Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I do want to discuss further the challenges with this piece of legislation.
Before I do, I do just want to go over a bit of process. Yes, certainly a government can't amend it at second...but they can pull the legislation, which has happened numerous times since Confederation. A government pulls their legislation and reintroduces it prior to a vote. That's happened numerous times.
My apologies for any loose language there. I am fully aware of how Parliament works.
However, I would also point to the fact that it was because Parliament didn't review it as in depth as they should have that the deferred prosecution for SNC-Lavalin got through. That was a failure of Parliament.
While I certainly understand and believe that everyone has the best interests of Canadians at heart, I won't back down for one second, no matter who it irritates or angers, from doing what I believe is right for my people of Northumberland—Peterborough South. That is to review this legislation.
Talking is part of democracy. In fact, “parliament" is literally a translation of “talking house”. That's what it means. What differentiates us from many other countries in the world is that we have the ability at committee in Parliament to share that. In fact, numerous times when former prime minister Harper was in charge, the NDP railed against time allocation as the greatest offence to democracy that man had ever known.
Members of this very committee have done that. I'd love to grab their speeches and go over them. I could read them word for word because they apply exactly today.
On a day when Motion No. 22 was brought forward, which is no doubt, in a way, to circumvent democracy, I will proudly stand up here and talk for as long as I have to, to stop this government's reckless spending. It's been proven over and over again that when a government taxes itself, taxes Canadians and taxes people of the world, it eventually leads to an equality—an equality of poverty. Everyone is poorer. The workers and the people who go to work every day are the economic engine.
This is meant as no slight whatsoever to our bureaucracy. We have many great women and men working every day, but ultimately it is the farmers in Saskatchewan, the miners in northern Ontario and the fishers on the east coast and west coast of this country who are driving our economy.
When we take money from those people, we take it from the productive engine and bring it to Ottawa and undermine economic growth. Economic growth is that magic elixir that fixes nearly every economic problem. You have inflation—economic growth. You have debt or deficit—economic growth. You have unemployment—economic growth. It is the answer to nearly every economic problem.
Ms. Dzerowicz talked about productivity and innovation and I agree with her. We are terrible at that. I think that's the only word I can use. We are terrible. We are near the bottom of the OECD and near the bottom of the G7 when it comes to innovation. This fall economic statement, other than repackaging one program, doesn't have any really strong, powerful things that could move us forward.
If it did, that might be a different ballpark. We might be able to have a discussion if we were serious about productivity.
We looked at countries like Ireland and Switzerland that have been serious about it. They've had full economic plans that involve policies from the left and the right and targeted tax cuts to encourage economic growth in targeted areas. There are certain areas where we can pretty much say that it is going to be a big part of our economic growth going forward.
Why don't we provide a series of technical benefits for artificial intelligence? Our SR and ED system is terribly out of date. It doesn't work like it's supposed to.
Why not take the opportunity and say, “Do you know what? We're going to have a slowdown.” We know that Canada's productivity, which is measured in GDP per hour, is worse than the United States' and Ireland's. Switzerland has nearly double ours, and it doesn't have the advantages we have, in terms of tremendous natural resources—just the sheer size of our country. Why would we not tackle that and go, “Okay...”?
By the way, there's all this talk about the subsidies that oil and gas get, which I'm not going to get into today. Do you know what? The average Canadian contributes $50 GDP per hour. Do you know what it is for oil and gas? It's $600. Their productivity.... It's the single thing the Canadian economy is struggling with most, and we are going to kneecap that industry.
Clean Canadian energy has to be part of the economic solution. It will drive our economy, going forward. As we transition to other fuels, we cannot simply disobey it and say, “We're going to completely eliminate an industry that is a productivity leader for our country.” We cannot abandon the workers across this country in clean, sustainable Canadian energy. When we look at this picture....
We need to enhance our innovation and productivity. I agree with Ms. Dzerowicz. There's nothing in the fall economic statement that will have a substantial impact. I've been saying this in the House since I was elected in 2019: We need to drive productivity, because, if we can make things and innovate more efficiently, effectively and quickly than the rest of the world, we win. We all win. You don't increase the wealth of a country by printing money. No country has ever taxed itself into prosperity. It's never happened—not once.
It's absolutely frustrating to me. We see socialist nightmare after socialist nightmare—Venezuela, Cuba and the Soviet Union. We know where socialism leads. It leads to poverty. We tax and tax and tax and tax. We say to those Canadians working the hardest out there.... It's unfathomable to me that a Canadian starting at $14,000.... This government believes they should start paying tax on that—$14,000. What's the poverty line? Is it three, four or five times that? A simple way to help people is taking less of their money. This fall economic statement has nothing to relieve that Canadian.
I also agree with my colleague Mr. Blaikie when he says some of this money—he can correct me, as I'm sure he will, if I'm incorrect—should go to deficit and debt reduction. If I can tell tales out of school, he's told me that before. Having a strong balance book is important to him. We agree on that point.
If the government said, “We are flush with revenue. Here's what we're going to do. We are going to take that money and dramatically reduce the deficit or debt”.... However, they are not. It looks decent—I'll give them that. The deficit is going down. I hear that. However, that's because of inflation. They're just taking more money from the most vulnerable, enriching themselves, then sending that money back out. That's the reality.
They are spending $6 billion more. If they had followed what the deputy leader of the Liberal Party said, and followed the pay-as-you-go system, where every new dollar of spending was to be met by a dollar of spending reduction.... That's in a different ballpark. That's not what they're doing. There's more and more spending.
Let's look at the track record of this government's balance sheet. It was given a balanced budget by the previous government. They were given that, even after going through the worst economic crisis of a generation. The Harper government still managed to balance the books—bring that balance sheet in line. Then what happened? A hundred billion dollars of pre-COVID deficit spending—$100 billion. You were given the keys to the balance sheet and you drove it right into the ditch—100 billion dollars' worth.
They said, you know, “We're fine. We have strong...”. What was Bill Morneau's comment? I think “fiscal firepower” was the comment of the day. Well, it turned out that he was about $400 billion short of what they needed, so they engaged and embarked in an aggressive quantitative easing program. We can go through the machinations of it back and forth, but it really equates to money printing—$400 billion.
Every time this has been tried—back to the Romans—every time a government thinks, “We have a great idea. This is fantastic. We control the printing presses. We'll never have any deficit or debt problems. We can just print more money”.... It happened in Yugoslavia. It happened in Argentina. It happened in the Weimar Republic. It happened in the 1970s right here in North America where they turned the printing presses on high and, once again, we were faced with inflation.
We had $100 billion of pre-COVID spending. Then, according to this government's Parliamentary Budget Officer, there was another $200 billion in non-COVID-related expenditures. That's $300 billion. That equates to about $20,000 for every Canadian family of four or actually a little bit more than that. That's $20,000 that Canadians received in non-COVID deficit spending.
I talk to my constituents. They're not telling me that they're $20,000 to the good after the last three years of spending. I would not hesitate to say that if that $200 billion plus $100 billion was, instead, were either put to the debt or deficit, as Mr. Blaikie insinuated—he'll correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure—that would have put us in a much better position.
Right now, going forward, according to the fiscal statement, we're looking at debt charges of about $40 billion. I think that's roughly equivalent to the health transfers this federal government pays out every year. We would not have to be paying that if the $300 billion—instead of being spent on things like “ArriveScam” and other reckless Liberal projects, and to Frank Baylis, amongst others, through a series of companies—was left in the pockets of government and we paid down debt or the deficit, where we wouldn't have to pay the $40 billion in interest charges, or even better yet, if it was left in the pockets of Canadians.
What will happen is that if, in fact, we leave more money in the hands of our workers, of our job creators, they will invest that money. Ms. Dzerowicz was absolutely correct; for every dollar that an American company invests in capital investment, Canadians invest 43 cents. That's the statistic. That's what's real.
I don't understand how you cannot then take that as.... One of the major expenses for any Canadian or any Canadian business is taxes. It's directly controllable by government. If we reduce our share, it only makes sense that companies, that individuals, will have more money to invest in the technology of the future.
If we don't get this right—and I say this in all seriousness—we're going to have serious challenges down the road. We are not investing in capital as much as the United States. We are not innovating. We're not investing in our innovation like many of our OECD partners. In fact, we were last at the OECD in terms of capital investment.
The solution to that is not more taxation. That's the part I don't understand with the 2% tax on share buyback. I don't even know whether that will be meaningful. I suppose economists will contemplate that and will comment on that, and I'm eager to hear their expert testimony. However, at 2%, I suspect it won't even meaningfully impact anyone's behaviour.
Why is it...? There are always two options. There are a carrot and a stick with all of these policies. Why does government always go to the stick? Why could it not give a break to those companies that are doing things right with respect to productivity and innovation? Why could they not, even if they wanted to take a more traditional, left-wing approach, invest in research and education?
I have been studying Ireland's economy. They're moving ahead of us when it comes to innovation and productivity. In fact, they are ahead of us. They've been very nimble on economic policy. They're a unitary state, so granted it's a little bit easier for them. It's both on the left and right-wing sides.
They are investing dramatically and quickly into their education system. They see an opportunity for artificial intelligence, genetics research for the economy of the future. They started paying for education in those fields. They're paying for research and development.
Of course, to fill one of the big gaps that our economy has always had and continues to have, we need some of the brightest minds in the entire world. We attract so many great newcomers to our country, and we need an immigration system that actually welcomes folks. I can't tell you how many individuals come to my constituency office so disappointed and despondent by the treatment they've received from this federal government. Let me be clear, on the record, that we need newcomers. We need the diversity in our country. We need the brainpower that they bring. We need their labour. But we have to make it less arduous for them.
I'll give you one example. We had in our riding a machine that cost tens of millions of dollars. They needed a team from India to help install it. This was not even a long-term immigration issue; they were just coming for a couple of months to help get this machine off to go. It drives jobs and productivity. They had to wait for months and months. Every day the machine sat idle cost thousands of dollars, and employees had to be laid off, because we couldn't get out of our own way.
There are things within the bureaucracy, very left-wing ideas that could help move the ball forward. This government won't even do that. They won't even stay true to their own ideology.
The other thing that Ireland does, very smartly—and many other countries, including the United States and Switzerland do—is targeted tax cuts, tax relief systems, and updated regulatory systems.
Our Income Tax Act is way out of date. We need to have substantive reform there. Like I said, the SR and ED system is broken. Ask any expert and anyone in the technology industry. It's not working. It's not helping to innovate.
Instead of targeting a 2% tax on share buybacks, why not help these companies and provide them with targeted relief that will encourage them? Not relief—as the NDP have rightly pointed out—that will lead to them racking up profits or paying huge dividends while at the same time collecting corporate welfare in the form of wage subsidies or otherwise. We need to have targeted, smart tax relief.
We would not be creating new ground, here. There are all sorts of countries and jurisdictions around the world...even some of our provinces are leading the way with respect to that. I know Ontario has done great things. Alberta has done great things. Why not look to some of the Ontario and Alberta processes to help attract some of these businesses and grow productivity that everyone—it appears, around this table—agrees on?
This fall economic statement just didn't have anything.
My concern—hopefully in the short term—is the affordability crisis. When I look at the affordability crisis, I don't see anything in the fall economic statement on that. As I said earlier, no one in my constituency was calling up and saying, “Philip, what we need is a 2% tax on shareholder buybacks so that public companies can have more capital”. I didn't hear that once. Maybe it's different in some of the other constituencies, but in Northumberland—Peterborough South that was not even brought up.
What I have heard over and over again, is that the cost of living is just getting too expensive. These Liberals are pricing people out of their homes. They're literally pricing people out of their grocery stores and into food banks.
In the long term, the productivity and innovation piece is something I'm very passionate about. I've spoken numerous times in the House about it, but there's nothing really substantive in there.
One of the pieces that's missing, which I think most experts will comment on and talk about, is the fact that we have a gap between the great researchers we have, the great post-secondary education and the final product. It's not the research product part that.... Obviously, we could always use more research, but it's the development piece.
As part of the pre-budget consultations, I get to hear from many different industries and many different institutions about this gap in the Canadian economy. In everything from auto manufacturing to artificial intelligence and cancer research, they all say the same thing. We're not investing in that development piece.
What that means is.... They do great work at the U of T, at MaRS and at the University of Waterloo, and they come up with amazing ideas. Unfortunately, many times, the people, the ideas or both work their way across the border or to the EU and we, as Canadians, don't necessarily get the benefit of these great ideas as we should.
This is something that we could certainly work on together on a non-partisan basis. I think all parties...I think most experts see this as an issue with respect to the Canadian economy and, quite frankly, I've seen it for decades. This is something that I was hoping to see in the fall economic statement. I was hoping to see a real commitment to increasing the productivity and innovation of our country for the long term of our country.
When we get back to the process of this legislation and why I feel it's important to talk, I don't believe that hearing Mr. Blaikie, Mr. Beech, