to the government's economic policies, one thing I find very troubling is the fact that the government always spends and spends, but the results are not there for Canadians. That is very true when it comes to indigenous services. The government has increased spending by over 100% for Indigenous Services Canada since it took office, but reports from the Parliamentary Budget Officer show that this spending has not led to a commensurate increase in positive results for indigenous people.

I wonder if the member can expand on what has gone wrong in the indigenous services department and maybe provide some suggestions on how the government can ensure that the dollars it is spending are getting to the programs they are destined for.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to be part of a government that is prepared to invest in indigenous communities and to work as partners to build a better country. In fact, I would suggest that we should probably spend more money supporting indigenous communities, rather than looking at ways to make cuts like the Conservatives have done in the past.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-32, An Act to implement certain provisions of the fall economic statement tabled in Parliament on November 3, 2022 and certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 7, 2022, be read the second time and referred to a committee, and of the amendment.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Leader of the Opposition]

Mr. Speaker, when I take a walk through this country, I cannot help feeling like everything is broken.

Inflation is at a 40-year high. In a single month, 1.5 million Canadians visited a food bank. In the GTA, the greater Toronto area, that number was 180,000, in one general metropolitan area. One in five Canadians is skipping meals, because they cannot afford their groceries. About half of Canadians are $200 or less away from insolvency. The number of insolvencies is up by a fifth compared to a year ago, the biggest increase in 13 years. One in six businesses is considering closing their doors.

Households now face the prospect of 15% of their income going to debt servicing alone, a recent record. Mortgage interest costs for the average family are up 11%. Year over year that is the biggest increase since 1991. If someone renewed their mortgage today, after having secured it five years ago, they would be paying about $7,000 more per year for the very same house they lived in last year.

If people think home ownership is expensive, they should be careful about renting. That now costs $2,000 a month in the average Canadian city. Vancouver has the world's third most inflated housing market. Toronto has the 10th. In fact, Vancouver is more expensive than New York, Singapore, London, England, and countless others of the world's most famous cities where they have more people, more money and less land.

If we took a walk out of our homes onto the street, we would find ourselves 32% more in danger of being attacked. That is the increase in the violent crime rate since the Prime Minister took office. In fact, there were 124,000 more crimes committed this year than in 2015, when the Prime Minister came to office. There were 788 homicides in Canada last year. That is up from 611 back in 2015, which is another 29% increase. There has been a 92% increase in gang-related homicide and a 61% increase in the reports of sexual assaults since 2015. Police have reported hate crimes are up 72% over the last two years alone. After the government tells us it is investing so much of its rhetoric and its money in fighting racism, we see hatred and hate-based violence has increased by three-quarters.

Some 31,000 Canadians have lost their lives to overdoses. If we take a walk down streets like East Hastings in Vancouver, we will see tent cities where adults are lying face-first on the pavement, having just completed their most recent dose, not sure whether they will actually awaken. Police and social workers literally have to scour the streets 24-7 to check pulses of people lying on the pavement, not as extraordinary circumstances or one-time emergencies, but as daily events. In fact, there were 71,069 Canadians who died of overdoses in 2021. Twenty-one people are dying of overdoses every single day. That is up from 11 per day.

More than six million Canadians do not have access to a family doctor. The most simple expectations that we have for our health, like going into a pharmacy and getting painkillers for our children have now become out of reach. Canadians are now forced to drive south of the border to get the same medications that are not available on this side of the border. In fact, according to an association of pharmaceutical wholesalers that represents businesses in 19 countries, only Canada is suffering from these shortages.

Meanwhile, speaking of the rest of the world, there are still people who want to come here, and we hope they do, but 2.6 million of them are waiting in immigration queues. Over a million have been waiting longer than the acceptable wait time. When they arrive, they would arrive at Pearson, one of the worst-ranked airports on planet Earth. Montreal is not far behind when it comes to records for delays. The port of Vancouver is now ranked 376th out of 380 ports around the world. Speaking of getting people into the country, 10,000 Canadians were sent wrongly into quarantine by a $54-million app that we did not need, that did not work and that could have been procured for $250,000.

