Finance Committee on Oct. 18th, 2016

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

You have a beautiful province. I totally understand why people come here to retire, and if I ever decide to retire at a younger age, I will definitely consider P.E.I.

My question is on the health care transfers. We're all listening to the news, and the government's decision is to hold it at a 3% increase, and all the provinces are...to say they're upset would probably be understating it. There are studies across the world that show we overspend per citizen on health care and that we don't have efficient spending on health care programs across the country.

In terms of P.E.I., do you have any comments on how efficient the health care spending is in your province? How much do you think is slippage? How much do you think is wasted or how can it be improved? All of that in five seconds.

[Allen F. Roach]

You said it was the last question, but you didn't tell me how much time I had.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Fair enough. That's why you're a minister.

[Allen F. Roach]

That is a great question.

I think that sometimes it's easy to say that there's a study to show that around the world there's waste. I know from being in the positions I've been in around the cabinet table, and certainly as a member of the Treasury Board and the chair for the last five years, that when I see the requests come through the Treasury Board, I see the management plans that come forward for budgets.

When I look at health care, I look at the way we send them back year after year to find savings. I can only speak on behalf of my own province. Again, we're a small jurisdiction, but we get to look at things a little more microscopically than perhaps the larger provinces like Quebec, Ontario. and B.C. We can really see, dollar for dollar, where everything goes.

I'll speak on behalf of my province very clearly. I don't think there's much wastage in this province, if any. We're just too small a jurisdiction. We count on every dollar. I know that you could talk to the previous health minister about discussions he and I had last year, and he'll tell you that we certainly went back to him and said, “No, we can't afford it.” I believe we're very prudent.

[Raj Grewal, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Thank you, Minister.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thanks to all of you.

Ms. Wright, you didn't have any questions, so I'll ask you one.

You mentioned in your submission that the government should be using a gender assessment tool when generating budgets and economic policies that lessen the burden on women. What do you mean by that? How do you implement that? How important would a national child care program be for women participating in the workforce and paid employment?

[Jenny Wright]

To reply to that question with regard to child care, a national subsidized child care program is something that we've been fighting for over 45 years, and it would be huge. It's the last bastion for women's equality and to improve the status of Canadian families and children. It's long overdue. It's time. As I said in my presentation, it has been costed out several times, and the cost of a child care program is well worth what it would bring in terms of the improvement in and stimulation of our economy.

With regard to gender assessment tools, our Canadian government does use some. They're not very robust and they're not used across everything, but they are an economic tool that is used. There are several frameworks. Many people have put them forward and costed them out, from Oxfam, to the World Bank, to the World Health Organization, and they aim to mitigate women's current socio-economic status, which is much lower.

As a country, we really need to be very upset and very concerned about the fact that we have a huge wage gap that is growing. It's not improving. Even though women's participation in education and in some parts of the workplace is growing, we have a monumental 72% wage gap. Women are only making 72 cents on the dollar relative to men. This can't be accepted in Canada any longer. As I said, of the minimum-wage workers, 59% are women. We need to put some economic tools in place right from the beginning in order to help mitigate some of that damage for women, so that they can be stronger contributors to the economy.

In terms of gender assessment tools, there are many of them out there, and they need to be part of the structure when we build economic policy. There are critical analyses that simply look at the financial impact on women, as opposed to men, if we generate a policy such as EI, health care, or income supports. What we find is that many governments have them, but they're kind of on side of the table, and the policy office at Status of Women Canada has to look that over before it actually becomes.... What we want to see are very robust gender analysis tools used when any economic policy is generated, and they need to have a human rights lens. Globally, the status of women in our country is falling, and we need to stop that trend immediately and make it fairer for both genders.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you very much for your answer.

I thank all the witnesses for their presentations.

Also, for those who did forward briefs by the August 5 deadline, we have all of those all in our system. I believe we have 470 in total, so there is some work for the analysts to do yet.

With that, I thank each and every one of you for your presentations and for your answers.

We will suspend for five minutes and then go to the open-mike session.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Order. I know that you guys are sorting out corporate taxes and deductions over there, but we have to start.

