Bill C-8

Economic and Fiscal Update Implementation Act, 2021

An Act to implement certain provisions of the economic and fiscal update tabled in Parliament on December 14, 2021 and other measures

Part 1 amends the Income Tax Act and the Income Tax Regulations in order to
(a) introduce a new refundable tax credit for eligible businesses on qualifying ventilation expenses made to improve air quality;
(b) expand the travel component of the northern residents deduction by giving all northern residents the option to claim up to $1,200 in eligible travel expenses even if the individual has not received travel assistance from their employer;
(c) expand the School Supplies Tax Credit from 15% to 25% and expand the eligibility criteria to include electronic devices used by eligible educators; and
(d) introduce a new refundable tax credit to return fuel charge proceeds to farming businesses in backstop jurisdictions.
Part 2 enacts the Underused Housing Tax Act . This Act implements an annual tax of 1% on the value of vacant or underused residential property directly or indirectly owned by non-resident non-Canadians. It sets out rules for the purpose of establishing owners’ liability for the tax. It also sets out applicable reporting and filing requirements. Finally, to promote compliance with its provisions, this Act includes modern administration and enforcement provisions aligned with those found in other taxation statutes.
Part 3 provides for a six-year limitation or prescription period for the recovery of amounts owing with respect to a loan provided under the Canada Emergency Business Account program established by Export Development Canada.
Part 4 authorizes payments to be made out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the purpose of supporting ventilation improvement projects in schools.
Part 5 authorizes payments to be made out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund for the purpose of supporting coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) proof-of-vaccination initiatives.
Part 6 authorizes the Minister of Health to make payments of up to $1.72 billion out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund in relation to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) tests. It also sets out reporting requirements for the Minister of Health.
Part 7 amends the Employment Insurance Act to specify the maximum number of weeks for which benefits may be paid in a benefit period to certain seasonal workers.

Economic and Fiscal Update Implementation Act, 2021

[Mario Beaulieu, Bloc, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

Madam Speaker, the Canada emergency business account provides interest-free loans of up to $60,000. Initially, repaying the balance of the loan on or before December 31, would have resulted in loan forgiveness of up to 33 per cent.

However, in Quebec we are seeing that almost a quarter of SMEs might not survive, and we think more needs to be done. For example, we have proposed increasing the loan forgiveness amount for the smallest businesses or those whose sales fell short of a certain threshold. What does my colleague think of that?

[Clifford Small, Conservative, Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame, NL]

Madam Speaker, those are excellent points raised by my hon. colleague.

I have spoken to many small business owners who are feeling the strain. They are worried about having to pay back those loans on time. They can barely keep their doors open, because our economy is shut down.

If the government does not act soon and follow what our European colleagues are doing, those businesses will fail. They can barely keep their cash flow moving at all right now, let alone pay back those loans in two years' time.

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

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to speak to the economic update proposed in Bill C‑8. However, I am not at all pleased to say that it is about as weak as the throne speech. There are many things missing from it.

The bill proposes some interesting things, such as credits for ventilation, transportation for people who live in remote regions, medical care and school supplies, and a tax credit to return fuel charge proceeds to farming businesses. These are things that seem to make sense. However, I would like to call on the federal government to be very vigilant and aware that it needs to pay close attention to areas of jurisdiction and to work with Quebec and the other provinces on several of these aspects.

In the economic update, the government also talks about charging a 1% tax on vacant housing. We all know that vacant housing is a major problem, and we cannot really be against such a measure. However, we need to raise a red flag, or at least an orange one, about the fact that this will once again interfere with certain jurisdictions. I therefore urge the federal government to be careful, to work with Quebec and large cities like Montreal and to provide the necessary support, instead of sticking its nose where it might not belong.

No one can be against that idea. However, the proposed percentage of 1% may pose a problem. I would like to think that it will bring in some $600 million or so, but a similar tax exists elsewhere. Vancouver had a 15% tax, which was later increased to 25%, compared to the federal government's 1%. France's tax is 12.5% for the first year and 25% for subsequent years. In Canada, we are talking about a 1% tax. What will be the real impact of that measure?

The Bloc Québécois believes that access to social housing should be a priority, and that is where we should be targeting our efforts. It is extremely important to increase the housing supply, because the need is there.

From 1960 to 1995, the federal government funded the construction of 25,000 new housing units. Now, with its 20-year strategy, the government is proposing to add 6,000 new units a year, and the Bloc Québécois is very concerned that it is just not enough.

The Front d'action populaire en réaménagement urbain estimates that since 1994 the federal government's disengagement from these programs has deprived Quebec of more than 80,000 social housing units. It is now estimated that Quebec needs 50,000 units.

I want to make an aside about health. If the government had not made gradual, insidious and even—dare I say it—vicious cuts to health transfers year after year, we might not be in such a predicament today. Our health care system has been significantly undermined over the past two years, and it was already struggling before that. Why was struggling before? Because it has been underfunded for a long time. Why has it been underfunded for a long time? Because half the taxes go to the federal government, but the federal government has less than half of the responsibilities. I do not know how many times I have to repeat that in the House, but I will continue to do so for as long as necessary. This economic update could have provided for an increase in health care transfers, but it did not. That was just a quick but important aside.

I now want to come back to social housing, a sector where we are seeing the same phenomenon. The federal government withdrew from this file in 1994, and the sector is now lagging behind. That is where the government needs to invest. It needs to build social and community housing. Scotiabank estimates that Canada needs to build an additional 1.8 million dwellings just to reach the G7 average. I take that to mean that we are currently doing very poorly in comparison with the rest of the G7. That is what Canada is being told, and that tells us something is wrong.

I would like to point out to government members that social housing is not the same as affordable housing. There is a very important distinction. The cost of social housing is based on the average cost of housing, which means that, because rents in the Montreal area have increased by 18.7% in the past five years, a social housing unit now costs $2,225 a month.

Do I really need to explain that a lot of middle-class families need social housing? This government is always banging on about the middle class. If supporting the middle class is so important, then the government should prove it. What people need is social housing.

I am calling on the government to respect jurisdictions and consider the work being done in Quebec through the AccèsLogis Québec program, for example. This is crucial.

The government needs to stop trying to grab headlines by making flashy announcements, since the large amounts of money it announces often include the provinces' and municipalities' shares. The government needs to stop misleading the public and start being honest about how much it is actually spending.

How is it possible that just 25% of the money has been spent, two years into a four-year program? This means that the government is insidiously and maliciously planning to ensure there will be money left when the program is over. No one realizes it because what makes the news is the big bucks announced early on. We are tired of this. We want to work for our constituents.

There are some other worthwhile points to consider in the economic update. There are not many, but there are some, such as the Canada emergency business account. My colleague from La Pointe-de-l'Île mentioned this program in a question. Our SMEs are drowning in debt. The estimated average debt is nearly $100,000, which is a huge amount.

SMEs are very important in Quebec. They are crucial. That is another thing that sets Quebec apart: SMEs contribute 30% of our GDP. We have to support those people. We cannot just let half our businesses fail in 2022. Analysts have concerns about that. More flexibility is called for, so we are very pleased that the loan repayment deadline has been extended. That is something we asked for, and the people of my riding are very happy about it.

How about increasing the amount for small storefront businesses because brick-and-mortar shops cost money to run? There are also online businesses competing with big, powerful multinationals. How about helping those little SMEs compete by coming up with solutions to support online merchants, such as reducing postage rates and credit card fees? Visa and Mastercard are not the ones covering the cost of all the points people get when they pay with a credit card; merchants are. That is an important thing to remember. There is some work to do on that. It would definitely involve negotiations, but I think it can be done, and the Bloc Québécois is offering to help.

I just talked about health transfers, a subject that is not mentioned in the economic update. However, the economic update does talk about ventilation and other things that come under provincial and Quebec jurisdiction, so we need to pay attention to that.

The economic update talks about the duration of EI benefits and the possibility of increasing the number of weeks. We appreciate that, because we have been talking about the seasonal gap for 10 years now. Why is that measure only temporary, though? This needs to be settled once and for all. EI benefits must be provided to people with serious illnesses; we can work together.

There is absolutely nothing in the economic update about supply chain issues. Labour issues were debated throughout the election campaign. Why have no proposals been made on this matter? The government needs to come up with something. The Bloc has proposals to make. Will the government listen to them?

We are proposing a tax credit for people aged 65 and over, after a certain number of hours worked. We are proposing measures for temporary foreign workers. Businesses are in urgent need of workers. These workers are not being allowed to enter; they are being turned away.

Last week I hit the roof over the 12-week waiting period for EI. Things finally got moving on the weekend with the addition of more teams. Why did it take months for this to happen? We are not here to cause trouble. We are here to work for the people, to collaborate, but things need to get moving.

The Bloc Québécois proposed a series of concrete measures for foreign workers, including expedited visas that are valid for five years and the possibility of eliminating the requirement for labour market impact assessments, or LMIAs.

To boost productivity, we are proposing a business investment program. The agri-food sector is chronically underfunded. I worry that it may become more profitable for a business to close up shop and reopen somewhere else. Why not create an investment program that could help with labour issues? That is important.

In closing, there is also the problem of transportation bottlenecks. It defies logic that we transport animals to be slaughtered in Pennsylvania when we are trying to buy electric cars and travel less in an attempt to reduce our carbon footprint. It makes no sense. What about the businesses' bottom line and the animals' welfare? There is a whole host of reasons to stop doing this.

I want to collaborate with the government, but there has to be something to work with, and there is not a lot of substance in this economic update.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I want to pick up on the member's comments on the importance of small businesses. It is important for us to recognize that the number of small businesses today in Canada is greater than the number prepandemic, from what I understand. I think in good part that is because the Government of Canada is working with the Government of Quebec and with municipalities like Montreal and Quebec City. We have been very successful at providing the supports that were necessary to ensure these businesses would survive the pandemic.

I am interested in the member's thoughts and commentary on how important it is that different levels of government work together for the betterment of our economy and people in general.

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

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. We agree once again. I find that has been happening quite a bit recently. That is a change.

I completely agree with him on the fundamental importance of SMEs. We supported the small business assistance programs because it is important to have them. However, I would like to remind my colleague opposite that small business debt levels are very high. Yes, all levels of government must work together, but we, too, must work together. The Bloc has some suggestions. We believe that the government should be a little more generous with the smallest businesses and consider their prepandemic debt ratio and profitability.

I am also thinking of the businesses that opened their doors during the pandemic. They thought the pandemic was over after the first or second wave, but more waves keep coming and they cannot access any assistance. I think an effort must be made to help these businesses.

We therefore agree on one thing: SMEs are important to the economy.

[Larry Maguire, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Madam Speaker, I want to ask my colleague from the Bloc a question with regard to small businesses. He and a member from the NDP, both of whom are in the House today, supported and helped me with Bill C-208 on qualifying small businesses and interfamily transfers last summer. I wonder if he could just remind my colleague from Winnipeg North that major accounting firms in Canada said that passing this bill did more for small businesses in Canada than probably any other finance decision for those qualifying small businesses in the last 25 years. I wonder if he could also remind my colleagues on the Liberal side of the House that it is this kind of support for small businesses that is really needed, as opposed to some of the things the Liberals have talked about. We know polices were needed to get things going. The problem with the government spending now is that only part of it can be traced to the need to keep small businesses and families going through the pandemic.

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

Madam Speaker, I thank my esteemed colleague from Brandon—Souris. We are on the exact same page.

I find it quite amusing that he has asked me to pass on a message for him, and I thank him for giving me the opportunity to make a clarification. Small businesses do not exist because of the government. The government did take measures to help them through the crisis, but my colleague from Brandon—Souris essentially wants me to emphasize how important it is to give them a bit more of a hand, because the restrictions are dragging on and on.

If anyone needs proof that these long-drawn-out restrictions are doing economic harm, just have a look at the people out in front of Parliament. It is clear from the protest that these restrictions have been in place for a long time. People travelled all the way here and stayed all week because the situation is having an impact on them. We need to think about businesses, about people in the service industry. Yesterday I saw one of my friends who works in the theatre industry. He was certainly fed up.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for raising these important points, especially with respect to housing and the housing crisis that so many Canadians are facing.

Does the member think that the federal government should focus on housing, specifically the existing first nations housing crisis in Quebec and across the country? Does the member think that the government needs to immediately invest in first nations housing?

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

Madam Speaker, the short answer is yes, of course.

As I mentioned earlier, my only concern is that the government needs to be mindful of jurisdictions and look at what is being done in the different provinces and territories. Housing for indigenous peoples is a parallel issue. There are indeed urgent needs in that sector, which, by the way, falls under federal jurisdiction. The federal government needs to take care of the areas under its own jurisdiction that it has been neglecting over the past few years.

With regard to the other sectors, the federal government needs to transfer the money and the work will get done. I am thinking, for example, of AccèsLogis and other programs in Quebec. Our ultimate goal is the same.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, Humber River—Black Creek, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am happy stand today to speak to Bill C-8 and join my many colleagues. I believe that together we are working to move our country forward and solve some of the problems we certainly have as a result of the pandemic.

I do want to acknowledge the protesters who continue to be outside blocking the streets and disrupting the lives of many people here in the city of Ottawa. It is nothing more than being obstructionist and it is putting a black mark on Canada. I was told yesterday that a plane flew across a beach in Florida applauding the truckers. Well, I think there are very few truckers out here. There are a lot of other people who are simply trying to cause problems and embarrass our country, and the sooner they leave, the sooner we all can get on to a life that we all want to live.

As I said, I am happy to speak to Bill C-8, an act to implement certain provisions of the economic and fiscal update tabled in Parliament on December 14, 2021, along with other measures that are going to help Canadians from coast to coast to coast. The bill would provide vital funding, tax credits that will aid in the fight against COVID-19, and aid in a variety of areas as we move forward.

I bring to the attention of everyone that after the American Civil War unfolded, the founders of our great country realized that we had to start giving out some additional responsibilities to the provinces; hence, education was allocated as a responsibility of the provinces, and we respect that continuously.

For the Province of Ontario in particular, approximately 80% of the funding that has been used in the pandemic to help the citizens, in particular of Ontario and across Canada, came from the federal government. It was money from the federal government that has improved the air quality throughout our schools, which should have been done a long time ago. Whether it was improving air quality or making sure that school boards had the funds for students to get an iPad and study and do online learning, even those are provincial responsibilities, I was very proud that the federal government stepped up to make sure that the provinces had the money to make a difference in those schools for the students, who are now grateful all across Canada to be back to school again.

One thing it created was responsibilities. We had to do all of that together with our provincial governments. The provincial funding has been continually cut, and one of the results of those cuts is that teachers have to pay for supplies out of their own pockets. From pencils and paper to educational programs, more and more costs have fallen on our education providers. I hear that a lot from teachers. I hear their frustration at the things that they have to do because the provinces are continually cutting the education budgets.

We all understand that budgets have to be dealt with, and none of us want to have to make cuts, whether it is the provinces, the municipalities or the federal government, but the reality is that we have to make sure Canadians have the resources they need to continue to grow and advance their businesses and their communities.

When COVID-19 began, schools across the country found themselves closed to in-person learning and classes were moved online. Many of the students in Humber River—Black Creek did not have access to the Internet and did not have iPads and computers. I am pleased to say that the money that was transferred from the federal government to the provinces was dealt with very quickly. Students throughout Humber River—Black Creek were given an iPad if they did not have one or a computer to help them so that they would not fall behind. They were already dealing with enough challenges and they needed all of the assistance that was possible.

Bill C-8 makes changes to what is called the school supplies tax credit. It amends the Income Tax Act regulations through a rate increase from 15% to 25%. It also expands the list of eligibility to include electronic devices such as webcams, microphones, headphones, speakers, laptops, desktops and tablet computers.

For the past two years, all of these things enabled thousands of children across Canada to continue their education. It was not ideal, but it was the best thing we could do to keep our children from falling behind. These changes would apply to 2021 and all years afterward, providing aid to teachers now and also in a post-COVID future.

Another way that the government is aiding our schools is the safe return to class fund. It was originally $2 billion and provided the provinces and the territories with funding to schools as they made investments to protect the students and staff. Bill C-8 would top up $100 million to support investments by schools in increasing outdoor air intake or air cleaning. It would help reduce the transmission of COVID-19 by supporting ventilation improvement projects in schools.

I will go back to when the founders of this great country allocated education as a provincial responsibility, which is respected continuously. This pandemic called for extraordinary circumstances. As a result of that funding, many of our schools are open and our children are back to school.

As a government, we have purchased and shipped over 80 million rapid tests at a cost of over $900 million. We can recall that about a year ago, many of those rapid tests were sitting on shelves and were not being used by the provinces. Provinces thought they did not need them. That certainly changed, so they ended up utilizing the thousands and thousands of rapid tests and ordering another $1.72 billion to procure and provide rapid antigen tests to the provinces and territories so they could be distributed to Canadians, which is the process, especially since there has been a growing demand from the provinces and territories for rapid tests to be provided around the holidays to prevent further outbreaks. These rapid tests are also key to the health and well-being of many vulnerable Canadians.

Over the Christmas period and in January, while we were waiting for a delivery of additional rapid tests, I cannot tell members the number of people who called my office asking if I could help them to make sure they were being tested as frequently as possible. One particular young woman who has MS was very concerned about her ability to get out to get her second vaccination and wanted access to the rapid tests. I have to say that our local hospital was very helpful to her and her family to make sure she had some rapid tests and that she and her family were going to be safe.

