Madam Speaker, I would like to start by wishing everyone a merry Christmas on these final strokes of the parliamentary calendar for this year.
I want to talk a little bit about the context of Bill C-58. I believe there is 100% agreement among all members, and probably among all Canadians, that we need more great-paying union jobs in this country. I want to talk about how we get there, how we make sure that there are more great-paying union jobs here in Canada.
The challenge right now is that, as a nation, we have a productivity crisis in our country, and productivity is what powers our economy. Let us imagine the economy of the country as a business itself. If, in fact, the business is producing things efficiently and effectively, then guess what? If there is a strong union in place, good wages should follow, and that is exactly what we want for the nation. Unfortunately, the factory that is our economy is not keeping up with other OECD countries.
Let us unpack productivity. What does “productivity” mean? In layman's terms it basically means how efficiently and effectively we are delivering goods and services. How efficiently and effectively is our economy running? The answer is that it is not great, unfortunately, because of a number of standards. Productivity in itself is basically a three-legged stool. One leg is technology; another is capital investment, and the other is workers. I will go through those legs one by one to make sure we understand what the challenges are and why, unfortunately, the government is just not meeting the challenges.
I will start with technology. It makes sense, and it has been true since the Roman Empire and even before it, that a society or an economy that has leading technology will have the ability to bring prosperity, or prosperity relative to the rest of the world, to its shores. Unfortunately, in Canada, we have a government that is stifling technology and innovation. For multiple years, going on almost a decade, in fact, we have been calling on the government for open banking legislation that was supposed to be here a year ago, and a year before that. Finally, in the fall economic statement, we got a promise for another promise to have open banking legislation. It was supposed to be here years and years ago. In the U.K., open banking has saved customers, depending on which academic or economist one approves of, between $1 billion and $10 billion. That is money we are leaving on the table every year because the government cannot get out of its own way.
We can look at legislation with respect to innovation. Around the world, there is a lot of innovation about how we nurture the small or medium-sized technology companies and make them into the behemoths that they are. Unfortunately, in Canada, we are struggling with that. We have innovations like a patent box, which is available to the government as a tool. We have special regulatory and tax breaks that we can give companies, not just to move factories onto our shores by giving multinationals billions and billions of dollars, but also by creating businesses here at home, and we are failing there when it comes to the technology aspect.
Another element of the technology world where we are letting people down is real-time rail. Most, if not all, G7 countries have real-time rail. People at home might ask me what the heck real-time rail is. Real-time rail is just having money travel instantly. A person may say that when they do an electronic funds transfer to their friend to pay half of the dinner bill, it seems to go immediately. However, in reality, while it seems to go immediately, what actually happens is that the financial institutions are fronting the money, and then the money comes back.
Our current money transfer payment system is really held together by duct tape and a dream. It will break down, mark my words, at some point if we do not have some legislative innovation to allow a real-time rail system, which most of the other G7 and OECD countries have. That is an issue because the flows of capital and the flows of transfer are incredibly important to an innovation economy.
We have some great start-ups and great fintechs across this country, but the government seems to be doing everything it can to stifle their development. There are tremendous opportunities. By the way, these are not partisan issues. It was, I believe, both in the Liberal policy items and in the Conservative policy items in the last election to have open banking, but we just need to deliver. That is the problem. Many times, my issue with the government is not so much ideology; it is just competency. These are things every other country seems to get done but that this country cannot.
Second, the other leg I talked about was capital investment. This is the money that powers the technology that powers the worker. We have decisions to make as a society as to how much money we put into the public sector, which is incredibly important, and how much money we put into the private sector, which I would argue is just as important, if not more so. The private sector is that economy; it is what is driving the money flow. If we do not have a vibrant private sector generating revenue and income for the rest of our economy, that means we will not have a vibrant public sector, because the taxes come from the private sector. They come from the small business owner who is working 20 hours out of a 24-hour day.
However, our current regulatory regime, as well as our taxation regime, is not fair to these individuals. In fact, even the government's approach to business is stifling growth. It is preventing winning from happening. I say this not for partisan reasons per se, but it does sort of illuminate where the government stands with respect to business. When it called small business owners tax cheats, that not only affects the bottom line; it also affects the way people think about business. It shows the way the government thinks about business, when in reality, without strong businesses, without entrepreneurs and without doers in our society, we will not have the revenue we need to fund our very important public sector programs.
The final leg I am going to talk about today is with respect to workers. Our workers are, I think, and in fact I know, the best in the world. We have so many intelligent, hard-working women and men across this great country who go to work every day, but what has happened to them over the last eight years is just not fair. I do not know how else to put it. Let us start by discussing what the government is doing directly, and then we can talk about what it is doing indirectly, to our workers. There is something called the marginal effective tax rate, which is how much one pays to the government for the next dollar. That involves both taxation and clawbacks. It is shocking to me that there are Canadians earning less than $50,000 who, on their next dollar earned, will be giving upwards of 70¢, 80¢ or even 90¢ back to a government. Can one imagine?
For those of us who have children, imagine saying to them that they are going to be given an allowance. They are to shovel the snow, which is no doubt coming, or rake the leaves, or whatever, and they will be given $10 an hour to do it. However, by the way, $9 an hour is going to be taken back. It is unbelievable the impact that taking away from workers would have.
In sum, we need to improve the productivity of our country through reductions in red tape and reductions in taxation so we can have the productivity we need to make sure there are great high-paying union jobs across this country.
