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

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

Madam Speaker, I did spend time in Newfoundland this fall. What a beautiful part of the country. I know the member has one of the best areas from coast to coast.

The blue ocean economy that the member mentioned is extremely important. There is a $1.5-trillion opportunity that exists in ocean technology and innovation. We had the opportunity as the Atlantic caucus to engage with Kendra MacDonald, CEO of Canada's ocean supercluster. They are doing tremendous work, and I know it matters to that member's riding. We need to continue that work through the superclusters, whether it be the automation one in Ontario or the protein industries supercluster in the west. Those five superclusters are doing tremendous work, and we need to continue to support them.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Madam Speaker, I want to ask my good friend from Kings—Hants about some of the statistics he quoted, including the one about the best debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7. Surely he has some better numbers than that, because that is clearly not the case when we look at the country as a whole and when we look at the nature of what he is talking about here.

The member said Conservatives need to pick a lane. Which lane are we in as far as overspending by $560 billion goes? The Parliamentary Budget Officer says $176 billion had nothing to do with COVID. Money has been spent on COVID, which we have supported while we get through this pandemic, but could the member please tell us why the government had to spend $176 billion extra on things that had absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic?

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

Madam Speaker, let me congratulate the member for Calgary Centre. He is very articulate, and I really appreciate his opportunities and interventions in the House.

I will say that I was quoting, and he will have to go back into Hansard to see if I misrepresented. I was quoting that Canada has the best net debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7, and that number is quoted directly from Finance Canada. If he takes issue with it, I would encourage the member to raise it in his committee.

What I find ironic about the Conservative Party is that when I ask the question back as to what program they would not have supported, there is very rarely any answer as to what that would be.

To answer the member's question, the pandemic is front and centre in terms of the issues that the government is tackling, but we have other issues to tackle, such as reconciliation, climate change and continuing to support different innovations in the economy, as we were just talking about. The idea that the government could only spend on the pandemic and not on other priorities is certainly not the way we see it on this side of the House.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is a real pleasure to be speaking tonight.

I am going to be totally honest with members: Given all the great and wild events of today, I am going to be doing this speech extemporaneously and sharing my time with the hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan.

When I look at the bill, Bill C-8, in the context of where we are today in Canada, I have a number of key concerns. Bill C-8 in itself is not necessarily the worst bill, but the concern is the context in which we are looking at Bill C-8 in Parliament today and all of the other things happening in our great nation. Part 1 of Bill C-8 talks about changes to the Income Tax Act, including a new refundable tax credit for improving air quality. Paragraph (b) of the summary talks about a new tax credit for travellers in the north. Paragraph (c) talks about the school supplies tax credit and increasing it from 15% to 25%. Paragraph (d) of the summary talks about a new refundable tax credit in the backstop provinces for fuel on farms. All of these measures, in and of themselves, are not bad measures.

Furthermore, the Underused Housing Tax Act taxing foreign buyers in this country is not necessarily the worst thing. The part 3 six-year limitation on the loans offered to small businesses in Canada to be in line with the student loan program in Canada is not the worst measure. Part 4 would authorize payments to be made from the consolidated revenue fund to put new ventilation systems into schools. Part 5 has more money for vaccine- and COVID-19-related initiatives. Part 6 has $1.72 billion from the consolidated revenue fund for COVID tests. We have actually been asking for those for a long time, and even despite all the money being spent, the government still has not brought them to us. Part 7 has changes to the Employment Insurance Act.

All of these measures in this omnibus bill, in and of themselves, are not bad clauses. The problem, however, relates to accountability, transparency and the state of the nation. This afternoon, right before I ran into the House, realizing I was going to be speaking soon, I had a quick call with the Parliamentary Budget Officer. He reminded me of the report he provided to Parliament and all Canadians on the state of the government's finances and what they have reported to Parliament.