While rapid tests might aid us in controlling the spread of current variants of COVID and any that may come in the future, the best path forward, in spite of the people outside objecting to it, is a vaccination requirement. Those who are not vaccinated put themselves and all of us at risk of contracting COVID-19 when they enter group settings, particularly indoor ones. This is why the proof of vaccination program is important. It is so that vaccinated Canadians can move to get back to their lives under this new reality.

I walked over here to Parliament and I saw all of the signs up there outside the cars, and all the ranting and raving going on by some folks. They are putting all of us at risk. I did my best job to protect them by getting vaccinated. All we are asking is that they get vaccinated, and if they do not want to get vaccinated, then to accept the consequences of that decision.

It is important not just here in Canada but internationally, as those who need and want to travel need appropriate documentation to enter these countries. I have been talking to many people in the medical field. Many of them want to travel, but unfortunately they are not able to do that, for a variety of reasons. However, people who have both their vaccines and a booster and have done everything possible should not have to worry that when they go out onto Wellington Street they are being exposed to the variants and the possibility of getting ill in one form or another. Proof of vaccination programs and their credentials have played a major part in allowing our businesses to reopen.

I am very thankful for the opportunity to make my comments this morning. Stay well and stay safe.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for mentioning the protest outside. I think it is important for all members to condemn the fascist and anti-Semitic symbols displayed by some. I hope the member will support the NDP's push to ban hate symbols.

I would like to talk about some pieces of the bill and the many essential measures that are not included in the bill.

There are so many seniors who are struggling after months of uncertainty around the GIS clawback. The government proposed a one-time payment solution, but this promised compensation would not be made available until May. Last week, my colleague for North Island—Powell River shared the tragic fact that this delay resulted in the unnecessary death of a senior in her riding who could not afford their medication, and it is having other devastating impacts. I spoke on the phone to a senior in my riding who was in a motel room. He had recently lost his housing because he could not afford rent without the GIS. He was using the last of his money to keep a roof over his head, living temporarily in a motel, and he was distraught about the idea that he would soon be on the street.

Will the member commit to calling on her own government to provide an emergency payment now—not in May, not in another four months—to keep seniors off the streets and to save lives?

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, Humber River—Black Creek, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for asking that question and continuing to work with us to make a difference in the lives of many people.

When we were able to give seniors throughout the country approximately $1,500 in these last two years as extra money to help them get through the difficulties, it was a huge help to many of the seniors I know in my riding of Humber River—Black Creek and across the country.

We are working on the issue that the member has mentioned. We understand that there have been some challenges and we are looking to try to remedy that situation as soon as possible.

[Eric Melillo, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from the government side for her comments today and for contributing to the debate.

When it comes Bill C-8, one of the topics that I do not think was addressed well enough is housing. We know that it is an important issue that is impacting people from many regions of the country at different income levels and from different walks of life. It seems that the government has put forward a lot of plans that would help to subsidize demand and actually further drive a wedge between the supply and demand sides of housing and widen the gap.

I wonder if the member can elaborate on what this government plans to do to increase the housing supply in Canada.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, Humber River—Black Creek, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am happy to comment.

The housing issue, of course, is important to all of us, and I am very proud of the work that our government has done. With our Minister of Housing, we have committed billions of dollars, and we have seen it on the streets of Toronto. Over 700 more housing units have been created through the accelerated housing program, and we are working on the issue of rent-to-own and a variety of other programs to ensure that affordable housing is created.

We understand that it is a problem throughout the country. The Minister of Housing is working full time to make sure that all of this is accelerated and is working with our municipalities, mayors and councillors to attempt to reduce red tape so that we all understand the need that is out there for affordable housing.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague, who chairs the committee I sit on. We will see each other there a little later. I am happy to work with her and to be able to talk to her in the House now as well.

My colleague was saying earlier that government transfers made it possible to buy iPads for students. I would like to ask the member what the point of buying iPads is if high-speed Internet is not yet available in all of the regions. It took a pandemic for the government to realize that this is an essential service.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, Humber River—Black Creek, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question. He is a great member of our committee, and I very much enjoy working with him.

Yes, getting the Internet broadband situation solved in this country is a huge challenge. We recognize that there are still areas that have very poor Internet quality or next to no Internet whatsoever. It has been and continues to be a major commitment of our government to ensure that we have high-speed Internet available to all Canadians, no matter where they live.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity in my first speech of the 44th Parliament to congratulate my Conservative colleague, the hon. member for Portage—Lisgar, on her recent election to be our party's interim leader. I look forward to working with her and with all of my Conservative colleagues in the days, weeks and months ahead as we hold the government to account while growing our party stronger.

I would also like to take a moment to provide my sincere thanks to the former Conservative leader, the hon. member for Durham. I want to thank him and his family for their dedication and efforts in helping guide our party over the past 18 months.

While the leadership of the Conservative Party has undergone change over the past week, I am disappointed to report that the Liberal government leadership in Ottawa remains the same: missing in action, as thousands of protesters from the “freedom convoy” have camped in the nation's capital and blockaded downtown Ottawa for over a week now. What is the government's solution to this impasse outside the walls of this place? We still wait to hear of one. In fact, he is so committed to resolving the issue, the Prime Minister was required to take a personal day off yesterday. Instead of ignoring the situation at hand, where is the leadership required to bring about an expeditious resolution so the citizens of Ottawa can go about their normal lives? More than two years into the pandemic, this is what Canadians simply want: a return to their normal lives.

Let me be extremely clear. There is no question that vaccines are critically important in our fight against COVID and to help us get there. Canada's Conservatives have consistently taken this position throughout the pandemic. We have also encouraged all Canadians who are willing to get their shots. I am fully vaccinated, and I encourage everyone who can to get vaccinated as well. It is the best tool we have, but it is not the only tool. Leadership is about bringing Canadians together. It is about providing the assistance required so we can get to the recovery everyone wants so badly.

Since the early days of this pandemic, Canada's Conservatives have been strong proponents of both vaccines and rapid testing. While vaccines are now widely available, the unfortunate reality is that rapid testing devices are still rare to find and expensive to buy. The government will say Bill C-8 addresses this question specifically by allocating funds directly to this, but why has it taken two years? The increased use of rapid testing will offer early detection of COVID to help limit its spread, and it would also be an important health care tool to let vaccine-hesitant and unvaccinated Canadians carry on with their lives responsibly.

Speaking of those who are hesitant, I receive calls and emails every day asking why there is a delay in the approval of a traditional vaccine from Novavax. Many Canadians have said they are prepared to get vaccinated, but would prefer the protein-based vaccine as opposed to an mRNA vaccine, and that is their rightful choice. Over a year ago, the federal government purchased 52 million doses of Novavax. However, it has still not been approved by Health Canada. Meanwhile, the status of the $126-million Novavax plant production in Montreal remains in question. It disappoints me greatly that the Prime Minister and his Liberal government are delaying access to critical health care tools that can give all Canadians a greater freedom of choice, especially as it pertains to managing their personal health care and family well-being.

In fact, where are the additional resources the provinces have been asking for in terms of federal health transfers to address the issue of a lack of health care surge capacity? The provinces have been asking for over two years and now, and instead, today we are debating Bill C-8, an additional $70 billion in spending that does not tackle this question head-on. We are now two years into this pandemic and it is all too clear that the Liberal government has failed to ensure we have the tools necessary to not only respond to, but, more importantly, live with COVID so Canadians and the people of Niagara can get on with their lives.

Another federal failure in the pandemic response has been excessive government spending. Since the start of this pandemic, the federal government has brought in $176 billion in new spending that is unrelated to COVID-19. Overall, the national debt has now reached an astounding $1.2 trillion. The cost of government is ballooning the cost of living. More dollars are chasing fewer goods and that means higher prices. Spending more costs more. That is the inflation tax.

We are seeing that inflation tax in everything essential to Canadians, from food to fuel to housing. For example, the price of food is skyrocketing. The average family will pay nearly $1,000 extra on groceries in 2022. Rent is up 5%, chicken is up 6.2%, beef is up 11.9% and bacon is up 19.1%. The same price increases are being felt by Canadians on fuel. Gas prices have soared by 33%. This weekend alone, I saw one gas station in Niagara selling gas at $1.56 a litre. Natural gas prices have also shot up, by 19%.

Perhaps the worst has been seen in Canada's housing market. When the Prime Minister took power, the typical house cost $435,000. Now it costs $810,000. That is over 85% inflation in just six years. Last year, home inflation hit 25%, which The Canadian Real Estate Association's chief economist called the biggest gain of all time.

It has been two long and difficult years, and some say it still feels like March 2020, when the countrywide lockdowns first started. All Canadians deserve a federal government that is here to serve and protect its citizens and our nation's best interests. That means it does not matter what their political party is, where they live in the country, what faith they follow or what their vaccine status is. All Canadians deserve so much better from their federal government than what we are getting now.

From the very beginning of COVID, the Liberal government was grossly unprepared for the pandemic, just as it is grossly unprepared to deal with the consequences and ramifications of its own vaccine policies that it is mandating on Canadians when alternative solutions and options exist. I mentioned this earlier: The duty of government and of everyone here is to work so that we can bring people together to find solutions in the best interests of all. Instead, we have a government in place that revels in wedge-issue politics, and the division that it brings has now manifested in the anger and frustrations we are witnessing today in Ottawa and across the country.

What we see happening outside the walls of this place today is a problem that can be directly linked back to the Liberal government's unpreparedness for the pandemic in the first place. Whether it was expired PPE stored in warehouses when the pandemic first hit, or the federal government deciding to ship good, usable PPE to China when our frontline health care workers desperately needed it here, or when we found out that the Liberal government decided to abandon the Global Public Health Intelligence Network just months before the pandemic hit, or the fact that many of our hospitals were already facing severe capacity limits before the first cases of coronavirus arrived or when the Liberal government decided to prorogue Parliament in the middle of a pandemic, all of the colossal failures add up to the frustrations Canadians are feeling today.

The weight of responsibility for this pandemic and Canada's response to it is on the federal government's shoulders. Vaccines and rapid tests should have been fully accessible by now to all Canadians. Our economy should be open and recovered from this pandemic by now. The provinces should have had additional resources to tackle the surge in capacity COVID brought. Workers should be back to work to help alleviate the severe labour shortages we are experiencing and to help strengthen our supply chains.

For two years, Canadians have done their part. Why has the government not done its part?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I disagree with much of what the member said. As a country, we have done exceptionally well in working with Canadians and other stakeholders to ensure that we had the vaccines that were necessary and had PPE. We have ensured that ultimately Canada is in a great position to recover and do better, and it is as a result of the actions from the government in working with other people. The member is so wrong on many accounts.

Within Bill C-8, there is an allotment of $1.7 billion to provide continuing support for rapid testing. Let us keep in mind that there was no backlog of demand for rapid testing at the end of the year. This government has met its expectations and in fact has exceeded the number that was required by the end of last year, yet the member is still convinced that the Conservatives need to go against this bill. Why would he vote against a bill that would help hundreds of his constituents?

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his faux righteous indignation, which shows up on the Liberal side.

It has been two years now. Why is the government continuing the process of playing catch-up? Last February it took four months. Why is the government four months behind in the acquisition of vaccines? I had to call and write in to ask why the CBSA agents and border workers were unable to get vaccinated when other people were. The government has been far from quick on this.

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

We already won the election over that one.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Oh, yes. Again, it is more righteous indignation—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

Order. There is no cross-debate.

The hon. member for Laurentides—Labelle.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Madam Speaker, what we are seeing is exactly what has been happening for months. We hear about divisions and bickering when they cannot seem to agree on vaccines and science within their own party.

Sometimes they say that it is good to demonstrate, and other times they say it is illegal to stay in one place. Sometimes they say that vaccines are good, and other times they say that science proves otherwise.

My colleague talks about the government being divisive and lacking direction, but I would like him to explain his own party's position.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Madam Speaker, the member is correct in mentioning the issue of divisiveness. The Liberal government revels in the whole notion of wedge issues to create division, to turn Canadians against one another.

I do not know about the members opposite, but I think we are all here because we want to help people, not because we want to turn the majority against the minority. Our job as representatives is to work together to find solutions that bridge those differences and find accommodations for those who do not want to be vaccinated. We should not be seeing what we are seeing on the streets of Ottawa. The government has brought it about. It is the manifestation of its own wedge-issue politics, and it should be ashamed of that.

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

Madam Speaker, I am going to read a quote from February 13, 2020, from the member for Carleton. On the protesting of indigenous land defenders, he said, “These blockaders are taking away the freedom of other people to move their goods and themselves. That is wrong and the government has laws and tools in place to combat it.”

Right now we are seeing an occupation in a Canadian city, and the member for Carleton, and the Conservative caucus primarily, are standing with the occupiers. We are seeing horrible acts.

If this is the way protests are going to take place and the Conservatives want to govern in this country, how do they expect to govern if they are supporting occupations and protests done in a new way like this? Maybe the member could explain.

[Tony Baldinelli, Conservative, Niagara Falls, ON]

Madam Speaker, I will comment on the member's question by repeating that what we see on the streets of Ottawa today is a manifestation of the divisive nature of the government's politics. It is reaping what it has created by running on wedge issues. It is turning Canadians against each other.

We all believe in the right to peaceful protest. Where was the government this weekend? The Prime Minister decided to take a personal day off instead of working to resolve this issue. Canadians deserve better. We need to get back to work. We need to be working for Canadians.

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

Madam Speaker, I am rising to speak on Bill C-8 with some sadness. Yes, there are some minor provisions in it that we support. However, what this represents is a real disconnect between the Liberal government and what is actually happening across the country. The fallout from COVID has been enormous, but it is not just from COVID. A series of policies put in place by the former Harper government and by the current government have all led to the same thing: massive levels of inequality, more poverty and misery, and more difficulties for Canadians.

Bill C-8 does not mention this, but it should: the appalling withdrawal of CRB benefits with just a few hours' notice when it took place a few months ago. There were 800,000 Canadian families who were depending on those benefits to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. The government crudely and irresponsibly ripped that safety net away from nearly a million Canadian families with a scant few hours' notice. It is unbelievable that any government would act this way, but the government does not seem to understand the impacts of its many policies that promote inequality and what that has done to Canadians over the last few years.

As I have mentioned in the House before, my wife, Limei, and I grow vegetables for local food banks in Burnaby and New Westminster out on Barnston Island. It has very fertile land and we basically use space that is rented by Chuck Puchmayr, a local municipal councillor. It is about 40 hectares of land. We are able to grow squash, tomatoes and a wide variety of vegetables. We then contribute to the food banks. We have been doing this for many years, and for many years we have seen, tragically, a maintaining of the long food bank lineups. Canadians of all backgrounds, seniors, people with disabilities and students, all have to go to a food bank to make ends meet.

In the last two years, we have seen a sharp increase in the number of Canadians, the number of British Columbians and the number of people in New Westminster—Burnaby who have had to go to food banks to make ends meet. We have seen in sharp relief how the massive level of inequality in this country and the devastation left by COVID has created more difficulties for Canadians. What we need to recommit to in the House of Commons is responding to what Canadians are feeling across the length and breadth of this country. Food bank lineups are growing. When the number of homeless are growing, there should be a compelling argument for the government to act to respond to those needs.

The government has an ability to act. We saw that at the beginning of COVID, on March 13, 2020, when the House leaders, and I was one of them, marched out into that corridor and announced that we would be suspending Parliament because of the incredible increase of cases across the country in this pandemic. We called at that time for the government to take immediate action to help Canadians. It acted promptly. Within 96 hours, four days, it took the initiative, without the support of the NDP, to immediately prop up Canada's big banks and their profits. They were given $750 billion in liquidity supports.

I want to say that figure again because it is so incredibly large it is unbelievable. There was $750 billion made available to the banking sector to make sure their profits were maintained, with no conditions. They did not have to do anything for that massive amount of liquidity support, including from CMHC, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which is supposed to be providing supports for Canadians to get housing. There were no conditions at all. They just threw the money at the banking sector so that they could maintain their profits. They got that in four days.

Therefore, the NDP got to work because the government really did not seem to have any direction at all. The leader of the NDP from Burnaby South and the entire NDP caucus leveraged our position in this minority Parliament to force the CERB at $2,000 a week, to put in place a student CERB and to put in place supports for seniors and people with disabilities. We made sure we pushed for paid sick leave for Canadians. This was absolutely fundamentally important.

The government's priority was to prop up banking profits. Fortunately, because it was a minority Parliament, we were able to force the Liberals to actually start thinking about people. There was $750 billion in liquidity support for Canada's big banks and a reluctance to do things for real people, except when they were forced to do so in a minority Parliament.

This is something that is clear to Canadians when they look at what the government has done since the increase in inequality and the massive propping up of the banking sector we saw under the former Harper government. The Harper government was criticized for $116 billion in bank supports and we are now at $750 billion.

The Harper government was criticized quite justifiably for the massive tax loopholes we have seen to overseas tax havens. In fact, Conservatives and Liberals agree on that. There is no limit when it comes to making sure the ultrarich can take their money offshore. Both parties have participated in this feeding frenzy to give as much as they can to the ultrarich. We are now looking at $25 billion a year. That is $50 billion since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. There was a quarter of a trillion dollars over the course of the last decade under the Conservatives and Liberals that the ultrarich were able to take offshore.

