Finance Committee on Nov. 5th, 2020

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The finance committee was charged back in March with overseeing government spending. There were two roles to that, making sure that people were being helped through this pandemic, and also making sure that the government was actually spending money in a way that ensured that people, small businesses, the folks who needed it, received those funds. We had those twin responsibilities, and we performed them admirably until August 18 when the Prime Minister unceremoniously and unilaterally prorogued Parliament.

Since then, for the last three months, between the prorogation and the filibuster, the finance committee has been unable to perform its duties it was charged with by a unanimous motion of the House of Commons. The government members have been saying that the opposition needs to compromise. There has been a whole range of suggestions brought forward. Every time it's greeted with, “Let us have some time to consider it”, and then the response that has come back has been no.

I'm deeply concerned by this idea that, again, even though every single element in Mr. Poilievre's motion has already been suggested by government members, the government again wants to consider it for a period of time. We have seen in previous manifestations of this process, or this strategy, that the response that comes back is then negative.

I'll say this facetiously, Mr. Chair, but the motion has less than 200 words. That means the government is now asking for 48 hours to consider this motion, which means about 15 minutes for every single word of this motion to be scrutinized. Part of the motion says “member for Westminster-Burnaby”. Those are four words. That would be an hour of consideration that the government members seem to be asking for. For the life of me, I cannot understand why the government members are stalling, when what has been suggested by the government is being brought forward, albeit with the addition of one additional witness, which is the Ethics Commissioner. .

We've now had three months when we should have been focused on government spending, and making sure that people are being taken care of. This is all through unilateral Liberal actions, first the prorogation and now the filibuster. We have an opportunity today at this meeting to adopt this motion, to have Liberal members withdraw their subamendment that is blocking it, and move forward.

There is really no reason to do anything but adopt the motion that Mr. Poilievre has put forward. I certainly support it. It's a reasonable compromise, and it would hopefully allow us to move back to doing what we were asked to do by the House of Commons at the beginning of this pandemic: scrutinizing government spending, making sure that as much as possible people are being taken care of during this pandemic.

I don't understand the stalling technique. It is reasonable to expect, with this motion coming forward, that the government members would have already done the consultation over the past hour. They've got another hour to do it, to make the phone calls. Let's just get it done, so we can move on to do the work we were charged by a unanimous motion of the House of Commons at the beginning of this pandemic. We've been unable to perform for the last few months, first, because of prorogation, unilateral, and now, because of five to six weeks of filibusters.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but the motion is technically not on the floor, because it's not in order. We're bouncing it around to see if we can find a way through this, and get to a solution before the Thursday meeting.

Next I have Mr. Fragiskatos. Are your comments going back to your original thoughts, or are you on the point we're working on here?

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I was going to share some thoughts in general with where we are, and where we might be going, but I see Mr. Poilievre has jumped back into the meeting. If he wanted to come back on to revisit his position that he expressed a few moments ago with respect to what Mr. Fraser proposed, I would be glad to hear him out, but if not, then I'll continue.

I don't see him motioning to speak, so I will share some thoughts with the committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Are your thoughts on this proposal of Mr. Poilievre's or do they go back to the original?

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I have a few thoughts on the proposal that's been raised, and also on the subamendment that we are still technically debating.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Let's set aside the subamendment for the moment. We'll take your thoughts on this issue.

If we can't come to a compromise on this issue to see our way forward and break the impasse, then we'll just rule the motion out of order and hope that some discussions take place in the backrooms before Thursday.

You're on.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

First of all, Mr. Chair, it's a shame Mr. Poilievre has disappeared again. I wanted to tell him, in a very friendly way, that I feel a bit left out. I think other Liberal members might feel a bit left out too. I mean, Mr. Fraser is a very good guy, but what about the rest of us? There were some very nice things said about Mr. Fraser, but nothing nice was said about Mr. McLeod, Ms. Koutrakis, me or Ms. Dzerowicz. I was hoping, seeing Mr. Poilievre commenting there, for maybe some compliments our way, but that's fine. It's all in good fun and all good-natured, always.

More seriously, Mr. Chair, I want to make the case that in contrast with what Mr. Julian just shared a moment ago, I think we're dealing here with elements of a motion that are new. I don't think it's uncalled for here that Mr. Fraser suggested that we would need a bit more time to reasonably examine what has been proposed. It's not as though the proposal we came back with as Liberal members is somehow unreasonable. We're not asking for another week or another month. We're asking for just a bit more time to examine what's been suggested.