Thank you, Minister, and thank you, Michael.

We shall reconvene for the open-mike session. Just before we do that, we had a suggestion, and we are going to hear from the head of the economic advisory committee, Dominic Barton, next Thursday morning at 8:30. That will be great for Raj.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

He is going to do it by video conference from South Korea.

We also had the suggestion that, because we are looking at economic growth and supporting business for growth, we should also, in an hour-long session, have the Export Development Corporation and BDC appear, the two together, if it can be arranged. Are people okay with doing that? It would be another hour on top of all the other hours. Okay? We will try to arrange that.

In our open-mike session, we have three presenters: Leo Broderick, Edith Perry, and Joe Byrne. What we'd suggest, because there are only three of you—not 23—is that all three of you come up at once to the table and take a mike. We'll give you about three minutes apiece. I think you all know how the open-mike sessions work. It's a way for you to get on the record. There are no questions from members, but it's a way to put on the record the things that you think should be considered in government policy and pre-budget consultations.

Welcome. We'll start with Leo Broderick.

[Leo Broderick, Representative, P.E.I. Health Coalition]

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you. I'm pleased to be here. I do want to say a special welcome to Steve MacKinnon, a former student. We're delighted—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Leo Broderick]

We're pleased he's here.

I'm here to make a statement on behalf of the Council of Canadians and as a strong supporter of Canadians for Tax Fairness.

We have the means in this country to eradicate poverty at all levels. We have the means to provide a national child care program, a national pharmacare program, and a national home care program, and we can eliminate the gender pay gap. The following suggestions will add an additional $30 billion to the federal treasury. I will have six points.

First, raise the corporate income tax rate from its present 26.3% to the U.S. corporate income tax rate of 39%. The federal tax rate now is 15%, and that would mean increasing it by 12 percentage points. Corporations in this country have never been more profitable. At this very moment, they have in their accounts $630 billion. Some refer to it as “dead money”. I refer to it as money that belongs to the Canadian people and to Canadian workers.

Second, close tax loopholes. There are at least eight serious loopholes in the Canadian tax system. You have been given those in a report.

Third, stop corporate offshore tax dodging. There are at least close to 100 Canadian corporations that use offshore tax havens.

Fourth, tax e-commerce companies to level the playing field.

As well, Canada should eliminate tax subsidies to big oil, which are at the moment $1.5 billion, and we should eliminate subsidies to the arms industries in this country.

Also, if we're fortunate enough to be able to rely on the people of Bologna and Belgium, and CETA is defeated, we would save an additional $2 billion in drug costs. It would also mean additional financial support to the Island dairy industry, so let's hope it is defeated, and then, following that, that the TPP is defeated in the United States.

The question is simply this: do you as a federal government want to serve the 99% or to continue to deliver the profits to the 1%?

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, Leo.

Next is Edith Perry.

[Edith Perry, As an Individual]

Thank you, Wayne.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Welcome.

[Edith Perry]

Welcome to all of you.

I guess I'll be the face of the low- and fixed-income population in Prince Edward Island, as well as a woman who's presenting.

Thank you, Wayne, for being, finally, a male on this panel who asked a question of the representative from the advisory council on the status of women. It speaks quite loudly that questions weren't directed to her when she gave a very credible presentation about the gender gap in wages and the fact that we don't have a national child care program. After all, the Liberals and Conservatives have been in government, as I believe somebody mentioned, for 45 years. We're still waiting for those two things to come into play. I wanted to make that observation.

I'll just reiterate my concern, as long-time social justice advocate, that we should certainly stop corporate offshore tax dodging, which I think was brought up during up the Conservative government regime; close tax loopholes; raise the corporate income tax rate from 26.3% to the U.S. corporate income tax rate of 30%; tax e-commerce companies to level the playing field; and put basic income guarantee projects back on the government's radar. It could be, indeed, another publicly funded health care program—i.e., medicare. The time is here for that.

Many P.E.I. residents deal with low incomes and high living costs. That includes a 15% increase, just recently, of HST, which includes nearly all forms of heating. We expect that it will also be tacked on to fuel oil as well. Our electricity rates are very high-cost in Prince Edward Island. That also then means that we have higher prices on good food and other necessities of living. This is where basic income guarantee can play a role, for certain.