Imagine if we were looking at a Bill C-8 that actually responded to Canadians' needs, if we actually stopped those massive tax loopholes for the ultrarich and reinvested that money in housing, supports for seniors, post-secondary education and expanding our health care sector. When Tommy Douglas forced the government of the day to put in place universal medicare, it was always with the idea to move from there to public universal pharmacare, to put in place dental care and to make sure, as the member for Burnaby South says so eloquently, that we have health care from the tops of our heads to the soles of our feet.

If we just stopped for a moment that hemorrhaging of $25 billion a year to offshore tax havens, imagine the kinds of investments we could make in public universal pharmacare and dental care. We could actually make a difference in people's lives, Canadians who are struggling with record levels of inequality.

The inequality is getting worse. The top 1% of Canadians now have a quarter of the pie. Nearly 50% of Canadians, and that includes indigenous peoples and marginalized Canadians across this country, are within $200 of insolvency in the course of any month and have no share of the pie at all.

Look at the picture these policies have created. We see this in Bill C-8, where there are minor things done, which we support but that do not tackle the fundamental issues we are seeing in inequality in this country. Imagine a Bill C-8 that actually started to reinvest in Canadians, in the right to housing and in public universal pharmacare. Imagine a Bill C-8 that made the investments that are so important so that Canadians could see their standard of living improve. We would no longer have a country where half of Canadians are excluded from any share of prosperity or any share of the economic pie and where 1% of Canadians, the ultrarich, not only have access to a tax system that allows them to not pay taxes but also to hog a quarter of the wealth in this country.

We believe in this change and that is why we fight in this Parliament.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, within the legislation there is a significant allotment of $1.5 billion for rapid testing. I want to pick up on this point because it really highlights the importance of the national government working with provincial governments with respect to the federal government acquiring rapid tests. We had a stockpile of them, even up to the end of last year, with an additional 130 million purchases in the month of January alone, that were distributed to the provinces and territories, but it is the provinces and territories that actually do the distribution.

I wonder if my colleague can provide his thoughts on the important role both jurisdictions play in ensuring that Canadians and small businesses have access to rapid testing.

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

Madam Speaker, I think my colleague missed the point of my speech. There are measures in Bill C-8 that we support. Of course we support the provision for rapid testing. That was not the point of the speech I just made and I wish he would have listened a little more attentively.

When we have a situation where half of Canada is excluded from any share of the wealth of the country, where $25 billion a year in taxpayer money is sent to overseas tax havens, where the banking sector and pharmaceutical lobbyists are a higher priority than regular Canadians, where food bank lineups are growing day by day and where more and more Canadians are homeless, that is not a tenable situation. We cannot go back to business as usual. We need a government that actually puts in place the measures that will help Canadians from coast to coast to coast.

[Eric Melillo, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for New Westminster—Burnaby for his comments today. I always appreciate the thoughtfulness he brings to the discussion in this chamber.

He rightfully pointed out how expensive life is getting for Canadians and how inflation is continuing to rise at record rates. It is concerning for us on this side of the House and I think for everyone in this chamber. One of the solutions that the Conservatives have put forward is to have the government spend smarter, spend more efficiently, control its spending and get to a position where we stop printing money, which we know is driving up inflation. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has confirmed that.

However, it seems, from what I hear from that member and from many in the NDP, that if they had their say they would spend even more. I wonder if the member would agree it is time for the government to control its spending so that we can get the cost of living crisis under control.

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

Madam Speaker, I would point out that I have been in the House now for a number of years and saw how the Harper government treated financial management. Conservative financial management is an oxymoron. What the Conservatives did over time was not only give $116 billion to the banking sector and run record deficits, but they created the condition, which shamefully the Liberals have continued, of massive handouts to overseas tax havens of $25 billion each and every year. That is money that seniors, students, families and a whole range of Canadians would benefit from. That $25 billion a year carves a massive fiscal hole, so we take no lessons from the Conservatives. Their financial management was appallingly bad.

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

Madam Speaker, I would like my colleague to talk a bit about my Liberal friends' optimism. I have been here for the past few days as we have debated Bill C-8 and the government's record, and the Liberals continue to rise to say how good things are, how great the government is and that things are fantastic.

Let us look at a few facts. The nation's capital is completely paralyzed right now, and we do not know when the government will take action. In Quebec, because Service Canada is so bogged down, 90,000 households have been waiting for months for the EI cheques they are owed and that they need to pay their rent and buy food. We are the worst G7 country in the fight against climate change. Canada needs an additional 1.8 million homes to achieve the G7 average. Quebec's health care system is on the brink of imploding because of 30 years of underfunding by federal governments of all stripes.

Even so, my Liberal friends are having fun and saying that all is well. Could my colleague comment on that?

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

Madam Speaker, it is true, they are jovial. The Liberals must be completely out of touch with what is happening to Canadians given their response.

The reality is that they have cut benefits that 800,000 Canadians needed to survive. They made the cuts with only 72 hours' notice. In my opinion, that shows that they are completely out of touch with reality, which is extremely sad and irresponsible.

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

Madam Speaker, I want to address Bill C-8. I want to make sure it is clear that I will be voting for it, but I find it inadequate. In that, my views are shared by the hon. member for Kitchener Centre. I want to reflect on the excellent points in his speech, especially related to the housing tax.

We had a speech given by our Deputy Prime Minister and finance minister on December 14. We are now debating it on February 7. Things change very rapidly right now.

As I think back to December 14, when the Deputy Prime Minister gave the speech, we would not have believed that we would be dealing with such a strain on our health care system, that the omicron virus would be so very transmissible, that so many people would be getting sick and that we would have the country, or at least the national capital, in a state of occupation with nerves frayed.

As an opening comment to my friends on all sides of the House, we need to do whatever we can as parliamentarians to display a non-partisan spirit of care and love for each other as neighbours and as Canadians. I have always felt that a hallmark of a Canadian debate is that we can agree to disagree without being disagreeable.

We are at real risk here. I never would have imagined in a million years that I would read, as I did on Twitter today, that there were such people as protesters in the nation's capital who thought it was a good idea to start a fire in the lobby of an apartment building. We really need to find ways to reach out, even to those people who are part of the convoy and who think they are in a glorious moment of grassroots democracy, to say please respect each other. Please be careful. Please go home.

As for Bill C-8, for those who have not studied it and for those who might be watching on CPAC or at home, the elements of it are all understandable, particularly with a lens on December 14, when there was a sense that perhaps we were coming out of the pandemic.

There is not nearly enough economic relief here for Canadians who are now not coming out of the pandemic as we felt we might be. The cutting of the benefit from $500 a month to $300 is completely unacceptable, and we know we need to see that improved. I certainly hope the government ministers recognize that this needs to change.

Yes, it is a good thing to see $1.72 billion for rapid testing. I agree with many of my opposition colleagues who have asked why it took so long. Why did we not have more focus on testing earlier?

I experienced what it was like to have daily rapid testing when I was on the Canadian government delegation to the climate negotiations in Glasgow at COP26. It was really interesting to know that the National Health Service in the U.K. could manage to test 35,000 people every single day. We tested ourselves and sent in the results, and then those results had to be double-checked. It did keep COP26 from being a super spreader event. They worked hard.

I think we need to look at testing, and I am glad to see this money is in the budget. I spent many months trying to prepare for people going back to school in the fall of 2020. I worked extensively with people in the office of the minister of finance and deputy prime minister, and attempted to reach all the ministers of education across the country, with a simple idea that the spaces that had been shut down because people were not allowed to congregate, such as community centres and empty buildings of all kinds, including hotels and convention centres, could be put to use as schools with greater distancing for children and better ventilation.

Of course, as ever, the barriers here were the provincial jurisdiction over education and the federal government having the role of providing money once the provinces asked for it. In that spirit, I think we are really late in getting around to ventilation in schools.

I do not uniquely blame the federal government for how long it has taken, because I know the barriers lie in provincial governments not asking. If a provincial government says, “Please, we need money to ventilate our schools better”, I am glad to see that the federal government, and we as parliamentarians, will approve that and write a cheque. This should have happened before our children and teachers, and in my case, my daughter is a teacher, all went into spaces that could have been made safer more than a year ago. It will take some time to use this money to better ventilate schools, but I am glad it is finally happening.

The measures here are good measures. At 1%, the so-called underused housing tax, or what could have been better described as a speculative investor housing tax, is a very small step in the right direction. We have seen the housing market skewed on the Lower Mainland of the province of British Columbia, as well as on Vancouver Island and throughout the province. Now, because COVID has led people to realize they can work from home and that they can buy a home anywhere, we have seen a real distortion, but a lot of that distortion has been from people buying houses for investments.

For Airbnbs and foreigners who keep houses empty, a 1% tax is good, but as the hon. member for Kitchener Centre said in his speech, it is like someone waiting for the fire department to show up when their house is on fire, and the firefighters coming with one bucket. This is not going to do the job. It will be a good first step. Perhaps we will learn from it and extend it to be a more meaningful tax to keep people from speculating in the housing market. Houses should be homes first, and not investments for those who do not plan to live in those houses.

There is much more I could say about what is in the bill. I want to talk about some of the things that are not there. We need, of course, more support on the EI front. There are EI changes in the bill, but we need more. We need more support for individuals who are falling between the cracks, but we also need to talk about what the real threat is globally of different, mutating forms of COVID-19. We know, and we have heard many members on all sides of the House say, that until everyone on the planet is vaccinated and until vaccine equity takes place between the industrialized world and the developing world, we will not be through it. It is now basically a giant petri dish of humanity, with the virus being more in charge than humans. We need to make sure that developing countries' citizens get access to vaccines.

Here we are. I am double vaxxed and I have had a booster, and millions of people around the world have not had a first shot. We need to get big pharma out of the way. To do that, Canada needs to side with India and South Africa at the World Trade Organization and support a waiver under the trade-related intellectual property regime, such that developing countries can manufacture their own vaccines without patent protection for the larger pharmaceutical companies.

I will note these larger pharmaceutical companies received millions of dollars from governments around the world to speed up the development of vaccines for COVID-19. I do not think they deserve any patent protection or profits out of this. I think some of the anti-vax protests that we see would be much reduced if the additional argument, which is really a logical fallacy, that just because big pharma is a terrible group and collectively represents a global version of organized crime, people are angry at vaccinations. We can be saying both that big pharma does not deserve a profit out of this, and that vaccinations are essential for public health.

In any case, I would have liked to see in this bill a commitment to move forward to get vaccinations to the developing world. I also look at this bill in the context of the Deputy Prime Minister and finance minister's speech back on December 14. She noted that the province of British Columbia had been walloped over and over again. We had a heat dome that killed 600 British Columbians in four days. We had an extremely stressful summer of emergency evacuations and stretched wildfire response to thousands of fires across the province. Just before the fiscal update was delivered, we had the loss of billions of dollars of infrastructure, as well as lost lives and devastating impacts, in Abbotsford and all up the Fraser Valley. We heard, and still hear, the Prime Minister's voice saying “We are with Lytton,” and that we would help them rebuild.

In point of fact, nothing has happened to help rebuild Lytton. There is not a new housing permit out there. We have a lot of backlog to make up for from climate impacts that have already occurred, yet as I speak today on February 7, Canada's commitment to hold to a target of 1.5° Celsius, which we committed to in the climate negotiations in Paris, remains unfulfilled. Even our promises will not get us there, much less our weak delivery.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, the member referred to the importance of one aspect of the bill that I think many Canadians are interested in, and that is the 1% tax on non-residents and non-Canadians where there are vacancies. We recognize that across the country we need to deal more with the housing issue. We have the rapid housing initiative and the housing strategy, and are working with the provinces.

Would the member not agree that dealing with the housing crisis Canada is facing is going to take more than just the federal government? I am looking at municipalities and provinces and their investments. I ask the member to provide her thoughts on that perspective.

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

Madam Speaker, I totally agree with the hon. parliamentary secretary. Multiple levels of government, and multiple orders of government, are involved in this moment. There was a period of time when the federal government took a hands-off approach to housing. I welcome the fact that CMHC has made a commitment on housing being a right, and that Canadians should have affordable housing.

There is more that the federal government could do. We used to have special tax treatment to encourage developers to build purpose-built rental housing. We have some of those programs now, but they are highly specialized. They increasingly say that they can build a property, but a small fraction has to stay below market. We need below-market pricing for rents. We have a huge problem with vacancy levels for people to rent decent homes. We also have, as we know, unaffordable-to-buy homes, but we need to look at smart development in our urban areas and in our communities, look at info, and find ways to promote smart housing, particularly co-operatives.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague because I obviously agree with most of what she said.

However, I would like her to rely on all her wisdom and experience to explain why Quebec, the provinces, organizations representing health care workers, and the public have been unanimously calling for immediate health transfers for months.

The government will say that it gave billions of dollars to fight the pandemic. That does not change anything. I would like my colleague to explain what the Prime Minister is waiting for. When will he increase transfers? The situation is urgent.

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

Madam Speaker, I completely agree, but I do not know what the Prime Minister is waiting for.

I think that, as always, the provinces and the federal government need to work collaboratively. There has always been conflict between the federal government in Ottawa and the governments in Quebec City and Toronto. We need to work together to protect our universal health care system.

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

Madam Speaker, I always enjoy hearing the thoughtful remarks of the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

I want to let her pick up on where she left off on the cost of inaction on climate change. We lived with the effects of climate change in this past year. We are seeing immense costs.

Could she comment further on the ambition that the government has to show not only to fight climate change, but to adapt to it? We are stuck with it for the rest of our lives.

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

Madam Speaker, the hon. member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay is one of the more thoughtful and scientifically literate people in this place. I am grateful he is here.

We have a very brief amount of time to ensure that the climate impacts we experience are survivable. I do not think we talk enough in this place about worst-case scenarios. We assume a rosy future in which we adjust and adapt to bad weather. That is not what we are facing. We are facing an existential threat to human civilization and it requires courage, which is what the government lacks.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Madam Speaker, today I am pleased to speak to Bill C-8, the federal government's fiscal update from this past fall. This gives me an important opportunity to share some of the feedback I have received from constituents over the holiday break. These constituents are really struggling right now because of the policies of the Liberal government and our current economic situation.

Over the holiday break, I had an opportunity to speak with some seniors in my riding about the challenges they are facing. One senior couple I spoke with had a heartbreaking story that I want to share with the House today.

These constituents of mine suffer from disabilities and are in their sixties. During the early days of the pandemic, as their disabilities prevent them from working, they utilized the Canada emergency response benefit. They were told by representatives of the government that applying for these benefits would have no impact on their pensions. While this is technically correct, many Canadians mistakenly understand their guaranteed income supplement or old age security benefits to be pension benefits when, in fact, they are not part of the pension plan. Due to this misunderstanding, these constituents applied for the CERB, which they needed early in the pandemic.

Now, these elderly folks have no savings. They do not own their own home, and they do not have workplace pension plans. They rely solely on their Canada pension plan, OAS and GIS payments. However, in July 2021, their world was turned upside down when they learned that the roughly $8,000 they had received from the CERB made them ineligible to receive GIS payments.

This massive hit to their bottom line means that they need to access payday lenders and food banks just to survive. These folks told me over the phone, almost crying, that the only food they had eaten in weeks was bread because the food bank is so short on food that the only food they have in supply is the leftover bread sent from the grocery store. These folks cannot survive on bread alone.

I understand that, on December 17, the government announced there would be a one-time payment for those who had their GIS clawed back in July 2021. According to the government's own figures, over 183,000 people had their GIS benefits cut. These are vulnerable seniors living with the lowest possible incomes, and this Liberal government cut their benefits out from under them. It is shameful.

It is especially shameful because so many of these seniors were misled that their pensions would not be affected by taking CERB. As I said, many Canadians think of their GIS and OAS as their pensions. Sadly, for these constituents, since they do not own a home and do not have any income apart from government transfers, they have not been able to access support from the traditional banks with competitive lending rates.

Now, these payday loan firms have rates that are up to 700% or higher than what one would get at a traditional bank. One figure had an annualized percentage interest rate of over 500%. These folks are being dug into a hole so deep that they will never be able to recover. They are being pushed into a position of extreme poverty because this government has given them no option. It is absolutely shameful.

I recognize that the government has said that it is going to do something about this, but with every passing day, folks like these constituents are being buried in a deeper hole of debt. They need the restoration of their GIS benefits immediately. They require financial support now to recover what they lost so that they can begin repaying their debts and getting their lives back on track. What is the Liberal government waiting for?

Today, we are amending acts to provide ventilation in schools, business tax credits for teachers to spend more on school supplies and a bigger tax credit for northern residents. Now, all of this is important, but what could be more important than ensuring that vulnerable seniors are not left in crippling poverty, with only bread from the food bank and their electricity and heat providers preparing to cut them?

I am told these seniors will not receive the Liberal government's announced support until May, yet these folks on fixed income are paying over 500% interest rates on an annualized basis on payday loans, just to heat their homes. The fact that the government is not taking swifter action on this is shameful.

There are other challenges facing disabled people. I have a constituent whose door I have knocked on many times. His name is Fred Glaubitz. Fred lost both his legs in an accident. He lives in rural Alberta. I have knocked on his door many times, and he always has such specific questions and very good insights on issues that are not really talked about.

