Mr. Speaker, in a way, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-4 at third reading today. This bill was introduced at the beginning of this Parliament and was left untouched all summer. When we returned in the fall, we spent a lot of time reworking the bill in committee. I will explain later, but this is one of the bills where the fact that the Bloc Québécois holds the balance of power in committee was a boon for first-time homebuyers.
Let us start with the genesis of this bill. This year's election campaign was pretty odd. We had a Prime Minister who did not know what he was talking about when it came to economics. I know that the Prime Minister is an economist, but he quickly turned into a politician. I am a politician too. There is not necessarily anything wrong with that, but being a Liberal politician is not always a good thing.
This Prime Minister saw that people were afraid of the Conservatives and that President Trump was making threats, so he decided he would say whatever it took to get elected, without any regard for the budgetary consequences. It was in that context that the current Prime Minister announced in January or February that he would eliminate the deficit.
Then he walked into a room, probably a back room somewhere, and the people around him told him that it was not going to happen. Instead, he decided to invent a new definition of operating deficit. His definition is disputed by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, does not align with how things are done in Singapore or Great Britain, and violates established accounting principles, but he decided to invent it in order to renege on his promise.
The same is true of the Liberals' budget framework during the election campaign. The Prime Minister said that the countertariffs would bring in $20 billion, that that money would be used to finance current spending and that this would help reduce deficits. We know that, in the end, the government received only a fraction of that amount in countertariffs. As a result, we are now facing a projected deficit of almost $80 billion.
If we are to believe most analysts, including the Parliamentary Budget Officer and Fitch Ratings, who believe that the government will not be able to achieve $50 billion in cost reductions over five years, the deficit is going to be even larger.
Despite this, despite the fact that the Liberal Party was unable to table a halfway decent financial framework, which we rather successfully picked apart during the election campaign, Bill C-4 includes election promises that were hastily made by the Prime Minister whenever he wanted to grab a vote from the left or the right.
Let us talk about the $26-billion tax cut over five years. A tax cut could be a good thing. It is okay to take care of the middle class. However, when do we see a tax cut like that without a budget, without a budget forecast and without any regard for the impact this will have on balancing public finances? What is more, there was no mention of what exactly would be cut. Everyone now knows that health care and seniors are paying the price. It is the carbon tax.
The Liberals, who were the champions of the carbon tax in the last Parliament, aggressively criticized the Conservatives for wanting to abolish the carbon tax. Suddenly, during the election campaign, the Liberals decided that votes, seats and power were more important than principles, the planet, the environment and, above all, their credibility, so they got rid of the carbon tax while stealing from Quebec. That is what is in Bill C-4.
We do agree with some of the measures, particularly the GST rebate for first-time buyers purchasing a new home. However, this was essentially an election stunt and should be viewed as such. First, there is the GST rebate on a new first home. It is important to understand that this measure is designed to stimulate demand, much like the tax-free first home savings account, or FHSA.
The Liberals have been saying for several years that housing prices are going up and up. Construction costs are up. Demand has also gone up a lot. Today, we know that there is also an element that is related to immigration, the population and demand. The Liberals decided to help first-time homebuyers, who are angry about the current market, so they can have the money to outbid others using a tax shelter. That is why they created the FHSA.
According to CMHC data, the FHSA allows a person, such as a young person whose father, mother, grandfather or grandmother has money to help them contribute to an FHSA, to go fuel bidding wars in the housing market, because the supply of houses is fixed in the very short term. The result is that people are fighting for the same houses.
Today, there is another measure that is very similar, and that is the GST rebate. New homes very quickly come up for sale in new subdivisions. There are people who can afford the down payment on very expensive homes. In my riding, there are now bungalows that cost almost $1 million. I know that in places like Vancouver or around Toronto, that is still considered affordable by some people's definition, but people back home cannot afford that. If these people get GST rebates on a new home because they are first-time homebuyers or because they have not owned a home in four years, that is a good thing.
The Liberals are accusing us of voting against the budget, even though we told them our priorities. The Bloc Québécois made six demands that were affordable, all things considered. These six demands had to be met in order for the Bloc Québécois to support the budget. One of our proposals was aimed at helping first-time homebuyers who do not receive money from their parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles to fill their FHSA. This measure was intended for those who do not necessarily have an income that would allow them to maximize these accounts and who have not yet saved enough for a down payment to buy their first home and, by the same token, obtain a GST rebate.