Speaking of building stuff, whether it is apps or anything else, our country is now ranked the second slowest for the time it takes to get a building permit. The average building permit takes over 250 days in Canada, but only 28 days in South Korea. It is no wonder we cannot build the factories, the pipelines and, most important of all, the houses that give people homes. We import 130,000 barrels of overseas oil every day even though we have the third-biggest supply on planet Earth.

All of these things are broken. What is most interesting about them is that they all happened under the Prime Minister's watch, while he refuses to take responsibility for any of them. Any one of these things in isolation would be considered a catastrophic embarrassment, but together they show the story of a country that cannot get anything done and that has accepted dramatic reductions in its quality of life and its expectation for what a person can receive living in this country of ours. The Prime Minister, who is in charge of the central government, ought to take some responsibility, but he takes none.

He says that a 40-year high in inflation has something to do with the war between Russia and Ukraine, even though inflation was already two and a half times the target before the war even began and less than 0.3% of our trade is with Russia and Ukraine combined. As for the stuff they produce, the stuff we already have here, he is not responsible for the massive increases in cost.

The Prime Minister is not responsible, he says, for the doubling of house prices or the fact that rental costs are out of reach. He is not responsible for the skyrocketing crime rates in our streets, even though his government oversees the Criminal Code and the national police force and border security. He is not responsible for the overdose deaths of so many Canadians. He is not responsible for the fact that so many people are going to food banks. He is not responsible for the fact that our children cannot get medication.

He says he is not responsible and he is right: He is not responsible. He is not responsible, even though he has the power to affect all of these things and, in many cases, he is the one who caused them in the first place.

I have never seen a prime minister who is so desperate to have more power with less responsibility. He wants to take over what we see and say on the Internet. He wants to control a greater share of the money that Canadians earn by constantly increasing spending faster than the economy grows. He wants to have more power over dental and pharmaceutical and child care, rather than allowing Canadians to control those things for themselves. He wants to have more control over health care by dictating terms to our provinces on how they should run their hospitals, even while he does not want to be responsible for any of the health outcomes that we see in our emergency rooms across the country. He wants more power, but he does not want more responsibility.

When we ask him about these failures, his constant refrain is that he is spending more money, and on that count he is right. There is no question that the government is the all-time heavyweight champion of spending. It has increased spending by 30% over pre-COVID levels even though COVID programs have now ended, but the results, as I have just listed, speak for themselves.

It is not a consolation prize that we are spending more to achieve these failures. The only thing worse than failing is failing expensively, and that is what the Prime Minister is doing.

Only in government, by the way, would politicians think that it is acceptable to measure their success by how expensive they can be. For example, this week, the Auditor General came out and said that the Liberals have spent an extra $1 billion-plus specifically on homelessness. Well, that sounds good, but they cannot keep track of how many homeless people there are in Canada. They have no idea what the results are. They have an overall housing program of $40 billion, which is supposed to make housing more affordable, but all the while house prices have doubled. The more they spend, the more things cost and the worse the results.

In the real world, people judge things by the outcome. For example, if I go to the grocery store, come back home, pull out a receipt and say to my wife, “I spent $700 on groceries” while I am holding two bags of groceries, she is going to say, “Where did all the money go?” I would say she has to give me a high-five because they were really expensive and that whatever I have in those bags must be terrific because it cost more than when she goes grocery shopping.

The reality is that nobody in the real world judges their success that way. We do not have restaurants that say, “Come dine with us. It is $500 a night to be in our dining room. We will not tell you anything about the service, the ambience or what ends up on the plate. What is most important is that our meals are the most expensive and therefore must be the best.” Only in politics do people think it is appropriate to judge success by how expensive government can be. What if instead of judging our success by how much we spend, we judged it by how much we delivered and the results that we actually achieve?

Everything feels broken in the lives of everyday Canadians, but the good news is that we can fix it. We live in the greatest country in the world. Our country has overcome these difficulties before and has rebuilt and given new hope where before there was hurt. There is a very clear path to achieving that result, and that is to start with the issue of money. Instead of spending more, let us achieve more.