Fred's particular situation is that he drives a diesel van with modifications because of his disability. In Canada, people who drive a gasoline-powered vehicle with somebody who has a permanent mobility disability can get a rebate on the excise taxes they pay on gasoline. However, people who drive a diesel-fuelled vehicle do not get any rebate on their excise taxes. Fred is not being treated fairly by the government, and this needs to change.

Disabled people with permanent mobility impairments who live in rural areas often drive diesel vehicles. There is inequity, not only for disabled people, but also for rural Canadians who need to be able to access this critical rebate. They cannot walk to the store. They need to drive. They are burning more fuel just to survive every day, yet people who drive a diesel vehicle are being left behind. It is time to allow this exemption for folks who drive diesel vehicles. I thank Fred for bringing this to my attention.

Talking further about the cost of fuel, Canadians are being driven into energy poverty by the Liberal government. Folks in my riding, for the past two months, have been sending me their home heating and electricity bills. Compared to last year with similar weather, they are paying over double what they paid last year.

Over the break, I spoke with Troy, a constituent of mine who runs a small automotive business. It has been a real struggle these past two years with COVID-19, and I think everyone in this House will agree. However, when Troy told me about his heating and electricity bill, I was shocked to say the least.

Since the phase-out of the coal-fired power plants in much of Alberta, our electricity grid has come to overwhelmingly rely on natural gas for electricity and home heating. Before the pandemic, the world had a glut of natural gas. The stuff is so abundant in Alberta, it was dirt cheap. When the Liberals applied the carbon tax, the cost of natural gas was so cheap that often times the carbon tax would cost more than the natural gas itself.

One of my colleagues actually shared with me a copy of the bill from a small seniors home in his community. Its heating bill last month was $5,000, and the carbon tax was $1,200 of that $5,000. These seniors cannot afford this carbon tax. Now, the price of electricity and home heating in Alberta and across Canada has skyrocketed because of out-of-control inflation, a constrained natural gas supply due to more stringent environmental and investing requirements, and a rising carbon tax. Folks are paying more than double what they were paying at the beginning of this pandemic. They are paying more for the gas and more in taxes to the federal government.

Small business owners are going through a rough time, even with signs of an economic recovery. The cost of labour is skyrocketing. Business owners cannot get key parts because of a broken supply chain, and the cost of any parts they can get is rising pretty fast. These people built businesses and are watching them go bankrupt before their eyes. Where is the federal government? Why are the Liberals not talking about tax relief for families and business owners who are beginning to experience what a world of energy poverty looks like that? Why are we not looking for ways to cool off inflation or address the supply chain crisis that is impacting all sectors of our economy?

When the Liberals talk, they claim that all is well, but they need to come to visit the people outside the halls of Parliament who are struggling every day: families and small business owners. All is not well in our country, and it is time for the government to stop being missing in action and to deliver what Canadians desperately need.

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

Madam Speaker, I listened to the entire speech, but I will focus on the last couple of words. It is a far stretch to make the claim that the Liberal government has been missing in action.

Over the last two years, the Liberal government has rolled out supports to Canadians during this pandemic, making sure they had the resources they have needed in order to get through it. Will there be more work to do? Did the member identify some areas where people perhaps may have been missed? Absolutely, and I applaud him for bringing forward those stories from his constituents.

However, to suggest that by and large the Liberal government has been missing in action is quite simply false. The government has done a lot more than the Conservatives ever wanted us to do, in terms of helping Canadians through this pandemic.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Madam Speaker, that was a typical Liberal answer, that the government has done so much for Canadians.

That is cold comfort to the over 183,000 seniors who had their GIS benefits cut out from under them by the Liberal government. This is not just some crack that a few people fell into. There are 183,000 seniors living on bread and whose home heating is being cut off—

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

I was talking about—

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Madam Speaker, they cannot survive, and the Liberal government is ignoring them.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

I do want to remind the hon. parliamentary secretary that he had an opportunity to ask a question. If he has another one, or another comment, he should wait for the appropriate time.

The hon. member for Saint‑Hyacinthe—Bagot.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his speech.

I would also like to ask him a very simple question. If he and his colleagues care so much about the needs of SMEs and other businesses, why did they oppose the assistance program just before the holidays?

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Madam Speaker, we do not want to see the country undergo any more lockdowns. That is key. We want businesses to be open. We want them to be safely serving their customers.

We know that a thriving SME sector is key to a thriving Canada. Conservatives will always have the back of small businesses and entrepreneurs across this country.

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

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Sturgeon River—Parkland for actually talking about a really important issue. We have seniors who are on GIS and whose money is getting clawed back right now and a promise from the government that the government does not want to talk about.

This clawback affects seniors, the most impoverished seniors, those who are in a housing crisis and who have not gotten a pharmacare plan, which the government promised. For single women over 65, 30% are living in poverty. The government's promise is for a one-time payment in May. We are in the middle of winter.

How does my colleague think many of his constituents who are being affected by the clawback are going to get by until May? Why does he think the government is not addressing this really critical question or acting in a timely fashion?

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Madam Speaker, the NDP has been raising this issue in the House, and I have been raising this issue for over a year.

There were unscrupulous firms out there claiming they would help people apply for their CERB benefits, even in many cases when people did not truly qualify. When I brought this to the attention of a member of the Liberal government, their response was that it was not illegal. These Canadians are having their money clawed back, and the Liberal government is turning a deaf ear to them.

We need the Liberal government to take action now. As my colleague has said, families cannot wait until May. These payday loans are so large that even with this one-time payment, even with increased payments going forward for the next however many years, they will not be able to dig themselves out of this hole of debt the Liberal government has helped to create.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to take part in a debate in the House. I have been asked to give my opinion on the economic and fiscal update. I do not claim to be able to do it as well as my colleague from Joliette did last week, but there are still several elements I would like to address.

First, no one will be surprised to hear that the Bloc Québécois more or less supports this bill. My colleagues who spoke before me said that it contains good measures. We agree on that.

However, the text of the economic update itself was nothing to write home about. It is a little like the throne speech. It did not contain much, at least not enough to convince us that it was so important that the government had to dissolve Parliament and call an election so that it could have both hands on the wheel. The economic update contains no major reforms and ignores several sectors. In short, there is nothing in it to really reassure us about the future and the economic recovery.

First, the economic update offers no response to the labour shortage and no solutions for boosting productivity. The labour shortage is probably one of the main issues raised in my riding during the last campaign. Business owners are at the end of their rope because they cannot find anyone to work for them. It is unbelievable that their number one problem is finding workers. When they finally decided to invest in a last-resort solution, the federal government made it harder for them, despite the fact that the logic is simple enough to follow. Difficulty recruiting workers will inevitably affect the growth of our economy. Every business in my region that decided to take the huge step of recruiting internationally and using the immigration process to make up for the labour shortage ran up against one obstacle after another.

One of those obstacles is related to the percentage of immigrants a business can hire. However, I must admit that progress has been made in this area thanks to a partnership between the governments of Canada and Quebec. A pilot project launched last month raises the current limit of 10% temporary foreign workers per business to 20%. This is definitely good news, especially for farmers, who often need a large number of workers to help with the harvest. However, the measure does not apply to all sectors, even though I am pretty sure that every sector could benefit considerably.

The Quebec government also announced that the temporary foreign worker program would be relaxed to exempt businesses from having to advertise externally and provide proof of their recruitment efforts in Quebec in order to fill positions in certain occupations for which there is a labour shortage. This relaxation of the rules will allow many business to get reinforcements in by hiring temporary foreign workers. The process of getting them to Canada will also be streamlined, according to a recent announcement by Quebec's minister of labour, employment and social solidarity.

It appears that Quebec is being far more proactive in this area than the federal government. It has often been said that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada is the federal government’s most dysfunctional department. Our proposal to repatriate all immigration powers to Quebec appears to be more topical than ever, when you see the efforts made by Quebec. I am not saying that everything is perfect, far from it, but at least something is being done, and, unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Ottawa.

Recruiting students is also problematic. Foreign students have to pay a lot of money to access education in Quebec, and then they have to grapple with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship and its red tape. Let me explain. When foreign students study in Quebec, some of them move to Ontario after graduating, because then they can get Canadian citizenship faster. This situation is very common and puts Quebec at a serious disadvantage, because we cannot retain the new graduates we need.

There are solutions, however. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada could, for example, improve coordination efforts with Quebec’s department of education and department of advanced education to facilitate the recognition of diplomas, degrees and equivalences. This might reduce the time it takes to process applications from international students and make sure that they are able to start their programs on time. The federal government could also give priority to the immigration files of applicants who already have a job offer and foster their integration in Quebec by ensuring that the time frame for obtaining Canadian citizenship is the same as in the other provinces. No, that is too complicated for them, and the result is that our entrepreneurs have to lower production, reduce their offerings and, as a result, cut their profits because of labour shortages.

At the same time, people who want to settle specifically in our province, in Quebec, are being rejected by the federal government. I am not even commenting on the issue of immigrants from French-speaking African countries, who are rejected en masse by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

That is what happened to Aurélien, a 29-year-old French-speaking Cameroonian with a degree in mechanical and production engineering from his native country. He enrolled in a diploma of vocational studies program in welding and fitting at the vocational training centre in Matane in my riding. There is a desperate need for welders in Quebec.

The Quebec government was very interested in his application and, through Éducation internationale, offered him a scholarship of excellence to cover his tuition fees. Despite this, an IRCC officer once again refused his application for a study permit. Why? The officer who handled his file said he was not convinced that the student would remain in Canada at the end of his stay. That is unbelievable and it is very unfair.

Aurélien is not the only student in this situation. According to Radio-Canada, applications from Cameroon are overwhelmingly rejected by the IRCC. In 2020, 88% of applications from that country were rejected, and the figures are apparently similar for applicants from Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Togo.

Aurélien had to give up his dream of living in Quebec. At the same time, the economies of Matane, the Gaspé, Quebec and Canada are all suffering. We urgently need workers. Why is the federal government being so stubborn? It makes absolutely no sense.

When our economy is suffering, I think we should find solutions or some way of getting the money that the federal government is letting slip away. I think that measures to fight tax havens would be more than welcome in this context. The Deputy Prime Minister announced last spring that such measures would be in this economic update. However, they have either been put on the back burner or disappeared completely. I guess this is not important enough to the government.

We are right in the middle of a recovery, and it is difficult to see any federal leadership when it comes to the economy.

Another element is conspicuous for its absence in the economic and fiscal update, namely health transfers. I cannot believe that the government is not yet tired of hearing the Bloc Québécois talk about health transfers, because we have been talking about them for two years. Even last week, the Conservatives and the New Democrats woke up and said that that would be something good to discuss.

Now all three opposition parties in the House of Commons are calling for action with respect to health transfers, as are the premiers of every province. The annual meeting of the Council of the Federation was held last week, and its members unanimously called on the federal government to do more to help the provinces and territories ensure the survival of the free and public health system. The health care system has been undermined by the impacts of chronic underfunding, which have been exacerbated in the past two years by the COVID‑19 pandemic.

Despite that fact, the federal government has categorically refused any increases to health care funding. Although there is growing pressure on the government to immediately pay out $28 billion to cover 35% of costs, indexed at 6% thereafter, the economic update is keeping the Canada transfer indexed at 3% until 2027.

The government's message is clear but totally oblivious, in my opinion, because the government can see the needs of Quebec's healthcare system as well as we can. It thinks it spent enough last year on the pandemic, so it is refusing to contribute. That is flawed logic. COVID-19 spending was a temporary, one-time expense, whereas the federal underfunding of health care is a permanent problem that has been squeezing Quebec and the provinces financially for years.

Not only is the federal government perpetuating the fiscal imbalance, it is ignoring the lessons it should have learned from the pandemic. If the three opposition parties and the Council of the Federation are not enough to convince the government, it might want to listen to the people who voted it in. After all, MPs are here to represent their constituents.

A Leger poll released last week revealed that a vast majority of Canadians want the federal government to increase its contribution to health care. Fully 85% of Canadians think it is urgent. Most respondents believe that health is one of the most important issues in Quebec and Canada. Almost four out of five Canadians think that the pandemic has had a large negative impact on the health care system. It could not be more clear.

I see that I am running out of time. There were, of course, many other topics I could have addressed, but this is really what concerns me right now. I spoke about the labour shortage and immigration issues. Last week, I spoke about employment insurance and our increasingly divided society. That is what concerns us right now, and there is a lot of work to do. Let us get to work.

[Élisabeth Brière, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions and Associate Minister of Health]

Madam Speaker, perhaps my colleague's speech was written before she became aware of what the minister announced last week. The fiscal update allocated $85 million, and processing times have improved and are now 87% faster. A new permanent residence application tracker was introduced in February 2022 for spouses. Citizenship and Immigration, the IRCC, has increased its processing capacity for permanent residence applications and made a record half-million decisions in 2021. For people who want to live in Canada, the IRCC plans to make 147,000 permanent residence final decisions in the first quarter of 2022. I have four or five points to add along those lines, but I think it is clear the minister is very engaged and dynamic and determined to improve the situation.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her comment.

We are indeed pleased that the minister is acting in good faith and wants to move things forward. Unfortunately, all the investments of the past months have not meant much on the ground.

In our riding offices right now, we are handling a lot of EI cases for constituents who, unfortunately, are not getting their money. We usually handle mostly immigration cases because Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada cannot process its own cases. For some reason we do not really understand, people like Aurélien, who wants to move to Matane and become a welder, are being stymied.

Investments are all well and good, but we would like to see them make a difference on the ground so we can get people into Quebec to alleviate the labour shortage.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

The hon. member will have three minutes after question period to continue his speech.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-8, An Act to implement certain provisions of the economic and fiscal update tabled in Parliament on December 14, 2021 and other measures, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

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

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-8 does not provide any solutions to the problems people are facing. People across Canada and Quebec are having a hard time and struggling to put food on the table. The number of homeless people across the country is growing.

Does my colleague think that the government did everything it could to act and strengthen the health care system so that everyone in Canada has a roof over their heads and families that are struggling can put food on the table?

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

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

No, unfortunately, I do not think the government did everything it could to help people get through the pandemic. That was kind of the point of my speech.

There are blatantly obvious problems with the health care systems in Quebec and the provinces. Last week, the Council of the Federation, the ministers, once again put forward a unanimous request for more health care money and a 6% escalator. Now the three opposition parties in the House of Commons are calling for it, but the government is stubbornly refusing to grant that request.

Health transfers are not the only issue. I have also talked to people who are not getting their EI benefits and have been waiting for months because their account was hacked and is now blocked. There are not enough investigators to deal with their files. This is deplorable, because these people deserve to be treated with dignity and should be getting their money. When people collect EI, it is because they need it.

To sum up, no, the government has not done enough.

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

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague on her excellent speech.

I would like to ask her to say more about money that must be earmarked for social housing. She just said the government has not done enough. The federal government's targets are pretty low, and it talks a lot about affordable housing, whereas we are talking about social housing.

Could she comment further on that?

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Mr. Speaker, indeed, the government is being rather half-hearted. We see the willingness and good intentions to invest in housing. My concern is that investment will focus on the large cities, where there seems to be a dire need for affordable housing and social housing, and the regions will be forgotten. These problems exist in the regions as well. The upside of the pandemic is that many people have moved to the Gaspé and the Lower St. Lawrence, and we even had positive net migration in 2020, but we need housing for those people. I think more effort needs to be made here.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Mr. Speaker, tonight we are debating Bill C-8 and another tax-and-spend bill by the current Liberal government, which does not seem to understand a lot of things. The Liberals do not seem to care about people's privacy. They do not seem to care that there is record inflation in our country. We hear the Deputy Prime Minister go on about it not being a big deal, and that it is not the government's fault. Blaming the world and blaming COVID is the typical go-to. The Liberals are blaming COVID for everything, but it is far more than that. We have an out-of-control-spending government.

We are at $1.2 trillion in debt, and it is growing. A lot of Canadians may not know that a big part of the reason why we have that inflation is in the Parliamentary Budget Officer's fiscal update. Everybody out there would presume, based on the Liberals, that it is all COVID spending.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer said that over a period of seven years, from 2019-2027, the Liberals plan to spend $541.9 billion. That is a lot of money. Of that, $176.6 billion is not even COVID-related. Here we are, at a time when we are being hit with inflation, when Canadians are already being hit with massive increases in food prices, which I will give some examples of in a minute, and the Liberals are trying to say it is all COVID. Meanwhile, they are padding a whole bunch of projects and doing a bunch of things that are completely unrelated.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that we have the Peace River Bridge in my neck of the woods. It is the main artery on the Alaska Highway, and it is hugely at risk. It has been failing for the last 20 years and it has to be repaired. Workers are welding on it almost nightly. It needs to be replaced, but sadly we do not see any plans to replace such an important piece of infrastructure in this spending. However, we see spending going into a whole bunch of mysterious places. I guess we will find out more about that after we understand what was spent on COVID.

What I should do is illustrate some of the costs. We have heard that 4.8% is the number for inflation, but it really is a deceptive number because there are many things for which inflation is a lot higher than 4.8%.