We proposed an interest-free loan from the government to help these people finance their down payment. It was a measure that would have cost $200 million or $300 million for all of Canada, from coast to coast to coast. This measure would have cost the government about $300 per year for every $10,000 loan it granted for a down payment. We are talking here about the down payment, not the total price of the home. This measure would have ensured that the least fortunate were not left behind. The government said no.
Let us now come back to Bill C-4, which is another example of the fact that, at the time, the Prime Minister did not know the difference between a party leader, someone who campaigns, and a prime minister. On March 20, when he was Prime Minister, he issued a press release saying that the government was going to refund the GST on new homes for first-time homebuyers. Some people started buying new homes. They thought it might be a good idea to buy a house in a new subdivision. People bought houses and signed contracts. They thought they were going to get their rebate because the Prime Minister had said they would. This was not announced during the election campaign, and the Prime Minister had said it himself. Then the Prime Minister called an election and launched his election campaign. He put on a show for 36 days and then recalled Parliament. All of a sudden, people were being told that the GST rebate would only be available to people who had signed contracts on or after May 28.
Everyone who believed the Prime Minister because he was the Prime Minister, everyone who thought this man had a modicum of integrity and principles and who signed a contract to buy a home, were not eligible for the rebate. We heard from representatives from the Ontario Home Builders Association. They told us that many people were in this situation. We also heard from representatives of the Association des professionnels de la construction et de l'habitation du Québec, or the APCHQ. They told us that many of their clients were in this situation.
At the Standing Committee on Finance, we proposed an amendment to move up the date for the GST rebate on new homes so that it could also apply to these people. How did the government respond? It responded by filibustering. There was opposition from the parliamentary secretary to the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, who is also known as the Minister of Finance. I do not think that he makes many decisions in the current government. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance was opposed to including these people who were trusting enough to believe the word of the Prime Minister of Canada. The Liberals refused.
At that point, in committee, the legislative clerks had found our amendments to be in order. However, the government tried to convince the committee chair that the bill could not even be amended to bring it into line with the Prime Minister's words. The chair accepted the government's arguments and our amendments were rejected. Thankfully, the Bloc Québécois holds the balance of power on the Standing Committee on Finance. We overturned the decision of the chair of the Standing Committee on Finance not once, not twice, not five times, not eight times, but eleven times.
Eventually, we came back here to the House to plead the case of the first-time homebuyers who had been cheated by the Liberal government. The Speaker of the House told us that we were right and that the chair of the Standing Committee on Finance was wrong. With that we scored a victory for first-time homebuyers in Quebec and in the provinces. This is a victory for Quebec.
This is another example of how the Liberals operate. They make promises before the election, they get elected, and then they give as little as possible and tell people to deal with their own issues if they were naive enough to believe them. That is exactly what happened.
Now, let us talk about the other part of the bill regarding the tax cut. The tax cut will cost $26 billion over five years. Funnily enough, the Liberals are offering a tax cut of $26 billion over five years while running a deficit of at least $78 billion. We should come back to this again in a year, because the deficit could be $5 billion, $6 billion, $7 billion, $8 billion or $10 billion higher. To them, $26 billion is not a lot of money. However, when the Bloc Québécois said that we had reasonable demands for the budget, the government told us that it was too expensive.
The Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, who I assume knows how to count, was so determined to show that our budget demands were unreasonable that he multiplied them by five so he could say that we were asking for too much. We had submitted demands totalling $6.6 billion. What we were asking for was half a percentage point of GDP. It is next to nothing.
We were asking for a program for first-time homebuyers, the program I mentioned earlier. We were asking for an investment of $1.4 billion per year for social housing because, generally speaking, Quebec does not receive its share of funding from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation programs. These programs are designed for high-rise residential buildings, whereas Quebec's housing stock consists mainly of small multiplexes and buildings with five stories or less, made up of five, six or eight units. This would also have been a program for social and community housing, because there is one province in Canada that has permanent programs for the construction of social, community and co-operative housing: Quebec.
We therefore requested our share of a separate program, the rapid housing initiative, which amounted to $1.4 billion. Old age security benefits for seniors amounted to $3.18 billion. With regard to health care transfers, we were essentially asking that the amounts provided for in the temporary agreements under the Trudeau government be renewed, since they were expiring. That represented $6.6 billion. Apparently that was too much. This tax cut alone would have paid for the Bloc Québécois's requests within five years, but our demands were too expensive.