How do we do that? Why do we not cap government spending and cut waste, and bring in a dollar-for-dollar law that requires the government to find a dollar of savings for every new dollar of spending measures? That would force politicians to make the same either-or trade-offs when they spend our money that everyday Canadians make in their lives.

When a local mechanic decides he is going to spend a little more on advertising, he has to spend a little more somewhere else in order to free up that money. When a family decides they are going to build a new porch, they might decide not to go on vacation or might try to find a bargain on both. They might get a deal on a vacation and go to the local construction yard to get some discarded lumber in order to build a porch more affordably.

Politicians and bureaucrats do not make those kinds of calculations because they do not have to. There is always more in the pot. They can tax more, borrow more or print more.

That scarcity gets passed on to the taxpayer. Every creature in the universe has to live with scarcity. The great economist Thomas Sowell once said that the first law of economics is scarcity. There is always more demand than there is supply. The first law of politics, however, is to ignore the first law of economics. That is what politicians do by simply putting scarcity onto other people by driving up their costs and externalizing the consequences of spending decisions.

If instead we forced politicians by law to live with the same laws of scarcity as every other business, consumer or taxpayer, we would force better results. Politicians would need to go into their departments and ask themselves, “If I want to increase spending on this initiative, where can I find savings somewhere else?" They would be incentivized to go line by line, year after year, to find low-priority items in order to redirect the money to high-priority results for Canadians.

Let us get the Bank of Canada back to its core mandate of 2% inflation rather than printing money to pay for political spending. Let us also get rid of the obvious examples of wasteful spending. We could cancel the ArriveCAN app and get rid of the multi-billion dollar Infrastructure Bank, which has achieved no projects but has guaranteed the profits of large multinationals and the bonuses of executives. Getting rid of this waste would allow us to save money and free up more resources for things that could achieve results for our people.

Instead of creating more cash, why do we not create more of what cash buys in this country? Why do we not grow more food, build more houses and generate more Canadian energy?

Speaking of energy, I had the privilege of visiting the single largest infrastructure project in Canadian history, LNG Canada, a $40-billion private sector investment approved by the previous Conservative government. It could only come to pass because the Government of British Columbia agreed to exempt the project from the carbon tax. Otherwise, it would not have been economical. What result will actually be achieved by this project? The answer is that it will cut 60 million tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere by replacing overseas coal-fired plants with clean Canadian natural gas.

Is it not interesting that this project had to be exempt from both Bill C-69, the government's environmental law, and the carbon tax in order for it to go ahead and reduce emissions? In other words, for this environmentally friendly project to occur, the government's environmental policies had to be ignored. That proves how backwards they are.

If the carbon tax had been in place, the project would not have been economical. If Bill C-69, the anti-energy law, had been in place, there is no way it would have been approved. What would have happened? About 60 million more tonnes of greenhouse gases would have gone into the global atmosphere because there would not have been clean Canadian natural gas to replace the dirty coal in Asia.

We have an enormous advantage reaching Asia. B.C. is the shortest North American shipping distance to Asia. We also have the shortest North American shipping distance to Europe from the east coast of Canada. Speaking of the east coast, when the Prime Minister visited there, he was asked about approving natural gas projects in Canada's east coast. He said there might not be a business case. He was standing next to the German Chancellor when he said that.

Ironically, the Germans just announced that they completed a new natural gas import terminal in 194 days. Do members know what they will not be importing there? It is Canadian natural gas. Why? It is because we do not export any natural gas overseas. We do not have any terminals completed. Despite 15 of them having been proposed when the Prime Minister took office, not one of them has been completed. Only one is under construction, the aforementioned LNG Canada. The rest are in limbo.

We could be sending the Germans our natural gas to break European dependence on Putin and to transform dollars for dictators into paycheques for our people in this country. Why do we not do that?

Let us think of the human benefit that would bring. When I was in northern British Columbia, I spoke to a Haisla Nation grandmother who broke down into tears when she said that her granddaughter had been diagnosed with autism. After decades of federal promises that these kinds of conditions would be met with services and treatment, there is no treatment in her region of rural, remote northern British Columbia. She said that if natural gas projects like LNG Canada were allowed to go ahead, and if her nation could sign agreements to share in the benefits of those programs, there would be local resources under the control of first nations communities to provide children like her granddaughter with autism treatment and countless other things. Why do we not empower first nations to do more things like that by allowing these projects to go ahead?

We need to get the government out of the way so these opportunities can occur. We need, for example, to incentivize more home building by requiring our large municipalities with overpriced markets to approve fast and affordable building permits so that we could build the millions of new homes that are required for our existing population and for those who have yet to come to our country. We need to require that every federally funded transit station be pre-approved for high-density housing around it so that our young people do not even need to own a car to live in an affordable house.

We also need to sell off 15% of the 37,000 underutilized federal buildings so they can be made into affordable housing for our young people. We need to get government out of the way so that our projects can get completed and our people can have homes and energy.

Finally, we need to get government out of the way and off the backs of our farmers so they can produce more nutritious food in this country. Is it not an outrage that Canada has the sixth-biggest supply of farmland per capita on earth, but in one in five households, people are actually skipping meals because of the excessive cost of food?

We should not only be able to feed our own families but be the breadbasket of the world by cancelling the carbon tax, not just on primary farming but on drying food and transporting it. We need to cancel the carbon tax on our truckers so they can bring that food affordably to our supermarkets. We also need to remove the ridiculous fertilizer tariffs and taxes the government is bringing in so we can produce more food on every acre of land in order to have greater output and reduce the amount of fuel that has to be burned to produce that prodigious output. Let us unleash the fierce power of our farmers to feed us again.

Let us also make it possible for our people to walk safely in the streets once again, something we used to take for granted. The answer is clear: The vast majority of crime is committed by a tiny minority of criminals. A recent letter from the Union of B.C. Municipalities demonstrated the number of instances of crime and criminality that are generated by a tiny minority. For example, in Vancouver, 40 individuals were responsible for 6,000 negative interactions with the police, most of them arrests. Let us think about that. The same 40 people were arrested 6,000 times in a year. That is like 150 arrests per person per year.

We all agree that if a young person makes a mistake, we should invest in rehabilitating them to get them back on the street once they are ready and into a job as productive members of society. However, when someone commits 60, 70, 80 or 100 violent offences and we consistently and automatically release them early on bail and even after they are convicted, that is contributing to the criminality that has grown by one-third since the Prime Minister took office. Let us target that small minority of criminals with serious consequences to get them off the streets and keep the streets safe.

It is not out of hatred for the criminal that we take these actions. It is out of love for the victims, the people who desperately want to live safely in our neighbourhoods. Instead of investing money in going after the lawful, licensed, trained and tested hunters and sport shooters, we should put that money into bolstering our borders to keep the smuggled drugs and guns that are terrorizing our communities out of our country altogether.

Finally, we need to come to the rescue of the people living in these all-too-common tent cities, whether they are in Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal, or in smaller centres like Peterborough, where this phenomenon is growing out of control. We see people who could be our brothers, sisters or, God forbid, sons or daughters who have lost their homes, are living on the streets and are playing Russian roulette with their lives. Every single time they ingest these poisons, they risk stopping their hearts, and we can change that.

We know that the government's current approach is to liberalize access to the most dangerous opioids and, in fact, use taxpayer funding and public resources for so-called safe supply to make them even more abundant. There is no such thing as safe poison; it is all deadly. We know what we can do to save these people's lives, because they are doing it in Alberta today.

Alberta has redirected the resources away from a so-called “safe”, taxpayer-funded supply of drugs over to recovery and treatment, getting addicts off the street and into a recovery centre, where they are first given detox, which cleans the poison out of their system, and then given 60 to 90 days of treatment, in-patient care, building up the habits of a clean, drug-free life. They are then gently reintroduced into society in jobs and opportunities, during which time they have counselling that keeps them on the right track. What is the result of that approach? It has cut overdoses in half and they are saving lives, proving there is always hope. It is possible to save these people.