An article from CTV says, “The biggest single increase was gasoline, rising 38.4 per cent over July of 2020.” In one year, it had gone up by 38.4%. It was not the only double-digit increase that Canadian consumers faced either. The article states:

“There's always a lot of moving parts to the electricity market,” said Rob Roach, deputy chief economist with ATB Financial. “But there certainly has been a lot of demand over the summer, and that just naturally pushes up prices.”

Even electricity is affected, and this is in an age when we want electrification to happen, with electric cars and all the rest. The article continues:

Electricity is up 21.1 per cent, with natural gas up 30.9 per cent. The hot summer has been at least a partial driver of the increase, Roach said.

I have even seen that. I buy the odd groceries, such as bread and different things like that, and I have noticed quite a spike in prices. They have gone up quite dramatically. I have four adult children and a daughter who is just about to graduate, and this is hitting them broadside. They realize that by the end of the month the money has run out. They even have decent jobs. My daughter works at Dairy Queen. Normally the money lasts, but it is not lasting anymore. She has a vehicle that she has to buy gas for and buys food the odd time.

This is what is catching a lot of Canadians off-guard. They wonder why they are running out of money. What it comes down to is that a government that is as much of a spendthrift as the Liberals are drives up inflation, which makes that dollar last less than it used to.

Another example of the increases in food prices is from a CBC article from a month ago:

Kendra Sozinho, a manager at the Fiesta Farms grocery store in Toronto, says costs from suppliers are going up faster than she's ever seen.

This is while the minister across the way says that it is no big deal. It is not the Liberals. The article continues:

“We're seeing almost every single supplier increasing their pricing which then increases our pricing,” [Kendra] told CBC News in an interview. “I've been here for 20 years and I've never seen a jump like this.”

Here we go. We are seeing record amounts of inflation. I would say that our economy is at risk. People ask me if we are beyond the point of no return and I say, “No, we have hope in Canada.”

In my neck of the woods, we develop our natural resources. We develop natural gas. A big part of the natural gas will make it to the coast through a well-known pipeline from my riding. We have oil, forestry, agriculture and mining. We have so many things. If we started actually appreciating the natural resource sector in this country, really started developing those resources and fostering trade like we used to from 2011 to 2015, when is when I was here with the previous majority government, the revenue would come with it. Let us hope we get there again.

There is typical thinking that the Conservatives have to clean up all the Liberal misspending over the past number of decades. We will do it again, though, and it is possible. To say that the Liberal government is not going to take credit for that is just wrong.

This is what another colleague of mine, the member for Carleton, said, according to the same CBC article:

Conservative finance critic...placed the blame for high inflation squarely at the foot of the federal government, noting that as a country with abundant energy and food resources, Canada should have a built-in advantage when it comes to keeping a lid on prices.

He is right. Internally, we should be doing fine, but we have seen the spike in natural gas prices. We produce the stuff, and we do it the best in the world. In the article, my colleague from Carleton continued:

“The biggest increases for consumer products have been those that we source right here at home, not those that depend on foreign supply chains,” he told reporters in Ottawa.

“Home price inflation is a home-grown problem,” he went on, arguing that record government spending under...[the Prime Minister] is to blame for inflation. “The more he spends, the more things cost”...[he] said.

That is the long and the short of it. Despite what the Deputy Prime Minister and the Prime Minister try to say, the credit completely lands in their lap about inflation and where we are today as a country.

The Prime Minister has been the prime minister for the last six-plus years. If we continue to have a prime minister like this, who seems to have no end when it comes to spending, it becomes very concerning. I look at the future of our children, given that our national debt has doubled in just under eight years.

I will finish with something that I talk to my constituents about a lot. The debt obligations are already $20 billion per year. That is just paying off the debt obligations, interest and the like to service the national debt. Those obligations will double within the next five years to $40 billion. That seems to be a mystery. It is a big number.

The average Canadian wonders how it will impact them, but the way the government pays its bills is through taxes. The concern that we have, especially on this side of the House, is that the credit card bill the Prime Minister is racking up will end up in all of our mailboxes. They are talking about things like home equity taxes and taxing the sale of homes now. They will deny it, but I have seen where it is actually being talked about with the CMHC.

One thing with Ottawa is that usually, when rumours are floating around, there is usually some truth to them. My concern, anyway, is that the government is out of control. It does not know how to control its spending. Again, we see the evidence in the $176 billion that is not related to COVID. It cannot just be placed at the lap of COVID.

We need a responsible government once again that manages its spending wisely. That will be a future Conservative government.

The House resumed from February 7 consideration of the motion that Bill C-8, An Act to implement certain provisions of the economic and fiscal update tabled in Parliament on December 14, 2021 and other measures, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a true honour for me to stand in the House on behalf of the residents of my riding of Davenport to speak to Bill C-8, an act to implement certain provisions of the economic and fiscal update, which was tabled in the House by our Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance on December 14, 2021.

This is an important piece of legislation. It is a bill that includes a wide number of critical supports that workers and businesses need to help them continue to tackle COVID-19, such as support for provincial and territorial health care systems with vaccines, more ventilation in schools and rapid tests. It also includes several tax measures, such as tax credits for businesses that are purchasing ventilation supplies and teachers who purchase school supplies to assist with virtual learning.

Since the beginning of this pandemic, keeping Canadians safe and healthy has been our federal government's top priority. Canadians have sacrificed so much over the past 23 months to protect themselves and their communities. When this pandemic is finally over, our national government will ensure that the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic underpin Canada's pandemic preparedness to make sure that Canada is always ready, moving forward. In the meantime, there are things we need to do now to continue to keep Canadians safe and to support our recovery.

I will focus my remarks on four key areas of the proposed bill: improving ventilation in schools and community buildings, rapid antigen tests, the small businesses air quality improvement tax credit, and the COVID-19 resilience stream.

Regarding improving ventilation in schools and community buildings, as members know, the COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult for families and educators, with school closures followed by varying degrees of reopening. With students across the country now back at school, and the continuing impact of the omicron variant, we need to make sure our children and teachers are in a safe environment. Improvements to school ventilation are an important component of that. That is why today's legislation proposes up to an additional $100 million to provinces and territories through the existing safe return to class fund, as well as $10 million to first nations for on-reserve schools.

We are also giving the provinces and territories the flexibility they need to spend the funds on the ventilation-related improvements they deem most important. This includes repair or replacement of heating, ventilation and air conditioning units; increasing maintenance of existing systems, to ensure optimized operation; and other interventions that bring in more outdoor air or result in cleaner air, such as the installation of operable windows or portable air filtration units.

As members may recall, the safe return to class fund, which was originally announced in August, 2020, provided $2 billion to provinces and territories for their efforts to ensure a safe return to school and to protect the health of students and staff. The fund is helping provinces and territories by supporting, for example, adaptive learning spaces, improved air ventilation, increased hand sanitation and hygiene, and purchases of personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies. In my riding of Davenport, 18 schools have benefited from this fund, which is amazing.

Additional funding that we are proposing in the bill we are discussing now, Bill C-8, would if approved provide the complementary funding provinces and territories continue to need as they work alongside local school boards to ensure the safety of students and staff members throughout the school year.

As our economy continues to recover and grow, parents should be able to fully return to work and trust that their children are learning in a healthy and safe environment. School is critical for children's development, their mental health and their future success.

I will move on to rapid antigen tests and ensuring they continue to be available to Canadians and to businesses. They will play a key role in helping to keep Canadians safe as we continue to find our way out of this pandemic and move into a post-COVID economy.

Throughout the pandemic, our federal government has continued to ensure that provinces and territories can make decisions based on public health advice and not budget limitations, as we work together to keep students, teachers, staff and families healthy and safe during this unprecedented school year. For example, we have provided over $3 billion in direct transfer payments to the provinces and territories for testing and contact tracing through the safe restart agreement.

In addition, the federal government has made significant investments in building testing capacity within the provincial and territorial health care systems, having purchased and shipped over 80 million rapid tests to them at a cost of over $900 million. With the continuing demand for rapid tests, Bill C-8 would allocate an additional $1.72 billion to the Minister of Health for the procurement and distribution of rapid antigen tests to provinces and territories, as well as directly to Canadians. With this initiative, and funding through the safe return to class fund, the federal government is helping to keep students and their teachers safer.

Moving on to the small businesses air quality improvement tax credit, we know that federal government support is not restricted to the classroom. We remain committed to also helping businesses and organizations improve their ventilation and air quality in order to keep Canadians safe. Proper ventilation makes indoor air healthier and safer, and helps to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission.

Many small businesses are on the front lines of the pandemic. They are enforcing vaccine mandates, installing protective barriers and making sure workers and visitors are safe. Many want to make further improvements to their indoor air quality, but investing in equipment to improve ventilation can be very costly.

With Bill C-8, the federal government is proposing a refundable small business air quality improvement tax credit of 25% on eligible air quality improvement expenses incurred by small businesses. This will make it more affordable for them to invest in safer and healthier ventilation and air filtration. Businesses would receive the credit on eligible expenses incurred between September 1, 2021, and December 31, 2022, related to the purchase or upgrade of mechanical heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and the purchase of stand-alone devices designed to filter air using high-efficiency particulate air filters. The credit is up to a maximum of $10,000 per location, and $50,000 in total.

Eligible businesses would include Canadian-controlled private corporations and unincorporated sole proprietors. The credit would also be available to eligible corporations and individuals carrying on business through partnerships. By helping businesses invest in better ventilation today, the government is helping to keep Canadians safe now and in the future.

Finally, regarding the COVID-19 resilience stream, we know that Canadians of all ages, children, seniors, young parents, amateur athletes and more, are gradually returning to community spaces such as arenas, swimming pools, libraries and community centres, but these buildings also require ventilation improvements. Building on the $150 million to improve ventilation in public and community buildings announced in 2020, the 2021 economic and fiscal update announced an additional $70 million over three years for Infrastructure Canada to support ventilation projects in public and community buildings such as hospitals, libraries and community centres. Funding will be delivered through the COVID-19 resilience stream of the investing in Canada infrastructure program.

In conclusion, I can assure the House that the government will continue to work with provincial and territorial partners to provide a healthy school environment for students, teachers and staff members in this challenging time. We will continue to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to beat COVID-19 and protect Canadians and Canadian businesses through this crisis. That is why support of Bill C-8 is so important, and I urge all members of the House to swiftly pass the bill so we can ensure that all these measures are implemented as quickly as possible.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will read a quote from a January 12, 2022, article. It states:

Last week, [the] Prime Minister...promised the Liberal government would send provinces 140 million rapid tests. That would be four times the number of rapid tests the federal government provided in December — enough for every Canadian to have one a week....

But as residents wait for testing, some provinces have flagged that shipments have been slow to arrive.

This was an issue almost a month ago, and I am wondering if the member can explain why the government is so late to the game. We were asking for rapid tests a year ago, and they have still not arrived today.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we want to make sure rapid tests arrive in our provinces and territories in a timely manner. I know most provinces and territories have stockpiled many of our rapid tests and have been distributing them as they receive them.

I heard an announcement this morning that Ontario has received a lot of rapid tests from the federal government. It is starting to hand out those rapid tests in pharmacies and grocery stores. It has come up with a game plan. I have great faith that rapid tests will continue to flow as quickly as possible from the federal level down to the provinces and territories.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Davenport spoke a lot about the need for schools to provide a healthy environment with good ventilation. She clearly cares about children and youth.

Another way to improve living conditions is to provide healthy housing, social housing, low-income housing and co-operative housing. The government could take such initiatives, which would also help narrow the wealth gap.

Why is this not covered in Bill C‑8? I think the bill fails to address this issue.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member knows the national housing strategy is a major piece of legislation and is a key policy piece of great importance to our federal government. It will continue to be a priority for our government to invest in moving forward, not only from a social housing and affordable housing perspective, but also from a housing affordability perspective.

It is one of the key things we heard during the most recent election, and it continues to be top of mind for all Canadians. I can assure the member it will continue to be a priority. We will continue to make sure we focus and come up with solutions, so every Canadian will be able to have a safe, affordable and accessible place to live.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Davenport for her statements related to supports for small businesses. In my district, I have heard from small businesses that are suffering. Affordability is at an all-time low. It is a true crisis for small businesses, which are shutting down left, right and centre.

How does this bill, Bill C-8, protect businesses from going bankrupt when all it does is present, at current, a tax relief for businesses that have installed ventilation?

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we are all worried about small businesses in Canada. They are the heart and soul and the foundation of our economy in this country.

We will continue to provide supports, including what is included in Bill C-8, for small businesses. There is quite a bit of investment in the bill that would allow small businesses to be able to upgrade their ventilation systems, with up to $10,000 for that. That is a significant investment.

It will continue to help to improve the air quality and improve the ventilation for both the staff and the customers coming in. We have been there for small businesses, and we will continue to be there for small businesses moving forward.

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

Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Budget Officer said it is time for the government to stop spending money, like the $100 billion in the latest budget. I believe the Parliamentary Budget Officer is an independent officer of the House of Commons. What does my colleague think of the PBO's recommendation?

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we have, over the last almost two years, experienced an unprecedented pandemic. In order to make sure that we stabilize our economy, in order to protect Canadians and in order to ensure a solid economic foundation from which our businesses can pivot into a post-COVID economy, we had to spend a significant amount of money. Over time, we have actually adjusted and targeted more of our investments. We continue to target our investments. We will continue to do so until we are in a post-COVID world.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, everyone has a story, and I have been hearing a lot of sad stories lately. The story I hear most often from Canadians is that people think they are losing control of their lives.

It is not just the pandemic. This story is also about 30-year-olds living in their parents' basement because they cannot afford the $800,000 price tag on a typical house in Canada today. They have done the math, and they know they may never be able to buy a house.

Their story is even sadder when they see big investment firms and the very wealthy raking in money the government printed and buying houses and real estate in their communities, then renting those houses to renters who may never be able to own their own home.

I talked to a young woman. She started a business in the winter of 2020. Again and again, governments shut her business down. Her entrepreneurial dream was killed by government policies.

I have talked to immigrants who come here with degrees in medicine or engineering but cannot work in their profession because of bureaucracy at the local level.

I have talked to indigenous people who want to use their natural resources to create jobs and lift their young people out of poverty, but who have been prevented from doing so by governments.

I have also talked to indigenous people who want to be able to own their own home, but who cannot because of rules imposed by Ottawa, by a system that prevents this from happening.

Finally, I have heard stories from Canadians who were targeted for their personal choice. I myself am vaccinated, and I encourage others to do the same, but I understand that other Canadians have made a different choice.

Before we insult them, maybe we should listen to their side of the story. Maybe they had a bad experience with medication, or a doctor gave them the wrong medication. Maybe they have an unrecognized medical condition. Maybe they had experiences in other countries where governments lied to the public for nefarious reasons, and now they are suspicious every time a government tells them to do something for their own good.

The thing to do would have been to listen to the stories of Canadians who have hesitations, to have the humility to say that we understand that they are scared and we are here to answer their questions, and to try to change their mind because they are still part of our Canadian family. Instead, our government took the insulting position of attacking those very people.

Despite his own record of racism, the Prime Minister wanted to insult others, people he does not even know. He tried to get truckers fired, people who work in a truck all alone for 22 hours a day. These people are being targeted by a vaccine mandate even though they might be the least likely to come into contact with others. That is why the protests happened here on Parliament Hill.

However, there is something positive. Freedom is on the march. We see it across the country. In Alberta, at midnight, the vaccine passport was lifted. We saw—

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

The member for Mirabel on a point of order.

[Jean-Denis Garon, Bloc, Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this debate is about Bill C-8. I am wondering if my colleague from Carleton is off topic.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

Members must do their best to stay on point in their speeches.

The hon. member for Carleton.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, freedom is never pertinent to the Bloc Québécois.

The same thing is happening in Saskatchewan. The premier announced that he was going to eliminate restrictions and the vaccine passport. The Quebec premier made an announcement about health measures. Prince Edward Island is also starting to give its citizens their freedoms back.

Now we are even hearing Liberal members starting to rise and speak against the government's partisan approach against Canadians. Two courageous members spoke out against the Prime Minister's approach and in favour of Canadians' freedom. I am therefore asking the government to start giving Canadians back their freedom, to eliminate mandatory vaccination, to allow public servants to return to work and to let every Canadian to take back control of their lives.

Our objective should be for Canada to be the freest country in the world so that each Canadian is the author—

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

The hon. member for Lac‑Saint‑Jean on a point of order.

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

Mr. Speaker, I understand that my hon. colleague is giving a pre-election speech for the leadership race, but the House is currently studying Bill C-8.

Freedom is important to the Bloc Québécois. That is why we want Quebec's independence.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

Once again, I remind hon. members to keep their comments relevant to the bill before the House.

The hon. member for Carleton.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is obvious that the Bloc Québécois is afraid and is trying to silence me. That is a good sign.

We are going to give Canadians their freedom back and make them the authors of their own stories. That is the approach we will take as Conservatives.

Everybody has their story, and the story that I am hearing right now is that people feel like they are losing control of their lives. There is the young couple living in their parents' basement, even though they are 30 years old, because they cannot afford an $800,000 house. They are calculating that they may never be able to own a home.

There is the immigrant who has come here as a doctor, but is blocked by bureaucracy from ever doing that job or getting a licence to practise. There is the first nations community that wants to harvest its resources to lift itself out of poverty, but is being blocked by government gatekeepers.