Since the election, this is only the fifth sitting week we have had, and I remember very clearly that the public accounts were finally tabled on December 14. This was six to seven months later than normal. In fact, the PBO report outlined that Canada was an outlier compared to other developed nations with respect to financial transparency and accountability. What is even more egregious is that two days later, with barely enough time for us to receive a copy of the audited reports from the various government departments to look at what the consequences of that spending were and how it actually materialized on line-item reporting in government departments across the country, the government tabled Bill C-2.

In Bill C-2, the government requested billions upon billions of dollars more, which it asked Parliament to approve to address the economy and COVID-19. How can the government ask parliamentarians to indebt future generations with more and more spending when we have not even had the time to review what was already tabled? We have to be more serious about how we are treating taxpayer dollars in the House.

I can also remember that in the early days of this pandemic, this official opposition was there for Canadians. We stood with the government to approve the necessary expenditures to make sure people did not lose their homes and that they were going to be able to be paid when the lockdowns came, but we are past that time now. The country has changed a lot in two years. In fact, on January 21, when I was driving into Vancouver for some meetings and I was listening to Dr. Bonnie Henry on CKNW, I was shocked by what I heard, because just the week prior, my son's day care had been shut, and my wife and I had to juggle a two-year-old at home while we were both trying to do our jobs. The school had to shut down because they were following provincial health orders. We agreed that was a great thing and that we needed to follow those protocols to keep children safe. No one is disputing that.

However, the week afterward, when I got out of the car after listening to CKNW and Dr. Bonnie Henry, I actually walked away feeling that things were going to improve, that the omicron virus was not having such a bad impact on people as Dr. Henry had originally anticipated. She said it was time to start changing our thinking about how we treated this virus and its mutations. She actually said we need to start looking at COVID-19 and omicron in the context of other respiratory illnesses like influenza and other viruses.

More recently, Dr. Kieran Moore from Ontario said, “We have let our lives be controlled for the last two years in a significant amount of fear and now we are going to have to change some of that thinking.” He goes to say that we cannot eliminate this threat and that we have to learn to live with it.

Here in Parliament, Dr. Theresa Tam recently said, “I think many experts believe that the so-called herd immunity may not be achievable with this virus because it undergoes constant evolution, so what you're looking at is this endemic state where people will get reinfected over time as immunity wanes”.

I interpret that to say, in other words, that versions of COVID-19 are going to be with us for a while and that our public health officers are telling us to start re-evaluating both the lockdowns and the way, perhaps, that governments are spending money in conjunction with this terrible virus that has had such a negative impact on all of our lives.

How does this relate back to Bill C-8? It starts back in our ridings.

On Saturday, I went by my office to pick up some materials before flying into Ottawa on Sunday, and there was a protest at my office. There were a lot of angry people who were not pleased with me. I went and spoke with them. A lot of people were ticked off that I spoke with them. The people at the protest were also ticked off at me because I am pro-vaccine.

I said to them they have a right to be angry right now. For two years, we have been living in a state of fear. For two years, our lives have been upended. For two years, my young children have not known anything different. My two-year-old son only knows the world of COVID.

What I am encouraging the government to do today is to start looking past COVID-19 now and to stop telling Canadians we still have to live with the same type of fear that we perhaps had to live with two years ago. We can start to move on.

That is why I am so displeased that the government is not giving Parliament and the House enough time to review expenditures, to understand the consequences of how we are spending money, the consequences of what lockdowns are doing and the consequences of not changing our thinking very rapidly.

People are angry. We see that outside today. People are looking for hope, and what all Canadians are looking for is a bit more transparency and a bit more openness from the Liberal government in terms of getting our lives back.

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

Madam Speaker, although I really did appreciate the references to the provincial chief medical officer, Dr. Kieran Moore, a good friend of mine from Kingston, I fail to see the connection the member was trying to make between what those medical professionals were saying and the state of the pandemic we are in now.

