Finance Committee on Oct. 8th, 2024

[Dr. Ian Lee]

I can. I just want to make clear, because I'm a numbers guy who always likes to quote numbers, that now I'm going to give you my judgment. We do that in class. We talk about judgments of the data.

I think the people who are really committed perfectly, legitimately, philosophically to issues of social justice—I'm using that as a phrase to capture lots of things, including a concern about inequality—see capital gains as somehow inappropriate and should be confiscated. I don't agree with that view whatsoever, and I'm sure you understand that. That's what I call the Argentine model. I don't think we should go down that road, because then you discourage investment in the jobs, companies and technologies of tomorrow.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

In fact, to your point, isn't creating policies that create worse productivity damaging to the ultimate goal of having social justice? Don't you need a robust economy that's producing jobs, that's producing wealth, that's improving people's standards of living, in order to have social justice?

[Dr. Ian Lee]

Yes. It's counterproductive. That's why I've been arguing, not only here but elsewhere, that this is not an argument against government policy or government having policies to help low-income people or social policies. Anne McLellan has been saying this. John Manley's been saying this. You have to generate the wealth in order to have that revenue base to support social policies and income support. What we're experiencing is a decline in our standard of living.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you.

Mr. Harpe and Mr. Larkin, I listened very carefully to what you said. It reminded me of my great colleague, Larry Maguire, who brought forward Bill C-208 a couple of years ago. I was listening to you and thinking that it's just terrible that, with the agricultural industry and this government, it always seems like it's one step forward and two steps back.

What I mean by that is that Larry Maguire's bill was basically intended to lower the tax burden on intergenerational family farm transfers to make sure that these family farms could stay in the family, as opposed to being sold to total strangers. That bill was passed, but now in this budget the capital gains tax inclusion rate was increased, which takes you back two steps.

Would you agree with that view?

[Andre Harpe]

Absolutely. It's really interesting. In the farming sector, we have a saying basically that we're cash poor and asset rich.

Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, we use our land as our retirement. This has just made us poorer because of raising the inclusion tax.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Do you think that increasing the capital gains inclusion rate creates an incentive or a disincentive for young farmers who want to make the capital investment to start up or expand their family farms?

[Andre Harpe]

It's very much a disincentive.

My family's farm has been in our family for just over 100 years now. This is the first time that it's become very questionable as to how we pass the farm on because of the inclusion rate being increased.

Our asset is one of those things that we can't move. We can't do anything with it. It's in Canada. We can't move it, so we have to work with what we've got.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, MP Morantz.

We'll go to MP Baker, please.

[Yvan Baker, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thanks very much, Chair.

Thank you to all our witnesses for being here today.

I'd like to start by asking some questions of James Janeiro, if I could.

For the folks watching at home, could you just define what a caregiver is?

[James Janeiro]

Certainly, I'm very happy to.

In the terminology that we use, a caregiver is pretty much anybody who cares for anybody else. It's everyone from a mom and dad caring for a child with a disability on one end of the age spectrum to somebody supporting their parents near the end of life or in long-term care on the other end of the age spectrum. In between is everything from lifelong disability, mental health, addiction challenges or episodic disability—you name it.

The one part of this care space we don't really touch is child care. We felt that space is pretty well served already, so our definition doesn't include child care. However, in any other situation where you're caring for somebody who needs some help, you're a caregiver, the way we see it.

[Yvan Baker, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

There are different ways to support caregivers. There are ways we can support the caregivers themselves.

When we provide better services, like better health care services—I'm thinking about long-term care, for example—we're therefore supporting not only the person in that residence or the person requiring care, which is the senior in this case, but we're also supporting the caregivers. Is that fair to say ?

[James Janeiro]

That's certainly true. If you ask a caregiver what they need the most, what they need the most is help for the person for whom they're providing care. The second-best thing you can do for a caregiver is support the caregiver as well. Our view is that you can do both.

Canada is a G7 country. We surely should be able to do both at the same time.

I would also say that the data is pretty clear that when the caregiver isn't doing well, the person receiving care doesn't do well either. If you're in that situation of being burnt out, being financially distressed or unsure how you're going to pay the mortgage or pay the rent because of your financial strain related to care, you're not your best self when you're providing care for somebody. Ultimately, the person to whom you're providing care ends up suffering at the same time.

[Yvan Baker, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

That makes a lot of sense.

Could you reiterate for the folks watching at home, who may not have seen your opening presentation, what your ask is of government to help support caregivers?

[James Janeiro]

Our number one ask certainly is, let's live up to the promise of the Canada caregiver credit. Let's change it from non-refundable to refundable, which would have the immediate effect of putting about $1,250 in the hands of caregivers every year.

That may not sound like a lot for all of us around the table, but certainly for the 20% of caregivers who earn less than $20,000 a year, even that extra hundred bucks at the end of the month is a little bit more room. It's one more trip to the grocery store, for example, or just a little bit more flexibility on their ability to make ends meet.

Number one, let's do that. It's been committed to and it's certainly in the mandate letter. Let's live up to that and make that happen.