More recently, there are the countless small businesses that have been flattened by endless lockdowns and rules that often seem to have no link to science, and there is the trucker, who has been dutifully putting the goods and services in our communities, on our shelves and on our kitchen tables and is now called names and prevented from doing his or her job by a Prime Minister who is not interested in listening.

I am vaccinated and I encourage others to do so, but every person has their story. People have their reasons. They might be medical reasons or cultural reasons. They might even have had an unfortunate medical experience with prior prescriptions that has prevented them from making that decision, but that decision must be theirs. Their bodies belong to them. They are masters of their own decisions.

Instead of listening to these people, the Prime Minister has insulted them, called them names and left them with no choice but to engage in legitimate and peaceful protest. If he wants to put an end to those protests, if he wants to actually reunite the country, then he should do what others have begun doing, because freedom is on the march in this country.

Saskatchewan, Alberta, Prince Edward Island and Quebec are beginning to lift these restrictions. At midnight in Alberta, the vaccine passport came to an end, and people across the country are showing their support for restarting freedom in this country, including two of the Prime Minister's own members of Parliament.

Let us get these restrictions out of the way. Let us open up our economy. Let us bring back freedom. Let us make Canadians the authors of their own stories again.

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

Mr. Speaker, I note that when the member was speaking, he talked about the protest outside being a peaceful protest.

What we do know is that many non-peaceful types of activities have been occurring. As a matter of fact, a number of his Conservative colleagues have also called out what is going on outside as an occupation.

I am curious if the member wants to comment as to whether or not he agrees that we should be asking those who are outside to leave now that they have made their point, or if he thinks that what is going on outside is totally legitimate and should continue in its current form.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not want any of this to continue. In fact, the truckers themselves have said they will not stay here one minute longer after the Prime Minister ceases to impose measures against the freedoms of Canadians.

As for the member insulting the people who have spoken up, I encourage him to listen to his own member of Parliament, the member for Québec, a Liberal MP who said he went to the protest and saw a very kind grandmother who demonstrated for her grandkids. She looked and sounded nothing like a white supremacist, nor did the Black, Sikh and indigenous Canadians I saw demonstrating on my way to Parliament Hill these last two weeks or in Quebec City this last Saturday.

I have enough respect for my fellow Canadians not to engage in these easy and absurd labels.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his speech. I would never want to silence him. I hang on his every word when he gives a speech in the House. He is one of my favourites.

Now, he and I do actually agree on one thing. The government's handling of this crisis has been a disaster. We agree on that. There has been no leadership; that much is clear. I agree 100% with my hon. colleague on that.

While my hon. colleague was taking selfies with some of these protesters, some of his Conservative colleagues in the Quebec caucus were calling for an immediate end to the blockades in Ottawa.

I want to know whether my colleague stands behind his selfies or whether he agrees with his fellow caucus members.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question. My position is that I am in favour of freedom. I want to end the blockade that this government and the other governments have forced on Canadians. That means putting an end to the vaccine mandates, giving the legitimate public servants who were fired over their vaccination status their jobs back, and repealing the vaccine mandate for the truckers who deliver our groceries and other goods.

Giving Canadians their freedom back will put an end to all of these protests and will help us start to make Canada the freest country in the world.

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

Mr. Speaker, allow me to congratulate the member for Carleton on his upcoming coronation as leader of the Conservative Party.

The irony here is that these lockdown protests have caused some of the worst lockdowns in the last two years. The member referred to unhappy stories. I have a few too. I have unhappy stories from workers and businesses in downtown Ottawa that have been unable to go to work or to open. I have unhappy stories from truckers who are stuck at Coutts and stuck in Windsor because of these protests, workers who are trying to move goods across the border and provide necessary supplies to our communities.

Will the member for Carleton speak up for those people to make sure that their unhappy stories are listened to by the rest of his caucus, and will he encourage these protests to end?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, one person is responsible for this mess, and that is the Prime Minister. He caused this mess by attacking Canadian citizens and taking away their freedoms.

The rest of the world is moving on. Other countries all around the world are lifting restrictions. Provinces across the country are doing exactly the same, but we have this holdup. The Prime Minister is hunkering down and, out of spite and personal pride, is refusing to lift these unjustified and unscientific restrictions. If he would only do so, then the truckers could get back to work and the other protesters could go back to their lives and everything in Canada would get back up on its feet and we could get back to working on giving people control of their lives.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

Order. 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 Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, Housing; the hon. member for Brantford—Brant, Pensions; the hon. member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, Veterans Affairs.

[Adam Chambers, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I feel like a baseball player who steps up to the plate after somebody has hit a home run, but I will do my best to follow the hon. member for Carleton.

It is my honour to rise today and speak to Bill C-8, which is the economic and fiscal update implementation act of 2021. The bill touches on several different topics, but I would like to focus on a few critical elements related to farmers, housing and what this bill represents overall.

For farmers, this bill quite simply is an acknowledgement that the government's approach has been wrong. It recognizes the harm of its carbon tax on farmers, but there is just one problem. The remedy does not go nearly far enough. Instead of discounting the carbon tax at the point of sale, the government is attempting to introduce a complicated rebate method. It puts an additional burden on farmers to collect their receipts, and at the end of the year they will get a fraction of what they paid in carbon tax back. A tax credit is not good enough. Farmers deserve much more than that. What is the science-based justification for treating diesel and gas differently from natural gas and propane?

I hope that all members in the House understand exactly how important farmers are to this country. When we live in cities and do the majority of our travelling by plane, if we take a look down what we see are beautiful farms covering the countryside. For many rural communities across this country, farming was the reason they sprang up, and it is the reason they continue to exist today.

Farming is one of the things Canada is known for internationally. Let me quote the Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance, which states, “Canada is the fifth largest exporter of agricultural and agri-food products in the world after the EU, U.S., Brazil, and China”, and “over 90% of Canada’s farmers are dependent on exports”.

Our farmers are competing with farmers from around the globe. It is a global industry, and farmers across the country, including in my riding, check the prices of global commodities, which help them determine and decide what to plant. They then follow international news to inform them of the best times to sell their products. A drought in Germany means farmers know their canola is likely to rise due to supply and demand factors.

When the carbon tax was initially announced, farmers were concerned. They knew they could not raise prices like other industries can. There was no way they could reduce the amount of fuel they were using, and increased costs come directly from their bottom line. That means they reduce the amount of money farmers can take home to their families at the end of the year, and the amount of money farmers have available to pay workers.

If it was not clear, farmers use a lot of fuel. A large tractor can hold 400 gallons of it. Thankfully, the minister understood that taxing diesel and gasoline was a non-starter, but that is not the only fuel that farmers use. Propane and natural gas are critical to farming. Natural gas and propane are cheap and efficient ways to heat and cool large buildings for many farmers, whether these are the shops they do repair work in or the places where livestock live in the cold winter months. These fuels are vital to selling most crops because of how farmers dry their products. Before something like corn can be shipped to market, it must be within a specific moisture range. It costs thousands of dollars to dry every month.

Last night, I spoke with a few farmers in my riding. They think this bill is quite clearly not doing enough. They sent me a copy of a few bills. I have a copy of a bill with me here. Just for the month of October to November, a natural gas bill for the farmer was almost $58,000. The carbon tax on that bill was $13,000. That is an unbelievable additional cost added to the monthly cost of operating that farmer's enterprise. Another farmer, Will, in my riding spends $40,000 to $50,000 some months on fuel.

This huge expense to farmers is why the Ontario Federation of Agriculture has been calling on the government to rethink the carbon tax application to farms. In March, the federal government needs to understand this, and to work to lessen the negative impacts of the carbon tax on the ability of farmers in Ontario to compete in both domestic and international markets. They may have asked for our understanding because it appears the government does not understand how much damage this is doing. That is perhaps why the Minister of Agriculture felt it was appropriate to say that the carbon tax was not significant for farmers after it was introduced.

I would like to point out that, like the carbon tax, it is a common theme with the government to not listen to Canadians when developing policy choices.

This is where I would like to thank my hon. colleague, the member for Northumberland—Peterborough South, for all of his work on the farm carbon tax file. He said the tax was crippling agriculture. Without his work, the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food may have continued to believe the carbon tax was insignificant. The member for Northumberland—Peterborough South called for an exemption to the carbon tax and put forward a bill to do just that for natural gas and propane, but with an unnecessary election called, that bill died with the last Parliament.

The tax credit proposed is complicated, it is onerous and it does not make it equitable with other fuels. There is an excellent solution here to help the farmers. It is quite simple and it is not in this bill. The solution is to provide a full exemption at the point of sale.

A similar criticism can be directed at the government on the proposed tax on vacant properties with a national annual 1% tax on the value of non-resident, non-Canadian-owned residential real estate that is considered to be vacant or underused. That is very complicated.

In the last election, housing was a major theme. Our party, the Conservatives, put forward a plan to limit and ban foreign investors not living in or moving into Canada from purchasing homes for a two-year period. This plan was well received. Really what we are asking for is a two-year pause to let everyone take a break so we can curb some of the off-the-record demand we see for homes that are driving the prices up for everyone else.

When we talk about housing, the government likes to point to a commitment to bring in a beneficial ownership registry, but like many Canadians, I am skeptical that the government will deliver on this commitment. It is absent from this bill and the government has a long history of promising something and failing to deliver.

The bill represents a disconnect that seems to have taken hold of the government. It is a disconnect between government spending and the consequences of that spending. The only policy solution the government has is to spend more money. That is the only solution that it has proposed over these last two years. In fact, it is the only policy solution it has proposed since 2015, since coming into government.

When COVID first arrived, it was unprecedented. Although I was not in this chamber at the time, I was pleased to see all parties working together for the benefit of Canadians to make sure businesses, families and all of us had the support we needed to get through the pandemic.

However, that time has passed and experts are warning the government to stop the rampant spending and pointing to the effects that spending has on inflation. We need a credible, fiscal plan with a focus on growth, not on redistribution, that acknowledges the risk that additional spending represents to Canadians.

I believe the buck has to stop somewhere. The House cannot keep signing off on billion-dollar pieces of legislation without a plan to find some savings or a plan for how to pay for it. There needs to be a debate where we can find savings to offset some of these new expenditures, which might be worthwhile. That is the very least the government could do. In fact, I would propose that the government, for every new spending measure it brings forward, finds an offset savings somewhere else.

This mountain of debt is not the legacy of COVID that we wish to leave for our children. They deserve better than this.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, it was only a couple years ago we heard the Conservatives stand up and give a lot of speeches about the carbon tax, saying it was bad. Then they minted a brand-new, shiny leader. It was not that long ago he was inside the chamber where the position they campaigned on was that they were in favour of a price on pollution. That is what they said. Somewhere they had a flip and they are now in favour of it. Based on the discussions and the debate so far on Bill C-8, they are like a fish out of water and they are flipping and flopping all over.

Is it the member's opinion that the Conservatives are going back to their Reform ways and adopting a policy position against the environment in support of not having a price on pollution?

[Adam Chambers, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know if it was just luck, but I am quite happy to answer another question from the hon. colleague, as he asked a question of me on my last speech.

Talking about carbon tax is really cold comfort to a farmer who is paying $13,000 a month in carbon tax. Where is that money coming from? I would like to ask this member about the farmers he has spoken to. This is what we are talking about, the impact of a carbon tax on a farmer.

It is important to recognize that some of these individuals and business owners cannot afford to keep spending and paying the tax increases. Therefore, we on this side of the House are going to continue to stand up for farmers and fight against a carbon tax that does not work.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

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

I heard him say that the government is spending too much and needs to look at where it can cut back.

I have a suggestion for him.

The government spends billions of dollars a year on oil and gas subsidies even though it has very ambitious climate targets to reduce greenhouse gases by 40% to 45%. It will never meet these targets if it continues to subsidize the oil industry.

What does the member think about that? Does he agree that the government could cut the subsidies to the oil and gas industry?

[Adam Chambers, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, when we are talking about subsidies to the oil and gas industry, we need to have a much more fulsome and honest debate about what represents a subsidy. The truth is that the oil and gas sector represents a significant economic driver for this country and has provided much of the wealth, economic progress and productivity that we have seen in this country over the last generations.

I would propose, in addition to considering all spending measures, that it has been over 10 years since the government has done any kind of review of its spending through any kind of efficiency review. There is plenty of money for the government to look at to see where we can find savings to spend on the priority areas. As I mentioned, there might be some really good priorities that we should be funding, but we can find the savings for that, going forward.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Mr. Speaker, one of the things, as the seniors spokesperson for the NDP, that I have been fighting for that I did not see in this fiscal update was an actual commitment to the seniors who lost their GIS because of the clawback by the government. The most vulnerable seniors, working seniors across this country have lost everything in some cases.

I am talking to seniors who have lost their homes and are living in vehicles. I have talked to seniors who cannot afford medication. I heard a story not too long ago about a senior who could not afford healthy meals and could not afford their diabetes medication and, as a result, lost their life because of this GIS clawback.

I wonder if this member could speak to that and his feelings about what we need to do to treat the seniors of this country more respectfully.

[Adam Chambers, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for all of her hard work on this topic and making sure that it is rightly addressed.

This was a mistake by the government, in a fairly complicated system, that imposed on seniors a difficulty in terms of the GIS clawback. I definitely support the proposals put forward in the House to right that wrong. However, it should be done very quickly, and it needs to be done immediately and not wait until June or July.

[Eric Duncan, Conservative, Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising today to respond to the government's economic update, formally called Bill C-8. I have had the opportunity over the last few weeks, since the House came back, to address a few of the important economic situations that I feel is putting our country under enormous strain right now.

I will use my time to talk about two key themes that I am hearing about repeatedly, over and over, and it is not just among constituents in my riding. It is a loud and clear message coming from every part of this country.

I will start with housing. When the Liberal government came to power in 2015, the average cost to purchase a home in Canada was $435,000. If we fast forward to today, we are getting to the point of nearly $800,000 on average. That is an 85% increase in housing prices over six years, 25% in many areas in the last year alone. Many people say, or the government will argue, that this is an international phenomenon. That is absolutely not true when we look at the degree and the severity of the housing crunch our country faces. Bloomberg has reported that Canada has the second-worst housing bubble in the entire world.

We localize that. Part of our job is to bring the stories and examples from our communities here to the floor of the House of Commons. In question period, I highlighted the situation we are facing in Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, the area in eastern Ontario I am proud to represent. I am grateful to the Cornwall and District Real Estate Board for keeping statistics. They show we have basically doubled the housing crisis in the Cornwall area over the course of the last five years. We saw one month's average price was Over $400,000.

One real estate agent told me that this is not uncommon. Supply continues to be a major challenge. Who wants to sell their home? Yes, money can be made, but where else will people go? Supply is a challenge and pricing on that everywhere is a challenge. The number of bids on one house was 13 bids in four days. Talk to any real estate agent, and they expect that problem to continue into this year and beyond, unfortunately.

One thing I want to do is to put on the record some of the feedback I have heard in my riding. We talk about housing prices, which impacts people getting into home ownership. I have heard a number of examples of 30- to 35-year-olds living in their parents' basement with a full-time job trying to save up to buy a house. If they can afford the mortgage, they cannot afford the risk of the mortgage rates going up in the coming years.

One of the other things we need to make sure of when we are talking about housing, a key aspect of our quality of life, is the rental market as well. Rental prices are rising across the country, including in my community of Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, be it in Winchester, Cornwall, Lancaster, Morrisburg or any point in between. Supply is very low and prices are going up astronomically. A property manager told me this week that there was a three bedroom rental for $1,400 a month plus utilities. I do not know if it was a house or an apartment, but they had 127 applications in one week. This is not sustainable.

People will ask us what we can do at the federal level. At the federal level we have been advocates of finally tackling money laundering in this country. Canada has a reputation, which is growing and not diminishing, of being an opportunity for money laundering in our real estate market. We need to ban foreign investment very clearly in this heated market.

Another constructive idea is this. As opposed to banning investment in the real estate market completely, foreign investment should be directed to building apartment rentals and units to help that market as well.

The government's economic approach to this is wrong. It says what it is going to do is spend billions and billions more dollars to give people more money to have equity to buy a house. The economics show this is the wrong way. All it is going to do is further inflate the housing market. When we have 17 people bidding on a house and they know they can maybe get more assistance, it is going to take that $400,000 average in the Cornwall area and make it over half a million, I am sure.

The optimism in our housing market in this country has never been lower. It has started, it is here now and it will be continuing because of the bad pieces of legislation and fiscal policy the government is proposing. The government put $400 billion of new debt, cheap money, into the market. We see a direct correlation with the time frame of that and the negative effect it has had on our housing markets.

I also want to talk today, as we talk about economics and fiscal updates, about how this should be a happy time, an optimistic time, in our country right now. We are seeing countries around the world present plans and updates to get past this pandemic, open up, get rid of mandates, provide a plan and give people optimism, from an economic and fiscal perspective and from a mental health perspective.

Look at where we are in this country today. In every single phone call I take, the tone and temperament in this country is getting worse. The Prime Minister's language and rhetoric is unacceptable. People are more divided, more angry, more bitter and are getting increasingly pessimistic about the tone and dialogue in this country at a time when it could be the opposite.