Everything feels broken in this country, but it is our role in the House to turn all of that hurt into hope. It is our job to come forward with the practical, common-sense solutions that have made this the best country on earth. It is our job to take responsibility for the suffering that exists in this country today and replace it with opportunity, to give people back control of their lives here in Canada, the freest country on earth, where people can chart their own destinies and be masters of their own fate.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons (Senate)]

Mr. Speaker, I will start by reading this quote: “[G]overnment is ruining the Canadian dollar, so Canadians should have the freedom to use other money, such as Bitcoin.” This is what was said by the Leader of the Opposition about six or seven months ago.

We know that since he made those comments, Bitcoin is now down by 65%, and the reality is that when we look at scandals like the FTX scandal, it is very obvious that the decentralization of currency is not a stable form and will never compare to something like the Canadian dollar.

I am wondering, since he made that comment, if the Leader of the Opposition has had the opportunity to reflect on his position, and if he has since then adjusted his position on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, people should have the freedom to invest in whatever they want, as in the quote, as long as they follow the law and pay their taxes, just like everyone else. What is illegal in fiat currency should be illegal using digital or cryptographic or blockchain assets as well. If it is illegal to evade taxes using fiat currency, it should be illegal to evade taxes using any other type of asset. The rule should be simple, consistent and clear.

However, one thing is also clear. Only the Canadian dollar will be legal tender in this country, regardless. I believe there is only one legal tender, and it is the Canadian dollar. The government has been ruining the purchasing power of that dollar by printing half a trillion dollars of it. It went from $1.8 trillion to $2.3 trillion in M2 money supply. That gave us the worst inflation in 40 years. It was entirely predictable. I predicted it: I warned the Liberals, and I wish they had listened.

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

Madam Speaker, I am having difficulty following the speech by the leader of the Conservative Party. First, he spoke about cutting spending. Then he talked about providing a family doctor for every Canadian who does not have one. That does not make sense.

Yesterday, there was a CBC story about CHU Sainte‑Justine, a children's hospital in Montreal. A child was in respiratory arrest, and they did not know if they could save him. Even though he was swamped and there were a lot of people in the emergency room, one ER doctor agreed to speak on camera and said that it is ridiculous, investments need to be made, people are tired and there is a shortage of ER staff. Clearly, the health system is on the verge of collapsing.

On the other side of the House, they have made their decision. They are not going to invest in health. They have said no several times. They even repeated it during question period today.

My question for the leader of the Conservative Party is the following. As much as we would not want it to happen, if the Conservatives were to take power tomorrow morning, would they increase the health transfer from 22% to 35%, as every province in the country has requested, without imposing any conditions? Yes or no?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, first of all, it is important to recognize the Conservative Party's record. We increased health transfers by 6% per year when we were in government.

This government has reduced the annual escalator for health transfers. Our party's policy is to continue to provide stable transfers that increase from year to year.

My colleague criticized me for saying that the government was spending too much. He just mentioned the failures in the health care system. Has the $500 billion in additional spending that the federal government racked up over the last two years solved these problems? Obviously not.

Just because we have a more costly government in Ottawa does not mean we will have better health care systems in our provinces.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, week after week we hear the leader of the official opposition stand in this House and outline point by point the economic violence of capitalist corporate greed, yet he never has the courage to name the real cause of high inflation, which is the Conservatives' endless appetite for obscene corporate profits while everyday Canadians struggle to put food on their tables.

Does the leader of the official opposition not have the guts to take on the corporate greed of Bay Street, or is he simply happy to continue to serve them?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I suspect corporations were just as greedy seven years ago as they are today, so why is it that inflation is three times as high? The reality is that we have a government that has facilitated the so-called “greedflation” we have.

When governments print money and pump it into the financial system, those who first touch that money are the ones who profit from it. That is why, when we see these massive money-printing deficits anywhere in the world that it has been tried, it has not only caused inflation but caused a massive increase in the wealth gap. The richest people, who have stuff, benefit when that stuff goes up in price. The poorest people, who need stuff, suffer because they have less purchasing power with which to buy it.

It is the money printers and the big government state capitalism of the Liberal government that are allowing this outrage and injustice to occur, and it is the member, by being part of this costly coalition, who is serving that government greed and corporate greed.