Finance Committee on Feb. 17th, 2022

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Thank you very much.

Do I have any more time, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

You have about 10 seconds.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

I'll just thank the witnesses, then, and the chair for his great work.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

That's great. Thank you.

We are moving to our final questioner and the Liberals.

We have MP Dzerowicz for five minutes, please.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank everyone for the important conversations today.

I will be directing my questions to Mr. Agnew again.

Mr. Agnew, part 5 of Bill C-8 is related to the COVID-19 proof-of-vaccination fund. It is to ensure that the Government of Canada continues to support provinces and territories in implementing proof of vaccination by introducing the proof-of-vaccination fund.

Here is my question for you. Across the country, there are different provinces that are making different decisions around the vaccine passports. How important do you think it is for us to continue to have this type of fund?

[Mark Agnew]

It is important. I'll explain that. Even if tomorrow every province and territory across the country decided they were no longer going to require proof of vaccination to get into a business establishment, there's the reality of international travel. Many foreign jurisdictions require a fully vaccinated status for travel into a country and, as well, we still require full vaccination in order to be exempt from certain quarantine and testing requirements.

Even if we're not going to need them domestically, there's still an international use case for them. For that reason alone, I think we have to make sure the provinces have the funding they need for the infrastructure, because we made the decision in this country not to have a single federal government-run vaccine registry.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

I appreciate your mentioning that.

I think the other thing that comes out once in a while is that we don't really know how COVID will evolve. We think it's sort of nearing its end because we'd like to believe that omicron looks like it's weaker, but one really doesn't know how it's going to evolve and whether we will need, for some reason, to re-establish that quite quickly across the country. Would you agree with that?

[Mark Agnew]

Certainly I hope that we won't have to introduce restrictions, but a non-linear path is probably the best way to describe what the pandemic has been like in our country and around the world.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

My second point is still related to this vaccination fund. It says that the Minister of Health will determine the proportion of funds across provinces and territories, and the requirements for the provinces and territories to access funding.

You might not have any advice in this area, but would you have any advice in this area in terms of the requirements to access funding, or is that beyond the mandate of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce?

[Mark Agnew]

It would mostly be beyond the mandate. The one piece I would suggest is that we continue to have at least the single QR code. Although the registries are still held at the provincial level, we do need to have something that's interoperable and also recognized internationally. The worst thing that could happen is to have 13 separate pieces of paper and to have to go to other jurisdictions and get them to wrap their heads around that.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

In the final minute I have left, Bill C-8 is all about us trying to move into the post-COVID world and restarting our economy. One of the things we hear a lot from small businesses is their need to actually fill their labour shortages. We are hoping to introduce a record historic number of new Canadians in the next three years, some 1.3 million.

Do you think that's something that will be useful and helpful, and is there something more you think we could be doing to help fill the labour shortages?

[Mark Agnew]

Yes, that will go toward addressing these issues. If you're talking about it in the context of the immigration system, one of the things we've been talking about is a trusted employers program for temporary foreign workers. If you're a company that is a repeat user of the program, the administrative burden, we argue, should be less on you. It's sort of a NEXUS program, if you will, for temporary foreign worker program users. That's something we would encourage the government to take up.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thank you very much.

I think that's my time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, MP Dzerowicz.

It's time to thank all of our witnesses. Thank you for your remarks, your testimony and your answers to our questions on Bill C-8. On behalf of the members, the clerk, the analysts, the staff and the interpreters, we thank you very much for coming before our committee.

We will let the witnesses go at this time.

Members, MP McLean had asked to discuss a motion that he had sent. I believe it was distributed to everybody in both official languages.

I do see a hand up.

MP Beech, go ahead.

[Terry Beech, Liberal, Burnaby North—Seymour, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. McLean requested this, so I put up my hand, but I will defer to him.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

MP McLean, please go ahead.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We forwarded the motion. We spoke with the clerk two days ago. We missed the deadline by 16 minutes in terms of submitting this for debate today.

However, there is an emergency that the country is facing right now. There's the Emergencies Act that we're debating in the House of Commons.

Part of the Emergencies Act, of course, implicates the Canadian financial system and what's going to happen to the security of our monetary system, with the government, I think, haphazardly—but we can determine that—forcing banks to actually freeze the accounts of people it thinks are involved with any of the blockades, protests, and so on, that are happening in Ottawa.

When I asked the question at the briefing the other night, the officials told me that the banks have algorithms to make this happen. I think the use of a blunt tool such as a blanket algorithm to freeze Canadians' bank accounts will have significant effects on our Canadian financial system, including the drifting of deposits from banks to other financial instruments that are not Canadian deposits.

There's a lot that is going on here, and I recognize that. I think this committee is well equipped to deal with the effects of what might happen with this, and we should examine that very clearly and very quickly.

If you'd like me to read the motion, I could, but it is in front of everybody. I think it would be respecting everybody's time if we were to just talk about the nature of what we need to accomplish here and let everybody read the motion itself. It stands on its own. We're open to some amendments to it. As a matter of fact, we ourselves would like to make some amendments.

Because of the timing of this committee and what we know we need to get done, part of the reason we bring this forward is to manage all the studies we have in front of this committee. We think this one should probably bounce to the top because of how urgent this actually is, and we should be dealing with this quickly.

Expeditiously, we could say that we're all expecting to have our amendments to Bill C-8 in by next Friday, and then on Monday, February 28, go clause by clause on it. I think we're all okay with that.

Perhaps we've seen enough witnesses for that and we can allocate two meetings next week for the first part of this study, including the witnesses we're calling here. That would be very instructive for the Canadian people and for the Canadian financial system.

I'll leave it at that. I'm open to any questions that people might have in terms of what I think this committee needs to accomplish on behalf of the Canadian people and to ensure that we're not overstepping and causing some significant harm to the Canadian financial system.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you, MP McLean.

We have MP Beech, and then MP Blaikie.

[Terry Beech, Liberal, Burnaby North—Seymour, BC]

First of all, I want to thank my friend opposite for raising this motion. He's right; it was outside of the 48-hour period, and even if it was 46 hours ago, we only received it this morning.

The emergency measures act is certainly important. It's something I think we can all agree should be studied. It's just going to be a matter of all of us agreeing how we're going to study that, how we're going to scope out this motion and how we're going to deal with the timing, which are all issues that my friend just outlined.

The intent of the motion as worded—and I don't know what amendments my friend opposite is referring to—is to start before March 3. I am guessing that there are members of this committee who would like to see it start even before that or significantly before that. I think it would be worth considering, especially given how much time is left in the day, potentially utilizing something at this committee that we haven't done thus far, which is to utilize our subcommittee to make sure that we can prioritize all of the current business, including this motion and the finalized wording of this motion.

I will remind my colleagues that we do have Bill C-8, current legislation, in front of this committee with a timeline agreed upon by this committee. With this motion, we have an additional request for the Deputy Prime Minister to appear, in addition to the current request for the Deputy Prime Minister to prepare for Bill C-8. I think we all want that to continue to happen.

At our last meeting, we included an updated invite with a new timeline for the Governor of the Bank of Canada. I think everyone here thinks it's important that pre-budget consultations are done on such a timeline that all of the substantial testimony we have heard to date and everything that has been written or received by this committee can be not only put into the final report, but received on a timeline such that it can be duly considered to be part of it and be positively impactful with regard to this year's budget.

Given that this is a substantial and appropriate motion that I think everyone here wants to study, and given that it's not just we who have amendments, but—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

MP Beech, I apologize for the interruption.

The clerk just informed me that we have a maximum of 10 minutes.

Mr. Clerk, when do we have to get this meeting done?

[The Clerk of the Committee, Mr. Alexandre Roger]

We have until 5:40 p.m. before we start impacting other meetings tonight.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Okay.

[Terry Beech, Liberal, Burnaby North—Seymour, BC]

Without giving up the floor—and I don't know if this is possible—maybe I could ask my friend if that course of action is agreeable to him. If so, then we don't have to worry that we have a deadline of 10 minutes.

Given that he has amendments, we have amendments, and I guess my other colleagues have amendments, let's get to the subcommittee, and we can get this all sorted out and get to this motion expediently.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

I have MP Blaikie.

I don't know if MP McLean wanted to respond to that.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Perhaps I can respond after MP Blaikie.