I am proud to say I am vaccinated. People have heard me in the House and on social media encourage people to get vaccinated. It is a positive that we are one of the most vaccinated countries in the entire world. Millions of people have gotten booster shots and in February 2022 cases are going down. We are going in the right direction. People should be hearing from the Prime Minister a plan to lift mandates. When it comes to travel, we are the only G7 country that has the outdated testing practices in place. People are getting more frustrated and more pessimistic.

We should be presenting a plan and a timeline and giving hope, like numerous other allied and similar countries around the world are doing. We can look to the south and see Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as governors, giving hope and optimism, showing a light at the end of the tunnel, telling people it is getting better, giving them some relief with regard to their mental health and getting people back to work.

We have a paralyzed political environment in the country because the Prime Minister decides, if people want to open up, if they want to get back to normal, if they want to live their lives and get their freedom back, to tarnish everybody and say they are racist or they are misogynist or some other disrespectful comment.

I am hearing over and over again back home that this needs to end. We are a wonderful country. Everybody I speak to is proud to be Canadian, but they are extremely frustrated by the lack of leadership and the tone that is coming from the Prime Minister. As a matter of fact, as opposed to what everybody else is doing in terms of opening up and giving that optimism, still on this table is a Prime Minister who, through the words of his caucus members, two of whom have rightfully and thankfully stepped forward, is doubling down on division and spreading, I believe, further disunity in the country.

They are actually talking about an interprovincial mandate for truck drivers. What does that mean? It means putting it in place at every single border, in every single province of this country.

Read the room. The science is not there and Canadians are not there. I oppose this legislation. I oppose the direction the government is taking. I will stand up to make sure we get back our freedoms, get opened up and finally get back to normal once again. It has been long enough.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thought I could agree with a lot of aspects of the hon. member's speech. We need to work on housing across party lines.

However, near the end of his speech, I started hearing the rhetoric we constantly hear from the opposition. He is labelling the leader of this country as the one who is cranking up the rhetoric, but I would argue it is really coming from the other side. Canadians are onside with getting vaccinated. If we were not united, we would not have the great numbers we have. Canada has done so well through this pandemic, and it is because of the leadership that has been shown by the Prime Minister and by this government.

Would the member not agree that Canadians are on board with health measures, that Canadians want to be safe and that Canadians want consistent messaging from their government?

[Eric Duncan, Conservative, Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we are one of the most vaccinated countries in the entire world. That should mean that at this point in the game, with the science and the data that are available to us, we should be opening up and getting back to normal. People should be getting back to work.

What people see is a deliberate strategy to politicize the pandemic, to give fear, to stigmatize people, to make it appear that we cannot open up, and we hear it not from me or from the opposition, but from the Liberals' own benches.

I will say it again: Read the room. Canadians followed the health advice. They have been double- or triple-vaccinated. They followed the rules and they are seeing what is happening around the world, which is opening up, getting back to a semblance of normalcy and getting past COVID once and for all. The time has come to start doing that.

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

Mr. Speaker, I just loved my hon. colleague's speech. I believe he spoke from the heart. He was very sincere. One of the things he talked about was division. I have to agree with him on that. Because of this government's policies, we are seeing a lot of division right now all across Quebec and Canada.

However, one thing we all agree on is what was left out of the economic update: health transfers. I think my colleague will agree with me. The feds did not increase health transfers even though 85% of Canadians want them to, even though the premiers of Quebec and all the provinces and territories want them to up health transfers. Everyone, including all the opposition parties here, wants higher health transfers. There is nothing in there about it.

My colleague talked about leadership, but I have not heard from any Conservative Party members yet that they support the request by the premiers of the provinces and Quebec to raise transfers to 35%.

Will my colleague be the first member of the Conservative caucus to show some leadership and tell me he supports Quebec and the provinces' request to boost health transfers to 35%?

[Eric Duncan, Conservative, Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from the Bloc for that intervention and comment. I agree with him.

I laughed in the House the other day as we were talking about this legislation. A member on the government benches said they had had 35 meetings with premiers across the country in the past couple of years. The premiers' number one ask for the entire time was a permanent increase to health care transfers to allow them to build up surge capacities that we need, not just during COVID, but in the winter months every year.

One thing that has been near and dear, going back to my days as a mayor in our region, is long-term care. We need to be making more capital investments in improving quality of care.

I will agree with the Bloc Québécois that we need permanent significant increases in our health care transfers. The government has done everything but promise that. That is the number one demand of provinces; the government is far from it. Again, at this point in the game, that should be the core and foundation of what should be in an economic and fiscal update. It is not.

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

Mr. Speaker, I really appreciated the member's comments on the supply of housing. What I especially want to emphasize is the supply of housing that is affordable.

We are so far behind. The federal Conservative and Liberal governments over the past 30 years got out of the affordable housing game. We are 500,000 units of affordable housing behind where we should be, and the NDP has put forward a proposal that we need to build those 500,000 units now.

I am wondering if the member can say the Conservatives support us, because it is affordable housing that we really need, housing that everybody can move into to have a roof over their head.

[Eric Duncan, Conservative, Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I was involved in municipal politics for years and I know that housing supply is a municipal and provincial jurisdiction. However, I agree wholeheartedly that we need to increase housing supply in this country. That will help with affordability.

We hear NIMBYism all the time: We need to get stuff built, just “not in my backyard”. I also say part of the challenge that we need to tackle nationally, provincially and municipally is the BANANA acronym of “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything” and the CAVE mentality of “citizens against virtually everything”.

We need to start working together at all levels around transit planning, around all these different factors. That will help to raise the private sector affordable housing supply. It is the number one thing we can do, and I appreciate the member's intervention on that point.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-8, an act to implement certain measures included in the fall economic and fiscal update.

This debate comes amid a real crisis of leadership in Canada. We know the Prime Minister called a summer election that Canadians did not want, and by cleverly sowing enough division and fear in just the right places, he managed to squeak out another minority government with the same willing partners in the Bloc and the NDP. He claimed that the 2021 election was necessary because we were at the most transformational moment since 1945, and that he would need a new mandate to implement a bold new agenda befitting a grand historical moment. Once elected, with the same partners who were already giving his government a free hand to do anything he wanted, what did the Prime Minister do that was so transformational that it required an election and a fresh mandate? He did absolutely nothing. He waited weeks before making a few tweaks to his cabinet. Then he waited a few more weeks before finally reconvening Parliament, delivered a bland, recycled Speech from the Throne, and eventually, the week before Christmas, tabled what he was still referring to as the fall economic statement.

What was in this much-delayed update? What worthy, once-in-a-lifetime transformational programs required a new mandate from an election to implement? We saw absolutely nothing. The statement was a continuation of the same trajectory the government has been on both since and before the COVID crisis began. The fall economic statement shows that the government is continuing down the path that it has long walked of out-of-control spending, higher taxes and continuing inflation that threatens to trigger a spiral of higher prices for consumers, higher interest rates, higher mortgage payments for consumers and higher debt service costs for governments, which will eventually mean higher taxes and service program cuts. This is the trajectory we are now on and it began long before COVID.

Canadians are facing an affordability crisis. Inflation is now the highest it has been in decades. Families can expect their grocery costs to increase by $1,000 this year. For millions of Canadians, this means hard choices about what they will do without. The vast majority of Canadians do not have an extra $1,000 a year to spend on groceries. Before the pandemic, nearly half of Canadians were virtually broke after paying all of their monthly obligations, and they simply cannot absorb higher food costs.

There is the cost of home heating. This is an absolute life necessity in Canada. Nobody in Canada, not even on the west coast, can simply tough it out in the winter and just put on a sweater when it gets cold. When it does get cold, and it gets bitterly cold in every part of Canada, Canadians need reliable and affordable energy to heat their homes, and the government slapped an ever-increasing carbon tax on home heating costs for millions of Canadians.

Transportation is also more expensive; gasoline is more expensive. This is also due in part to the carbon tax. This cost affects everyone, whether they own a car or not, whether they drive or take the bus. It makes driving to work more expensive, it makes bus passes more expensive and it puts pressure on municipalities, which have increasing costs to operate police, fire, ambulance, waste collection and transit vehicles. These higher costs have resulted in higher property taxes or cuts in services, and this will continue.

Nowhere is the increased cost of living and inflation crisis more obvious than in Canada's housing market. A true crisis in affordable rent and home ownership has deeply taken root in Canada under the current government. It became much worse during the COVID crisis, and this bill does not give hope to would-be homebuyers or renters. In fact, it is a continuation of the very policies that have pushed home ownership out of reach for young families.

COVID has had a devastating effect on the Canadian economy, resulting in a significant drop in GDP and massive job losses, yet the price of residential real estate has gone up, and not just by a little. The Canadian real estate market saw the most spectacular run-up in home prices ever seen. The average price of a Canadian home went up 30% in the middle of an economic contraction with massive job losses. How could that possibly happen? Was there a massive collapse in other asset classes to offset a rush of money into residential real estate? No. Stock markets also enjoyed a spectacular run during COVID, so where did the money come from?

Can there now be no doubt that massive deficits, facilitated and enabled by central banks that massively expand the money supply by buying the government's debt with newly created money, inflate the value of assets without actually creating any real wealth? It is Justinflation.

This bill, with its deficits and the absence of credible fiscal anchors or an acknowledgement of the inflation crisis, is a doubling down on the previous fall economic statement and last year's budget. There is nothing to give Canadians hope for a future where there will be affordable homes, manageable costs for basic necessities, relief from taxes or the better public services they want and need.

There is nothing in this statement to give Canadians confidence that their leaders are prudent managers of the nation's finances. In fact, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has pointed out that the government's own stated rationale for the billions in additional spending contained in the update no longer exist. The PBO has also pointed out that since the pandemic began, billions of dollars have gone into non-COVID new spending programs.

Furthermore, beyond the dollars and cents, the PBO has pointed out that the government is struggling with basic fiscal transparency. The PBO stated:

This year both the Annual Financial Report and Public Accounts were published on December 14, 2021, the latest publication since 1993-94. Comparatively, Canada was among the last of the G7 countries to publish their financial accounts for the 2020-21 fiscal year.

The PBO goes on to point out that the federal public accounts are published later than most provincial and territorial public accounts and that “Canada falls short of the standard for advanced practice in the International Monetary Fund’s [fiscal] reporting guidelines”.

In some respects, these quotes from the PBO about basic competence and transparency might be the most disturbing part of all. For six years, the government has been increasingly paralyzing the country with incompetence.

We watched a government just shrug off payment systems that do not pay, procurement systems that do not procure and create regulatory systems designed to kill projects. It dithered for years with a non-decision on Huawei, jeopardizing national cybersecurity. It defied parliamentary orders. It has presided over the resignation of eight generals, one clerk of the privy council and a governor general.

Now we are adding the inability to file timely fiscal reports to the incredible litany of muddled and incompetent government. Today, as we debate the implementation legislation for the fall economic statement, Canada is as divided as it has ever been. The government has long pitted east versus west, urban versus rural, and now the vaccinated against the unvaccinated. The government operates under an “us versus them” mentality that has finally and courageously been called out by one of their own this week.

To conclude, I will not support this bill. It is a matter of confidence in the government, and I have none.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague talked a lot about the housing issue but has not mentioned anything about how supply has decreased during COVID-19. He talked a lot about government spending but has not talked about why that spending was necessary.

I would like to know which of the benefits the member would have liked to see cut. Does he not agree with the business supports? Does he not agree with supporting seniors? There are measures in this bill as well that would help curb the buying of homes and residential properties. Does he not agree with that?

Inflation is not just a problem here in Canada but is a global problem right now. The supply chain is the main reason for causing this problem. I would like the member to give me his comments on that.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot there, and I will do the best I can with the time I have.

To start with the last point, yes, indeed there is inflation in other parts of the world, but in no other advanced economy is it like it is in Canada. This is a Canadian phenomenon compared with our peer countries.

On housing, yes, indeed supply is an issue. We have seen nothing from this government to meaningfully address supply. It is quite the opposite. We have a continuation of regulation, and that goes to other levels of government as well, but certainly there are supply issues here. However, what the government has done is inflate the entire asset class with its deficits that were facilitated through the creation of new money, which I addressed.

With respect to programs, yes, indeed we supported all of the support measures that were necessary to combat COVID. However, as the member might have noted in my speech, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has pointed out that the criteria for the stimulus portions, and the government's own rationale for them, have disappeared, yet the expenditures remain.

Finally, I would like to thank the member for participating in the debate. It is nice to see somebody besides the member for Winnipeg North and the member for Kingston and the Islands actually doing their job and speaking in the House of Commons.

[Monique Pauzé, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Calgary Rocky Ridge denounced the Liberal government's lack of innovative policies or programs. Last spring's budget included measures to crack down on tax evasion, but nothing came of it. There is nothing about that in Bill C‑8.

Would ambitious measures to deal with tax havens not give people the hope that my colleague was talking about and restore their confidence in the government's finances?

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. This government has spent a lot of air time during committee meetings, and occasionally in the chamber, paying lip service to the problem of money laundering in Canada, which is a very serious problem, and we see it in the real estate industry. It is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that this government has failed to adequately address. I would agree with the member on that point.

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

Mr. Speaker, I just saw on Facebook that in Rivière‑du‑Loup, in my riding, the price of gas is $1.66 a litre for regular and almost $1.90 a litre for premium. That is unprecedented in Canada.

My colleague referred to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who has said that it is time to stop spending money and that it is not getting us anywhere because inflation keeps soaring.

I would like his opinion on that.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with the member completely, and I am sure that in his riding most people rely on personal vehicles for transportation to get to work and back. There is no subway system in the member's riding, so the inflation impact, particularly on transportation, is a real problem for working people in Canada, and the PBO's concerns were well noted on the out-of-control spending.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, today we are debating a bill related to the fall economic update. I think we have to realize that the situation we are in right now is the context in which we are debating this bill.

I have never seen our country more divided in my time in office, and I have never seen us in the kind of national crisis that we are in right now. We are now in year three of COVID. Every one of us in this House and every member listening has constituents who are tired, who are facing mental health crises, who want stability and certainty, who have lost jobs, who are trying to find labour. We have a big problem in this country right now. We are seeing civil unrest.

I just feel that the legislation that the government is putting forward right now and the tone that the government is taking with these problems are not treating these things seriously. It is really easy for us to just assume that Canada is always going to be this place of wonderful, vibrant, inclusive pluralism that sees constant economic growth, but we cannot make that assumption. It actually takes work and it takes effort, and that effort is not deep political polarization and it is not making political hay out of crisis situations; it is actually trying to work with each other to come up with solutions. This bill does not recognize that point right now.

My constituents are seeing out-of-control cost of living increases. I was just at the grocery store last night in my community, and I watched a woman pick up a container of chicken breasts and then put it back. She picked it up again and then she put it back. She picked it up again, and then she put it back and walked away. That is happening across demographics. People do not know if they can afford to pay for basic necessities, and this has changed in such a rapid period of time.

This bill does not address that, because we are not addressing the underlying causes of inflation. We are not addressing the continued deficit spending that we have seen over the last couple of years during the pandemic. I really think that now is the time for a new approach. I believe we should not be debating any new budgetary measures without having a plan to end pandemic restrictions.

I understand why we looked to restrictions at the very start of the pandemic. I think we did that for several reasons. The government needed time to figure out what COVID was, particularly as we were watching the body bags pile up in different parts of the country. There was a desire to try to contain COVID. We now know that is not possible. COVID zero is not possible. It is not a thing. We have to learn to live with it.

Restrictions were supposed to buy us time to get vaccines and therapeutics. We have both. Thank God we have both. Restrictions were supposed to incent people to get vaccinated, and very many Canadians have been vaccinated and have been boosted, and I want to thank them for that. However, I would argue that after six months under many of these restrictions, the people who have not been vaccinated to this date have probably made a choice, and frankly, the political rhetoric around vaccination that we saw during the federal election campaign did nothing to help raise vaccination levels. All it did was divide our country further.

My last point is that restrictions were ostensibly put in place to buy politicians at all levels of government time to build up capacity in our very broken health care system.

On the first four points, we do not need restrictions anymore to do those things. On the fifth point, to build up capacity and deal with Canada's broken health care system, restrictions are not going to do that; only political will gets that done.

This bill misses the mark, and I would like to see the federal government immediately put forward a plan to end pandemic restrictions. I think that would take the temperature down across the country, and it would also serve to give us a starting point to think about how we are recovering as a country from what has been collective trauma across our nation. That needs to be the starting point.

The thing this bill does not address, which it really should have, given the amount of spending in it, is that point number five I just mentioned: how we are addressing Canada's broken health care system. I know a lot of this fourth round of restrictions was to do with worry about whether a few hundred emergent patients suffering from COVID would overload our ICUs across this country. I know health care is provincial jurisdiction. The federal government also has a convening role in a national crisis to ask provincial governments how we can help, how we can fix this problem and how we can support the doctors and nurses, who are rightly asking for solutions from all of us.

We cannot point fingers at each other across levels of government and then expect Canadians to continue to sacrifice through restrictions and continued impingements on our freedom. We cannot keep expecting to divide Canadians, so I really hope the government will turn its attention to those types of forward-looking measures, when it comes to moving into a state of endemic management for COVID, figuring out how we can unite each other and figure out how we can have common ground and understand one another, rather than just using political rhetoric to try to drive wedges.