Worse yet, the tax cut is an ill-conceived, poorly thought-out election ploy. It is a fairly small tax cut. According to figures from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which I am quoting from memory, we are talking about an average of approximately $180 per person in Canada. With the cost of housing and groceries rising, that is clearly not enough to keep people afloat. However, for 60,000 people in Canada, this is a tax increase. Who are those people? They the most vulnerable people, including people with disabilities.
Canada has something called the disability tax credit. This tax credit is calculated based on the tax rate applicable to the same bracket, which has been reduced. When the tax rate on the first personal income tax bracket is lowered, the tax credit is lowered. It is a refundable tax credit. People with a disability who are too poor and who sometimes do not even pay personal income tax because they are in such a difficult situation were losing money. We are talking about 60,000 people.
Did the government think about those people? No, it did not. The Bloc Québécois did. The Conservatives also worked with these groups, who came to us and said they had not received a response from the government. The government told them that there was nothing it could do, that this is how tax credits are calculated. We are talking about 60,000 people.
These people did not benefit from an $180 tax cut. For a single person, it is more like a loss of $141. For people with disabilities who do not pay income tax, the government's tax cut increased their taxes by $141, even though they are among the most vulnerable members of society. For a couple, we are talking about a loss of $155, due to the form these tax credits take.
We had to prod the minister into announcing that he was going to try to find a solution. He ended up announcing it right out there in the foyer of the House before his appearance at the Standing Committee on Finance meeting, because he was afraid that his testimony might do him too much harm after he was confronted with all of this. That is why holding the balance of power in committee is so important. That is what making gains looks like. It means giving genuine first-time homebuyers a real GST tax credit after the government let them down. It means ensuring that vulnerable people are not abandoned by the Department of Finance. Right now, we are studying the budget implementation act and, thanks to the Bloc Québécois's work with the groups that flagged this issue to us last spring, we know that the Department of Finance will look into this matter. We are confident of that.
The carbon tax is just one example among many of how this government is backpedalling on the environment. Just before he called the election, the Prime Minister decided to abolish the carbon tax because he did not want a carbon tax election, as the Conservatives wanted. This is how the mechanism worked. In provinces where the tax applied, the tax that would be paid later in the quarter was refunded upfront. It would be collected later. This was intended to make the mechanism socially acceptable when it was introduced. The government said it would send out the cheque first and collect the tax later. What did the Liberal government do? It abolished the tax. It never collected it for that quarter, and yet it still sent a rebate to people in seven provinces who had never paid it in the first place. The government still sent them cheques.
The government told us that we had a different pricing system in Quebec, and that was why we did not get a cheque. When it sent out those cheques with money from the government's consolidated revenue fund, 22% of which came from Quebec taxpayers, not one province, including Quebec, was paying a federal carbon tax. The move was denounced by a motion passed unanimously in the National Assembly of Quebec and by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, journalists and analysts. The only ones who thought the Earth was flat in this case were the Liberals. There are 42 Quebec Liberals here who claim that they are proud Quebeckers and that they represent Quebec. How can they claim to represent Quebec when a Prime Minister from Ontario, who represents an Ontario riding, a parliamentary secretary from Winnipeg and a bunch of members from British Columbia tell them to vote against Quebec and they obey, despite the motion adopted by the 125 members of the National Assembly? That is exactly what happened, and it is just one example among many of how this government is backpedalling on climate action.
The last budget included $4 million for the environment. I was at the budget lock-up with the member for Repentigny, and we were looking for the government's environmental policy. To pretend that they were investing money, the Liberals had to include critical minerals in that part. We are talking about $4 million over five years for the environment. Now the government wants to go after the only thing left, the industrial carbon tax. It is funny that the Liberals want to go after this, because we heard from the Governor of the Bank of Canada at the Standing Committee on Finance.
The Conservatives said that everything produced by big businesses that would be hit with the industrial tax is expensive, including steel, and they produce materials that are used to build housing, so that would increase the tax on homes. The Governor of the Bank of Canada said that it had no effect on inflation and that we should look elsewhere to find the source of price increases, because these big businesses export their materials.
Bill C‑4 is a mishmash of all sorts of things. We are obviously in favour of the part about housing, but how can anyone be in favour of a major environmental reversal that only served the Liberals' electoral interests? How can anyone support that? It is rather difficult. How can anyone unreservedly support a tax cut that ignores people with disabilities, that gives very little to households and that is ultimately being used to fund the cuts to health transfers that we saw in the last budget?
All I can say is that the government needs to stop introducing bills like this one, where everything and anything is all mixed together.