For number two, we were very happy to see a commitment in the last budget to a national caregiving strategy. The government has yet to say what's in and what's out of the national caregiving strategy. We have some ideas, which we're very happy to share and we have shared. I've shared a few around the table today. However, for the purpose of the budget, certainly the imperative is that the proper strategy be funded, so it is not just words on a page or a report on a shelf, but rather that whatever measures are included in that strategy are properly funded from the beginning and in perpetuity.

[Yvan Baker, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

One of the things that I've worked on and am passionate about—and I think the two of us have spoken about it over the years, and I know a number of caucus colleagues have worked on this and supported this—is improving the quality of long-term care in this country. Specifically, the position that colleagues and our government took is that we should put in place national standards for long-term care.

In some cases, folks are getting wonderful care in long-term care, but there are too many cases where people aren't. COVID exposed that in a very apparent way for many Canadians.

Would national standards, if they were the right standards for long-term care implemented by the provinces, which we still have to make sure happens, not improve the quality of care that seniors receive and, therefore, not only help serve our seniors better and care for our seniors better but also support our caregivers?

[James Janeiro]

They most certainly would.

Here in Canada we have one of the highest rates of long-term care institutionalization and utilization in the world, and proper care for our elders is what we all owe our parents and our grandparents. They built this country. The least we can do for them in their later years is to make sure they're properly cared for, safe, happy and in a sustainable environment that gives them the food they like, the community participation they need and all the things that we would want for ourselves and everybody we love as we age.

Measures like federal long-term care standards, if done properly and if properly funded both by federal and provincial governments, will raise that bar for long-term care across the country. That's very important and should happen.

I will also say, though, that a lesson from around the world is that, if you do this properly, there are fewer people who need to go into long-term care in the first place. If you really do concerted work around home care, if you do concerted work around community-based supports that are there to help with snow clearing, grocery shopping, tending to the leaves and the kinds of things that are harder and harder with age, there will be fewer people in long-term care. The stats show that these kinds of everyday things point people towards long-term care. It's not always a health condition. Sometimes it's home maintenance, doing your shopping, doing your laundry and so on.

If we can figure out and learn from other countries how to support seniors to age in place with those kinds of supports, with good home care supports, we end up with fewer people in long-term care, which, coupled with improvements in long-term care, make everybody who ages better off.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, MP Baker.

Now we'll go to MP Ste-Marie, please.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Roy, in the two and a half minutes I have left, I would like you to provide us with more details on your first recommendation. You would like to see a program dedicated to tourism growth and making destinations more attractive. The program would, among other things, support a category of festivals and events that are not recognized by Canadian Heritage.

Can you remind us why this program should target festivals of all sizes and why it should be devoted to festival operations?

[Martin Roy]

I'll explain what is behind this proposal.

Over the years, various iterations of programs have benefited festivals and events. In 2009–2010, among other things, the marquee tourism events program was put in place by the Conservative government. That government invested—because it is indeed an investment—$100 million in the event sector to increase the tourism attractiveness of festivals and events. Subsequently, there were other versions of this program, as well as tourism-related programs that were accessible for festivals and events.

This time, the new version of the program would seek to generally upgrade festivals and events in Canada. We want our festivals and events that are already well established both in Canada and abroad to attract more international tourists and bring more foreign currencies here. We also want the major festivals that are popular in the country to attract more people to the communities and more tourists from other regions. Therefore, we are proposing a kind of general upgrade for all festivals and events.

You talked about grants for operations. That is the form of funding we recommend. Under the programs proposed by the federal government, too often funding is provided on a project-by-project basis, which requires the festival or event organizer to spend a certain number of dollars to get more money. At the end of the day, that doesn't help much. In the current situation, what we really need is to keep the festival running, given all the crises and headlines I alluded to earlier.

[Gabriel Ste-Marie, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, Mr. Ste‑Marie.

Now we'll go to MP Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Janeiro, you said in your pre-budget submission that, as of August of this year, the federal government has made no announcements about policy or funding for the national caregiving strategy. You're proposing that budget 2025 must include sufficient funding to implement the policy changes and initiatives that will be included in the strategy.

In your view, what level of funding should be attached to the national caregiving strategy?

[James Janeiro]

That's a very fair question. I guess it depends on the level of ambition we're talking about here.

Our view is that caregiving is the next frontier of public policy in Canada. It's one in four Canadians. That's a pretty unignorable population. Eventually, half of all of us will be a caregiver. If one in four is unignorable, certainly one in two is unignorable. This is one of those ticking time bomb issues for which we have a narrow window to get right as our population ages and disability becomes more and more complex over time.

Our suggestion to the federal government on this—and to other parties as well, looking ahead to elections and beyond—is that there's an opportunity for ambition here to make Canada the best place in the world to give and receive care. We can learn from the U.K. and from Australia and other jurisdictions that this is not always cheap but that this is an investment in the rest of the economy.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Yes. Prior to being finance critic, I was health critic for eight years. Health critics don't die; they get more critical. I remember during COVID that Canada experienced the highest percentage of deaths among seniors as a percentage of total deaths in any country on earth. I think we would do well to remember that.

With regard to the Canada caregiver credit, you noted that the commitment to convert that from a non-refundable tax credit to a refundable tax-free benefit of a minimum of $1,250 was contained in the 2021 Minister of Finance mandate letter. Have you received any explanation from this government as to why it has not fulfilled that commitment it made four years ago?