I hope the federal government somehow uses its convening role to see how we can support the provinces and fix our broken health care system so this does not happen again. I hope the federal government commits to ensuring these types of restrictions we have seen over the last couple of years are not normalized and that we put safeguards around when the federal government can actually use these, so that Canadians are not sort of sitting is a state of suspended terror or uncertainty on when they are forward again. I hope the federal government actually puts some resources into ramping up the pandemic warning system. We should not have to be relying on data from the WHO and other areas. We should be having our own data to be able to figure out how we can best manage our borders.

There are so many things we could be doing, but I feel this bill is a continuation of the status quo in the middle of a national crisis, rather than saying how we get out of that crisis and heal the rifts from the collective trauma our nation has gone through, and then focusing our efforts on rebuilding.

The last few days and weeks have been difficult on every Canadian. I have gotten so many emails and calls from people of all political stripes and proclivities panicked and worried about the future, and it is our job here to give that stability and that sense of hope moving forward. I watched question period today, and we all have to do a lot better.

The interim leader of the Conservative Party of Canada asked the Prime Minister to meet and has proposed a meeting across party lines with all the party leaders to figure out not only how we can move forward and how we can ensure that critical infrastructure is not being blockaded, but also how we can ensure that pandemic restrictions are removed. These are both reasonable to move forward, and they are what we are here to do. That is our jobs. We cannot keep trying to take a side one way or the other and try to think something is going to happen. There has to be an acknowledgement of an issue on both, and I do not see that happening here.

This is less of an admonishment and more of an encouragement to all of my colleagues who are listening today, and to anyone who is listening at home. If we do not start taking these things seriously, we are going to keep seeing this spiral and disintegration. So many different generations have worked so hard to build our country up, not tear it down. It is our job here to make sure we do so.

With that, I encourage my colleagues to work together across party lines to come up with solutions, take the temperature down and invest in our future.

[Ruby Sahota, Liberal, Brampton North, ON]

Madam Speaker, I found my colleague's speech to be quite interesting.

First, I am a person of faith as well, and she thanks God for the rapid tests and vaccines this country has now procured. I know she was a big critic on whether we would be able to do all of those things.

I would say that we should be thanking the government for being able to manage in such difficult times. We were able to procure more than enough vaccines for our country. I know that this member was basically demanding that the government provide rapid tests to all the provinces. We did so. This fiscal update provides all of those measures. It provides for ventilation in schools.

It asks, and we did ask, the provinces what they need. They needed funding to create vaccine passports at the time. They needed supports for their businesses. This fiscal update would do all of those things.

I am a little tired of hearing, from the opposition, these extreme ideas. At the very beginning of the pandemic, the opposition members were saying to shut down all borders immediately. Now they want us to open—

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

I have to give the hon. member for Calgary Nose Hill the opportunity to answer.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I just want to thank my team and my caucus for standing behind me for over a year as I stood in the House as the official opposition critic for health. In the role of the opposition, during that time, we held the government to account. When we were not getting vaccines and other countries were, every day we were in the House, asking questions as to when they were coming, as well as in committee meeting after committee meeting. That is the role of the opposition: to put pressure on the government to make sure that it is delivering results for Canadians. In a functional Parliament, that is what we should be doing.

I want to thank my colleagues in the Conservative Party for lifting me up during some tough times, and lifting my team up to get that job done. I am proud to say that.

My colleague spoke in the past tense about measures that the government had taken, such as vaccine passports and these things. We have to be talking in the future tense. We have to be saying where we are, going forward. We cannot be looking in the—

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

We have to give more opportunity for questions.

The hon. member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to see you in that chair.

I thank my hon. colleague from Calgary Nose Hill for her speech. She was extremely critical of the government's lack of leadership and vision when it comes to health.

I wonder if she could comment on what proposals she would make if she were sitting on the government side. Is it not time to provide funding to the provinces?

There is a historic shortfall. Over the years, health transfers have declined from 50% to 22%. As a compromise, Quebec, the provinces and the territories have unanimously requested an immediate increase to health transfers to cover 35% of costs.

Would my colleague support this measure?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, who is always bright and good to work with. We need to have a much more robust response from the government on addressing Canada's broken health care system. Funding is certainly a large component of that. We need to make sure that the provinces are adequately funded.

We also need to look at some of the significant learning that has occurred, and at the cracks that have been exposed in our health care system throughout the pandemic with a level of honesty and determination in order to fix it. We cannot sweep these problems under the rug.

The Conservative Party of Canada had several ideas, in the last election, of what we needed to do. In the spirit of bipartisanship, I look forward to working with members of all political parties to see how we can fix this because we—

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

One last question, the hon. member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay.

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

Madam Speaker, I know that the member for Calgary Nose Hill and I agree on a number of things. We agree that my riding makes very good wine, and I agree with her that Canadians are struggling to get by.

There are Canadians who are not struggling to get by. Those are the billionaires of Canada, the ultrawealthy. Could the member comment on the NDP's idea that it is time for the ultrawealthy to pay their fair share, so that the tax burden of Canada is not on the shoulders of those who are struggling to get by?

Would she agree that we need a wealth tax on the ultrawealthy, so that we can make sure the costs of the pandemic are shared equitably?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for raising one of the key economic engines of his riding, the wine industry. I certainly know that our party has several ideas for tax relief, around the escalator tax, to incentivize growth in that sector.

I believe that all Canadians, particularly low-income Canadians right now, should be afforded some measure of tax relief, but particularly low-income Canadians to ensure that they can make—

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

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House once again.

How do we begin to go over the country’s finances under the Liberal government? There is always so much spending and it is impossible to keep track of it all. It can give someone a headache if they try to keep up with it. Many of my fellow Conservatives are doing a great job of going through these spending items, showing how a lot of them do not make any sense and helpfully explaining how to handle Canada’s finances more effectively to get a better deal for the taxpayer.

I think it needs to be said, as a general comment, that in difficult times it is actually more important, not less, to make sure that we are managing our finances carefully and with close attention. The government must not act like it received a blank cheque from Canadians. However, when we are dealing with unusually large amounts of money, and when our minds are easily distracted by the news and events surrounding us here in this country, the temptation is always there to fall into a spending spree and make impulsive decisions without clearly thinking about the future and the ramifications of the decisions we make.

Everybody knows by now that we have entered a time of soaring inflation and supply chain shortages. Maybe it took an extra while for the Liberals to acknowledge it, because the warnings were coming from the official opposition, but they got there eventually and recognized that it was more than “Justinflation”.

To a degree, some challenges were expected during all the uncertainty and real disruptions to do with COVID and two years of lockdowns. That is the sort of thing that has been affecting countries around the world, which has been the government’s favourite talking point for a little while. However, it is not the perfect excuse that the Liberals are trying to make it out to be. Their mandate for truckers crossing the border, for example, at a time when supply chains are fragile with moving goods, is only one of the latest examples of their wrong-headed and unbalanced policies. We are already behind 18,000 truckers, and the mandates are only further exacerbating that issue. The Prime Minister's inflammatory and extreme rhetoric has also not been helping. However, I am not so much speaking on national unity today. It is the economic side of these problems that is the focus of debating the bill in front of us right now.

As far as handling COVID is concerned, the Liberals really have been normalizing lockdowns in practice. They have gone along as if it was a fallback or default position. Sometimes it seems as if they are stuck in the spring of 2020. The Liberals did not listen to feedback inside or outside of the House about supporting the provinces, strengthening their health care funding and providing all kinds of preventive measures as requested. The Conservatives demanded that they maximize all the incentives for businesses to hire and for more people to keep working, but now we find ourselves with ongoing labour shortages across different sectors. We are not out of the woods yet.

Even though we do need to be prepared for the worst-case scenario, it is still concerning to see the government announce a local lockdown program when it has consistently lacked a balanced approach. It would be one thing if the government was caught off guard by a crisis and had trouble finding its way, but with the Liberals and their economic update, it is about so much more than just COVID. Our finances were not in good shape before 2020 because of the same government’s mismanagement. We started off weaker than we needed to be, and it is obvious that the Liberals have not learned anything and are not willing to correct the course.

Over the last couple of years as a member of Parliament, I have had the chance to work on a few committees. In each of them, I have seen the same pattern up close. The government will make announcement after announcement for our future economy yet to come, while it does not hesitate to actively undermine our strongest sectors in the current economy. We cannot go on spending as much as we are if we do not have a strong economy to back it up.

When we ask them practical questions about the most basic details of their dream economy, there is not an answer, because questioning them on it just kills the mood. The Liberals are shooting our country in the foot and asking questions about it later, but it is okay, as there is a buyback program for the proverbial gun anyway. They will happily bring in new restrictions on people’s lives through taxes and new laws, but they do not seem to care as much about making sure that ordinary life can function in their new utopia.

First, they brought in their carbon tax, with no regard for the disproportionate impacts it has on rural areas, like the ones I serve, and the most vulnerable populations, even though their regulatory review admits it. It specifically singles out seniors living on a fixed income, but also single mothers, who are most at risk of experiencing energy poverty. As the carbon tax continues to escalate, The Liberals are looking to pile on the clean fuel standard, which has another carbon pricing mechanism attached to it. These people are only going to feel more and more crushed by the burden of the government's tax-heavy approach.

However, there is no need to worry because they say they are preparing our economy for the future. They promise a boom for industry with electric vehicles and biofuels in Canada. Again, without a plan, it sounds too good to be true.

A couple of days ago in committee, I followed up with the Minister of International Trade on a potential problem under CUSMA. Since coming into force in July of 2020, we have had a window of time to prepare for a requirement to regionally source 75% of lithium for EV batteries with minimal impacts on tariffs. If we are unable to do so there will be a massive increase in tariffs. With or without them, we could easily fall behind in this new industry, which appears to be crucial for the government's direction. What if it does not work out as well as expected?

I asked the minister about it a year ago. She did not seem to know what it was, and with no clear answer since then I decided to bring it up again this week, one year later. I am still not sure if the minister is actually aware of it and it is hard to get anything done if one does not know what one might have to deal with.

When it comes to new mines or resource projects in this area, industry has clearly said that the Liberal government's own impact assessment process is getting in the way and causing delays. The timelines for approval take way too long and it does not have to be this way. Our Canadian economy depends on resource development, the energy industry, specifically oil and gas, as a major contributor for work and wealth, but it is the same Liberal legislation, with an activist environment minister, that would aggressively shut it down while preventing the projects it will need to replace it.

If the Liberals want to keep spending away, where will the money come from? This is not the only way Liberal policies are working at cross-purposes either. Ever since the Liberals first floated their idea of reducing fertilizer emissions by 30%, producers and industry have been deeply concerned that this would follow the European Union's model of restricting the total amount of fertilizer used. It went with a 20% hard-cap reduction on fertilizer usage. This could cause huge losses for crop production.

Following its efforts, I raised this issue multiple times and the government has not ruled it out here in the House of Commons. Last fall, Meyers Norris Penny released a commissioned report on the estimated impact of such a policy in the coming years. By 2030, according to the report, losses of crop yields for corn, canola and spring wheat could total tens of millions of tonnes, costing up to nearly $48 billion to the Canadian economy. For Canadian agriculture, which is already a leading example of environmental efficiency and sustainability, this would be nothing short of devastating.

Considering the estimated number of losses to crops, this would also create new problems for trade exports and disruptions to domestic or global supply chains. Price pressures with reduced supply can easily combine with inflation to make it worse. What makes it even worse yet is this. Part of the Liberals' plan for their new economy for the new future is going to be biofuels. We all know that both corn and canola are the main crops we are going to be growing for biofuels going forward. According to this report, the number of bushels that are going to be produced is going to massively drop and we are not going to be able to meet this demand to fuel the future set out in the Liberals' plan.

Do members know what the government's response continues to be to all of this? It disagrees with the report, which is fair enough, except it has not even done its own impact studies or clearly laid out to farmers and producers what it is going to do. I was glad to hear it is looking at options besides heavily reducing fertilizer, but the main issue I am trying to raise today, and in the past, is that it continues to refuse to rule out the hard cap for the use of fertilizer. This whole time the government could have reassured us by saying it is not going to happen, but here we are again. It will not do it.

The Liberals need to think twice about ruining their own plan for biofuels where there is going to be even more demand for canola. How will it work for our producers who are having a harder time growing it underneath this new regime it is putting in place? The input costs are already through the roof, both for seed, fertilizer and spray. Machinery costs are also through the roof. Somehow I do not think they understand the practical realities and decisions that our farmers have to consider. The government already is not taking the concerns about land used for food versus fuel seriously, but now it wants to play with the idea of restricting fertilizer.

Despite all the uncertainties right now with inflation and supply chains in our economy, Canadians can be sure of at least one thing. The current Liberal government has been and will continue to be a disaster for our economy. It really could be so much better if it would only listen.

[Kody Blois, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

Madam Speaker, the member mentioned the economy during his remarks. I would remind him that, prepandemic, this government had resided over an economy where unemployment was at a 40-year low and our debt-to-GDP ratio was declining. During this pandemic we have been there to support businesses. Our job numbers are strong, as is our GDP, notwithstanding the challenges there.

What I want to ask the member specifically is this. When I look at the Hansards from 2020 and 2021, he made a lot of mention of blockades and the economic impact they were having in his part of the country, and indeed elsewhere in the country. I have yet to hear the same type of language from him as sometime in 2020, calling for the protesters to go home. I have yet to hear that language.

I will go on record right now to say it is important that the protesters go home, not only those here in Ottawa but also those in Windsor and in Coutts. Will the member take the opportunity to do the same thing on the record right now for his constituents and all Canadians?

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, back in 2020, one of the main issues was inaction from the government, and we have inaction again when it comes to this blockade, just like we did back then. It refused to act, let it go on and on, hoped that it would take care of itself and the pandemic basically took care of it, so it did not have to do anything back then. Today we are looking for the government to actually acknowledge the concerns that Canadians have. These hard-working everyday Canadians are bringing it to Ottawa and putting it right in front of the Liberals, so they cannot ignore it. They are not listening.

Canadians want to be heard, and that is what this is about. They want to hear what the government has to say, so I would ask that it listen, just like we were asking it to do back in 2020.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands for his speech.

He began his speech talking about lockdowns and vaccination. I totally agree with him. However, I would like to point out that if the provinces had received the health transfers, the situation might not be as serious as it is today, and perhaps the country would be less divided.

In Senneterre, in my riding, the Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux de l'Abitibi‑Témiscamingue had to cut overnight ER services and the obstetrics department. What people have gone through is simply unbelievable. Long-term care homes have been devastated.

The Conservative Party seemed to have lots of plans during the election campaign. From the member's perspective, what is the best plan for ensuring that health transfers are made to the provinces as planned, including an increase to cover 35% of costs?

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, we had a campaign that called for the increases in transfers to provinces. Prior to the pandemic, we heard many health experts say that capacity was one of the biggest issues that we faced. We were consistently operating between 95% and 110%, and there was no real plan back then to address that. We still do not have a plan from the government on how to address that going forward.

That is what Canadians are looking for. Throughout this debate, and with what has been happening with COVID, they wanted to see a plan from the government going forward. With this budget update, there is no clear plan to address the shortcomings that have been identified over the last two years.

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

Madam Speaker, during the member's speech, he made a reference to the fertilizer reduction strategy. It is something I have taken a great interest in during my time as the NDP's agriculture critic over the last four years. I want to get his comments on the National Farmers Union. It says that Fertilizer Canada has produced a simplistic self-serving model that does nothing to illuminate the actual path that farmers must follow to reduce emissions in line with the requirements of our international commitments. The union also said that its report provided no useful insights on how farmers can contribute to our low-emissions future.

Reducing fertilizer is, of course, going to help farmers' bottom line. Does the member agree that there are other paradigms farmers can follow to achieve the same yields, but with less fertilizer usage? It just requires a collective effort and more research on how to do so.

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

The hon. member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands has 15 seconds for his response.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, further research is always going to be a big part of it going forward. We have a great agricultural program at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Innovation is going to be a big part of it, but again, at the end of the day, the government has laid out a biofuels strategy, and farmers need canola and corn to be able to meet that. The number one way they are going to meet that is through increasing the yield potential of those crops. Fertilizer is how to do it.

In particular, nitrogen is one of the elements these crops use and it is one of the things they are going to try to target. That is what the European Union targeted with its reductions, but those crops need it the most. The two—

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

The time has expired.

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

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

The question is on the motion.

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.

The hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, we request a recorded vote, please.

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

Pursuant to order made on Thursday, November 25, 2021, the division stands deferred until Thursday, February 10, 2022, at the expiry of the time provided for Oral Questions.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, if you canvass the House, you might find unanimous consent to call it 6:44 p.m. so we can get to the take-note debate.

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

It is now the late show, to adjourn.

Does the hon. member have unanimous consent?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

The House resumed from February 9 consideration of the motion that Bill C-8, An Act to implement certain provisions of the economic and fiscal update tabled in Parliament on December 14, 2021 and other measures, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[The Speaker, Anthony Rota]

It being 3:17 p.m., pursuant to order made on Thursday, November 25, 2021, the House will now proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded division on the motion at second reading stage of Bill C-8.

Call in the members.

(The House divided on the motion, which was agreed to on the following division:)

Vote #22

[The Speaker, Anthony Rota]

I declare the motion carried.

Accordingly, the bill stands referred to the Standing Committee on Finance.

(Bill read the second time and referred to a committee)