I do not think the member is incorrect at all when he says the pandemic is moving into an endemic state and that COVID will be with us for a while to come, but that is what this bill is specifically about. It is about starting to put resources into places so we can deal with the endemic state that the pandemic is entering into. For example, we are making sure we give schools, through the provinces, money to improve their ventilation systems and we are making sure we help provinces with their proof of vaccination certificates.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Madam Speaker, the Province of British Columbia was able to handle its vaccination certificates just fine. That clause in this bill is a political clause more than anything else. We already have the technology in every province to implement that system. What we need to look at now is when we can move past that so that people can get their lives back to normal.

[Caroline Desbiens, Bloc, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

The Bloc Québécois is very concerned that the government has remained silent about the health transfers Quebec and the provinces have called for. As my colleague talked about in more depth earlier, the federal government has been failing in its duty to transfer sufficient health care funding to the provinces for a very long time. Now this problem has caught up with us.

I would like to ask my colleague what he thinks about the fact that the government absolutely does not want to hear about immediate health transfers with no strings attached for the provinces and Quebec so that we can finally deal with this urgent situation.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—Charlevoix.

I agree with some of what she was saying. We need to let the provinces do what they want when it comes to managing our health care and education systems. The federal government needs to respect the provinces' jurisdictions.

[Blake Desjarlais, NDP, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague from the Conservative bench.

Many aspects of the bill, particularly the sections related to housing and pandemic relief for schools, are in fact good measures. However, what I am concerned about is where the government has not put the resources.

There are many things in the bill that, of course, have some good aspects to it, but there are many that do not. One of the biggest aspects that I believe is missing, and that I hope the member can comment on, is related to making sure that there is support and resources for enforcement to ensure that our health care providers across the country are truly protected, and also to ensure that we provide the resources, as the member from the Bloc just mentioned, for more support for the provinces.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Madam Speaker, I have two quick points, and I thank the member for Edmonton Griesbach for the question.

I believe that the Government of Canada should not be choosing which provincial program it wants to support. Provinces are better off making those decisions on the ground. They know where to allocate their resources most effectively.

Secondly, on housing, the government could have done what the House agreed to do in June, which is to ban foreign buyers, and not make a complicated taxation system that will have very little to no effect on the role of foreign buyers in our market already.

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

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House today, as at any time, and to address another bill from the government that deals with the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. I will get to some of the specific provisions of Bill C-8, but I do want to start by talking broadly about the some of the issues that are very live in debates around the circumstances of the pandemic right now.

Two of the big areas of discussion we have are about the relationship between science and policy-making as well as questions about freedom and the importance we attach to freedom and how we define that concept in the country. I want to talk about those two concepts to set the stage for the rest of my remarks.

By most accounts, the history of modern science starts with that great figure of Galileo, who tragically ended his life under house arrest, persecuted for championing the simple idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Galileo's story is often presented as a clash between scientific rationalism and religious dogmatism, but I think the truth is not quite so simple. Galileo was a person of serious faith and Copernicus, whose heliocentric theory Galileo defended, was actually a priest as well as a scientist.

While having plenty of religious supporters, Galileo also had many scientific detractors. In many cases his critics opposed him on scientific grounds, arguing that his theories constituted bad science and should be suppressed because they involved misinformation. Regardless of their deeper motivation, both sides in the argument over heliocentrism claimed to have science on their side.

A better way of understanding the conflict between Galileo and his detractors is as a dispute within science and about the appropriate method of scientific inquiry. Galileo championed free scientific inquiry while his persecutors emphasized trust in established scientific authority and conclusion. Galileo was presenting new data and advancing new ideas, ideas that challenged an existing scientific paradigm and establishment.

He believed, rightly in my view, that the progress of science requires constant empirically grounded questioning. He did not believe that efforts to preserve public trust in established science justified the rejection or suppression of emerging empirical data. It was a dispute between empiricism on the one hand and the demand for trust in the cultural, religious and scientific authorities on the other.