Again, there are things in there that haven't been suggested before. What is wrong with taking that into account? If we were allowed to take that into account by adjourning today's meeting, then we would hopefully get beyond this impasse and deal with matters that we've been talking about doing for weeks.

I think it's a great thing that we would have the new Governor of the Bank of Canada come in and speak to us in a few days' time. The sooner the better. I would very much appreciate hearing the new governor's perspective on a range of matters but certainly as it pertains to COVID-19 and where things currently stand. This is a new governor. He has put his views to the committee before with respect to COVID-19, but not in a very detailed way. He has given public speeches on the matter as well, but we as a committee have not had an opportunity to engage with the governor meaningfully, I'd say.

I think you'd accept, Mr. Chair, that meaningful engagement has yet to take place. I would like to ask the governor his thoughts on a range of issues and his thoughts pertaining to the bank's approach to COVID-19 from a fiscal perspective. As well, much has been said in the business press and elsewhere with respect to new approaches that central banks are seeming to embrace. I'm thinking about modern monetary theory. What is the new governor's view on that perspective in terms of economics? What interactions has he had with other central bank governors around the world on how they are addressing COVID-19? How does Canada's approach compare and contrast with what other bank governors are doing? I think that would be an opportunity, and hopefully the sooner the better. I think if Liberal members were given an opportunity to examine what's been suggested, we could get to that in a meaningful and timely way. It doesn't sound like Conservative members are anxious to go down that path.

That's how I see this. I did have some thoughts on the subamendment that was originally being debated and discussed, but I'll leave my thoughts there for now, Mr. Chair. I think I see other hands up of other Liberal members.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

We'll let you hold on to those thoughts for the moment on the subamendment.

I'm not sure if I have the right order here, since I'm dealing with different systems, but on my list I have Mr. Fraser, Mr. Poilievre and Ms. Dzerowicz.

Is that the right order, Madam Clerk? Okay.

Mr. Fraser.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thanks.

Going back to the issue of the proposal, I appreciate Mr. Poilievre's commentary. I enjoyed the job I had before politics. I felt most days that I was half decent at it.

There is no circumstance in the world where I would have committed to a binding decision minutes after receiving a motion, or even an hour after receiving whatever the suggestion would be, if I was engaged in another meeting during that time to consider it.

I'm not trying to be tricky. The reality of the next couple of hours or evening, whatever it might be, is that I'm going to be engaged in this meeting until this meeting is done. I have a few other obligations tonight. I think it would be a more productive use of time if I could work on trying to figure out whether we can work with this motion.

To Mr. Julian's point about being x number of hours per word, obviously that's silly. The reality is that had we had this motion a few hours before the meeting began, maybe we could have gotten somewhere. I didn't see it until the clerk circulated it during this meeting—I'm not trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes.

If we can't agree to suspend until the next available slot—and I would invite House leadership of each of our parties to have a conversation to see whether another committee would yield time for us tomorrow—then we can continue to debate the subamendment. It will delay my consideration of the motion and some of the conversations I would otherwise have. However, I really am trying to use this as a helpful starting point. I think the Cabinet confidence piece is a significant movement from where we last left off.

If committee members want to go back to debating the subamendment for the evening, we can do that. I honestly believe it would be a far more productive use of time for me and others to consider what's been proposed and to see if it's something we can agree to in advance of the Thursday meeting.

I'll leave my comments there, Chair. If opposition members would agree to a suspension or adjournment, I think that's the best possible route so we can consider it. If not, it looks like we'll return the subamendment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Okay, I have Mr. Poilievre next. Go ahead.

What are your thoughts on what Mr. Fraser said, or anything else for that matter, on where we're at right at the moment?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Listen, we've had five weeks to talk about this. We've, in fact, had longer than that.

Mr. Julian's original motion for the disclosure of WE scandal documents was passed—it's hard to believe, Mr. Chair—on July 7. It was July 7. We're closing in on December and we still don't have the documents.

Now they're saying, “Oh we just need a little itty-bitty more time to try to figure it all out.” Then we'll get here on Thursday and they'll say, “Oh, it's still not enough time. We maybe need to give another five weeks of speeches.”

Meanwhile, people are losing their livelihoods. We have the biggest deficit in the G20, the worst unemployment in the G7, other than socialist Italy, whose policies the government is desperately trying to emulate here in Canada. We have easily the weakest economy in our peer group. We've increased our national debt by about 40% in seven months.