I think it's time that people who look at financial strategy should include social justice as an equal standing in how they approach things. I'm a little skeptical about whether or not this new government will indeed address all these needs.

I'll sign off here. Those are my observations and comments.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, Edith. You're just under the wire, in any event.

Mr. Byrne, the floor is yours for three minutes.

[Joseph Byrne, As an Individual]

Thank you to all of you.

Welcome to Prince Edward Island.

I also want to acknowledge the contribution your team makes to these deliberations.

Thank you for having me here today.

My remarks are made on the basis of the studies and presentations that I've had access to over the last 20 years. The overarching theme that I'm asking the committee to consider is, for all the policy proposals you're going to consider, that the lens used to assess them is, how are they affecting the most vulnerable around us?

Effective policy should allow us to draw a straight line between the policy and the effect it has on people living in poverty, those with mental and physical health issues, or those living with disabilities, one-parent families, especially single mothers, children, and our first nations communities.

The corollary of this principle of looking at how it affects the most vulnerable is that we need not actively pursue policies that focus on benefiting the wealthiest among us. They're doing quite fine.

The social analysis I'm using is one that's been used for a long time, which is “see, judge, act”, and you can enter that circle from any point. I'm asking the government to act quite quickly on two particular issues. This could be a dissertation, but I just want to focus on two particular issues right now. They are housing, and employment and income. The actions there will lead you into that same circle of see, judge, act, but it needs to get started immediately.

We need reliable and predictable investment in public housing stock. There are plenty of good experiences with programs such as home retrofits, but we need an expansion of multi-family units in public housing right across the country. I'm asking the government to recommit to co-op housing, not just to the existing co-op housing, but also to the expansion of the co-op housing stock over the next 20 years.

Just a few blocks from here, walking through the streets, we can see the places where we're asking our families, friends, and neighbours to live in substandard conditions. It's really unacceptable in Canada in the 21st century. We recognize the efforts of landlords to make some of that housing affordable, but we see people living in places that are overcrowded, dingy, cold, and dark. We're asking those families to raise their children in that kind of environment, which makes it very difficult to nurture a sense of hope and optimism for the future.

We can study it. We can act. There's a number of programs that the committee can be recommending over the next few years, but we also need to start expanding to see what the future is going to look like. It is going to take time to build the stock and plan around it. We need expansion and maintenance. We have to look at civil society groups to invest their own time and energy in building these communities. The outreach needs to begin immediately. The conversations need to happen at food banks, soup kitchens, churches, and service organizations, but they need a message that change is not just around the corner, it's here.

Second, in terms of unemployment, as we know, most of us want to be in charge of our own lives and our own decisions and to feel that we have a high degree of independence. The ability to exercise control of our spending starts with our income. We need to broaden the discussion, as we heard earlier, about the precariousness of employment. In P.E.I., if you work full time at a job at $11 an hour job, you're making just over $21,000, which is almost $3,000 less than the low income cut-off. We're asking workers to live in poverty.

We need to move more quickly on wages. The federal government could take the lead by increasing the federal minimum wage and encourage provinces to do the same. We also have to encourage workers to organize and to make it easier for workers to organize and for unions to be certified. If you're living in poverty and are dependent on the income you have, you're not going to take very many risks to jeopardize that, because for the future, losing that, as little as it may be, is pretty bleak.

Federal government transfers to individuals can be helpful, but the evidence also says that federal government investment is needed in social infrastructure: a national child care strategy, pharmacare strategies, and a housing strategies are all essential. Stability comes from that. On the increase in direct and indirect transfers, a move to a basic income guarantee would be a major advance.

The final request to the committee is for movement on national revenue: simplify the tax forms and bring back the links to basic personal exemptions at federal and provincial levels. P.E.I. has dropped the basic personal exemption in real terms, and it has the most drastic effect on people who are living most precariously and with the least ability to benefit.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, Joe.

Thanks to all three of you.

With that, we'll adjourn.