As a student growing up and hearing the story, it was very easy to feel superior to Galileo's establishment-perpetuating persecutors. However, in the context of the current pandemic, it may be a bit easier to understand why some people thought that the propagation of scientific ideas outside of the scientific consensus was dangerous. The questioning of scientific authority in any time can lead to distrust, confusion, unrest and the drawing of erroneous conclusions. Galileo's ideas could have turned out to be wrong, but despite its risk, this process of reasoned and empirically grounded questioning of received wisdom has always allowed the society to draw new conclusions and soar to new heights, figuratively and literally. Our commitment to questioning old ideas and seeking new discoveries has the potential to push ourselves still further, despite the friction that we may experience along the way.

During this pandemic, the public has been encouraged to trust the science, but in practice this has generally meant trusting the established public health authorities, rather than holding public health authorities accountable through rigorous empirical critique. Public health authorities deserve our thanks for their incredible efforts during immensely challenging times, but they have also gotten some things wrong and given health advice that has been contradicted later or was being contradicted by public health authorities in other jurisdictions.

Points of dissidence have generally been explained on the basis that the science has changed. In many cases though, such as with masking at the beginning, public health advice changed quite independently from new empirical evidence. Public health advice on masking seemed to be much more a function of the available supply of masks than it did of actual new evidence on mask effectiveness.

Even so, science can only ever move forward if it is first questioned and put to the test. The process of inquiry of advancing hypotheses that are initially regarded with skepticism is not anti-science, rather it is fundamental to science. There would never be any scientific progress if people were not willing to question established ideas or patterns of thinking.

There are many potential examples of the seeming disconnect between official scientific advice and emerging empirical evidence. Many people are asking why the scientific advice in different jurisdictions around the appropriateness of lockdowns is very different from public health authorities in other countries, looking at the science or coming to very different conclusions than some public health authorities in Canada.

I have spoken in the past about some of the evidence around the relationship between low vitamin D and COVID-19. A systematic review of scientific literature published in January 2021 found the following:

Most of the articles demonstrated that vitamin D status in the blood can determine the chances of catching coronavirus, coronavirus severity, and mortality. Therefore, keeping appropriate blood levels of vitamin D through supplementation or through sunshine exposure is recommended for the public to be able to cope with the pandemic.

About half a dozen meta-analyses conducted since have come to the same conclusion.

This is an interesting example, because in response to a question about vitamin D asked here on April 22, the former health minister described recommendations for vitamin D supplementation as emerging from “the myriad of fake news articles that are circulating around the Internet”. While the former health minister I am sure would like to be thought of as being proscience, her approach to new empirical information has many of the hallmarks of the Inquisition, that is, an approach that defends conventional wisdom even when that conventional wisdom is contradicted by emerging empirical evidence that is clear throughout the scientific literature. If we falsely equate a proscience position with a proestablishment position, we are then undermining the process of questioning an analysis that is vitally necessary for any kind of scientific process.

I encourage this kind of open-minded re-evaluation to be applied to all aspects of COVID-19 policy. This applies not just in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences. Our policy responses to COVID-19 need to continually grow and change in response to new evidence. We will not be able to grow and change if the necessary process of challenging pre-existing conclusions with emerging evidence is suppressed.

On the subject of freedom as such, we can see how what is true for science is also true for other domains of human action, including the freedom and the capacity to ask questions, to present unpopular opinions and to live according to one's sincerely held beliefs while respecting the rights of others to do the same. The ability and the character competency required to do this are what make the process of human progress possible.

On these issues, John Stuart Mill points the way for us. Mill did not argue that freedom was necessarily natural or that freedom was some a priori human right. He did not need to make those arguments because he was able to show that freedom is good because it is useful. This seminal thinker of what we used to call liberalism argued persuasively that when people are able to challenging existing norms and practices and to live in different ways, society is furnished with empirical data that helps others understand what actually leads to human happiness.

If I live my life in one way and the Speaker lives her life in another, then others are able to see the degree to which these modes of behaviour contribute to human flourishing or not, and are therefore able to shape their lives, at least partially, in response to that information. Mill used the term “experiments in living” to describe this process of learning from the choices of others and their consequences. That applies to experiments in science and also applies to experiments in living. Greater variation and a willingness to buck established trends help to furnish a broader range of data points from which we can then draw useful conclusions.

Unfortunately, modern progressivism deviates from liberalism in its lack of humility. Modern progressives assume they know the right path and therefore can impose it. They assume that an inevitable trajectory of history makes every step they take necessarily right and good, so they easily justify any action that moves things along toward their chosen ends.

Concretely, the government's agenda includes highly coercive policies. For instance, it is imposing vaccination on the unwilling. We can also talk about draconian new Internet regulations and a planned new values test for charities. That is just what we know so far.

True liberalism is about saying that people should not go to jail, should not be penalized and should not lose their jobs just because they hold views or want to make choices that I personally do not agree with. A person can be anticoercion while still being provaccination. A person can be for free speech without liking everything that gets said as a result.

We see clearly from its agenda that the government is not a liberal government in the classic sense. It is an illiberal government. It is a government that has turned its back on classic liberalism and is instead embracing an authoritarian progressivism. It is a government that values being woke over being free. We need to re-engage, in our response to the pandemic, with classic wisdom around the importance of honest scientific inquiry and the importance of human freedom.

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

Madam Speaker, notwithstanding the fact that the member promised he would get to the bill and he did not, he did address the issue of science and the evolution of science. In particular, he used an example about masks.

The member would have us believe that because some people questioned the use of masks in the beginning, and as we have evolved through our understanding of the virus we have now come to the conclusion that certain masks, i.e. cloth masks, are not as good as others, that somehow means those people were right.

What the member is basically trying to do is say that science is the process of proving that because we claimed it in the beginning, when it is not. Science is a process of evolving through learning about the disease, learning about how it is transmitted, and learning about how masks work.

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

Madam Speaker, the member had a very confrontational tone in the process of posing the question. I am not sure if we actually disagree, very much, on what the process of science is. What I said is what I think he said at the end, which was that the process of scientific inquiry requires asking questions, challenging received wisdom, experimenting and putting forward hypotheses, and then that empirically grounded process of questioning leads to new conclusions.

I made a point in my remarks about the importance of that process and of legitimate empirical questioning of received authority. At the time the member refers to, I was looking at the science on masks. I took a bit of a risk as a member of Parliament by saying that I thought our public health authorities were wrong in their advice not to wear masks. I said that at the time, which was maybe a bit of a risk, but I read the empirical evidence and I thought that it was an important thing to say. It turned out that the thing I said was correct. It shows the value of empirically grounded questioning.

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

Madam Speaker, to be honest, I am not sure where my colleague was going with all that. He said a lot of things in his speech that I find problematic, including the fact that he is questioning the science here.

I am not sure that we are all ready to say that people are free to think differently and to believe that what science is telling us now is wrong. He suggested that people have been imprisoned for disagreeing with the government.

I find that freedom is a convenient excuse for a lot of things, and we are seeing that in the streets right now. Is my colleague saying that the health measures that have been put in place to combat the virus are not legitimate?

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

Madam Speaker, there were many things I could respond to in that question, but I probably will not have time for them.

The member was sort of saying that freedom is used in a lot of different ways these days, and that freedom could be used in this way and that way. My point is that there is this space for human freedom that should go beyond the things that I like. I might say that people should get vaccinated, but that does not mean that I should force that view on other people. That does not mean that I should try to coerce people by saying they should be fired, for example.

There is a legitimate space for individuals to say that, for whatever reason or through whatever process, they have come to a different conclusion. I believe we have to retain the idea of classic liberalism that individuals should be able to make choices about themselves and their own private spheres without being threatened with job losses or other consequences for coming to different conclusions.