We have all of these problems—

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. Poilievre, I have a point of order from Mr. Fragiskatos.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

The member knows very well that it is not appreciated or acceptable to put points on the parliamentary record that are simply not true. In the interests of having a parliamentary record that is accurate and reflective of what is actually going on in the world and in this country, I would ask for the member to reframe the argument, or rethink—

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I will have to cut you off, Mr. Fragiskatos. It's really debate.

I will say that I didn't think Italy had a socialist government at the moment, but maybe it does.

Go ahead, Mr. Poilievre.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

In the amount of time that you gave my friend Mr. Fragiskatos to raise his point of order, which was a very generous amount of time, he managed to claim that I had stated a falsehood, but he couldn't think of a single example of anything I said that was false.

I think it's quite clear that what I was saying is precisely true. We do have the highest unemployment in the G7, but for socialist Italy. We have the highest deficit in the G20 as a share of our GDP at $380 billion. That is far and away the biggest deficit. We have added about 40% to our national debt in seven and a half or eight months.

Those are all factual statements. They are not pleasant things to say, but they are true, and we need to start saying them more and more because here we have a government that is trying to impose a socialist agenda on Canadians. Government spending in this country is now 55% of GDP. When the majority of the economy is controlled by the government, you have a socialist economy.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I do think, Mr. Poilievre, we are straying far away from trying to establish some way of breaking the impasse with your motions on the floor. On Mr. Fraser's point, is there a willingness to try to allow Mr. Fraser—I would expect the House leaders as well—to try to come to a conclusion based on your motion here today and to get it in place by tomorrow. If we can find time to have a meeting tomorrow, that would be even better—or it's not time that we need to find, but the space to meet. Otherwise, hopefully at the start of the meeting we can round this out and come to a conclusion on what documents are going to the law clerk so he can review them and come before us and he and the Clerk of the Privy Council can tell us if everything was according to the way we'd originally asked for it.

Could you stick to that area? Otherwise I'm going to rule the motion out of order, and we'll go back to the subamendment.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Right. Mr. Chair, I know you have been extremely liberal in permitting members of the government to discuss everything from ancient religious texts to cartoon characters. I'm sorry if I managed to talk about economic—

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I've been extremely liberal with you.

I don't think there's any question about that, giving you a wide range to make comments, so if we could come back to Mr. Fraser's suggestion it would be awfully nice.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

The difference is that when you're presiding over government members, you are liberal with a small “l”, and when you're presiding over me you're a Liberal with a big “L”. I would ask for the same licence to address issues as they have been given in their interventions.

We have work to do. We have facts to expose. We have asked this party, this government, to allow us the chance to do so, but so far we've got nowhere. Even though we brought forward a motion today, which reflects what the Liberal House leader has been tweeting about, and we thought he would be delighted to see us put forward what he tweeted, now we get a “maybe”. We try our best to match the demands of the government to deliver a solution that will get us back to work, and then what do you know? They show up and say it's not good enough, that they need to think about it for another 48 hours.

Where does all this end? When do we get back to work? It's been five weeks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I take it that you're not going to accept Mr. Fraser's offer.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

It's just a little bit interesting that you said to us, Mr. Chair, that you thought we could maybe meet tomorrow and then you changed your mind and said that, well, we're not sure if we can do that either. So we're being told—

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Let me clarify that. In normal times, we normally could. I talked to the clerk, and I am told that there is no space available for us tomorrow. That's a problem, given what we're dealing with in the COVID world we live in and having to deal with Zoom and scheduling, etc. in here. Normally, we could meet five days a week as a committee, but we're not in those kinds of time frames now, and that's a problem. I didn't change my mind. I just had to face the reality, I guess, that there's no space for us tomorrow.

I do have Ms. Dzerowicz on my list, and then we're going to go back to the subamendment, but just to give committee members something to think about, I really do believe that if we work at it, we can have a solution to this issue for the Thursday meeting.

I want to mention this just for members to think about, because I know that we all want to get to pre-budget consultations. We want to read the 793 submissions that have been submitted. There are a lot of good recommendations in them. We've seen some of the briefs—at least some of us have because they've been sent to us directly.

This is just for the committee to think about. Under our normal standing order, we would have to report on our pre-budget consultations by December 8. There are, as I said, 793 briefs that have come in prior to August 15, so we would have those to work with.

I know that the analysts have been working on them and trying to get them into summary order so that we could have a look at the recommendations, etc. That would mean that we would have hardly any time, I guess, to really hear from witnesses in person, and we would probably need two or three meetings—three, more than likely—as members to propose recommendations, discuss them and agree on recommendations. That's scenario number one. That would be a possibility.

The other possibility would be that we could ask for permission from the House to table in the first week of February. To do so would actually require getting permission from the House for the allowance of virtual hearings beyond December 11, because I understand the motion that's in the House allows them only till December 11.

If we went with that scenario, we'd have a few time slots between now and December 11, but after December 11 other committees are not meeting, or I don't think they are. If we were to hold three-hour meetings or more on December 14, 15, 16 and 17, in a three-hour slot we could hear 12 witnesses, six in each hour and a half. That would allow us 48 priority witnesses. It would give the analysts January to draft the report, and we could do our work in the last week of January to get our report done and in. As I said earlier, they are working on an appendix on the written briefs that will be very helpful to us.

The other point I'd make—and this, as I say, is just to think about, because we do have to get this work done somehow to benefit Canadians—is that the analysts have also worked on our COVID-19 hearings in the spring.

I've seen a bit of a summary of what the analysts put together prior to prorogation. They have now continued on that work. There are a lot of good suggestions in those COVID-19 submissions that we've seen. They have put together a comprehensive summary of the COVID-19 suggestions. We could also bring that forward—either report it as a summary to the House—to give the Minister of Finance and others the opportunity to see what others said in those hearings in the spring. That would be in addition to whatever work we may decide to do on pre-budget consultations.

I'm just taking the leeway as chair to lay that out there. I do think people need to think about where we're going and how we can do the best we can to get the information that Canadians spent time on when writing and submitting briefs to us and appear before us in the spring.

That's just there for your information.

Ms. Dzerowicz, you're still up for Mr. Poilievre's motions proposal. It's not really a motion that's allowed on the floor, but we'll allow you in. Then we'll go back to the subamendment.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that.

I did want to start by replying to a couple of things that Mr. Julian has talked to, and then I want to end where you just finished right now.

Mr. Julian had indicated that there was nothing new in the motion that was presented today. I agree with my colleague Mr. Fragiskatos that there are at least a couple of new elements. One is the Ethics Commissioner coming into it, which I don't have problem with at the moment. It's just that it is a new element.

The other new element that I just noticed is that the committee adopt all of the evidence from the first session around the WE Charity study. Again, I don't have a problem with that, but there are some new elements in this motion that I just wanted to mention.

I could be wrong, but it seems that when Mr. Julian was talking, he knew about the motion or had read the motion beforehand. Someone cynical might say that if not all of us had access to the motion beforehand, maybe there wasn't really truly—

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

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, I received and read the motion at the same time as other members.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Julian. I stand corrected then.

Then my point is just the one that was already made, so I won't spend more than a second on it. I think if we wanted to come to an agreement, it would have been helpful for us to have received it beforehand.

I do want to thank Mr. Julian for reminding all Canadians and everyone who is listening that this committee was charged with financial accountability for all of our COVID expenditures. I want to remind Canadians that our former minister of finance and our finance department officials did an extraordinary amount of work to ensure that every two weeks we did receive a biweekly report on every single bit of spending that was approved, followed through on and spent. That report actually continued right up until prorogation in August.

I want to make sure that Canadians are reminded that we have been accountable. We have been transparent. We continue to be committed to both of those principles in as fulsome a manner as possible.

I also wanted to address some of the comments that Mr. Poilievre has made because I don't like leaving things hanging. This government doesn't have a socialist agenda. He has indicated that a number of statements he has made are true. I will say that we have spent an extraordinary amount of money, and most economists have said and said that our federal government was right to actually spend as deeply and as widely as we have because of the unprecedented pandemic and what our economy is going through.

I'll also say, since Mr. Poilievre has thrown out some numbers, that 75% of Canadians have returned back to their jobs. Our unemployment rate has moved from 13.7% to 8.9%. These are positive moves. Indeed many economists have said that we are faring better than some other G7 nations, including the United States, in terms of trying to restart our economy and move our economy forward as we move through this pandemic.

There are over $230 billion in direct support measures for Canadians that have already been spent. You can tell how helpful they've been by the number of Canadians who have taken advantage of those programs, including the 8.8 million people who have received CERB. Now it's been transitioned to CRB and to EI. More than 3.5 million employees are supported by the wage subsidy and 380,000 students are benefiting from the Canada emergency student benefit.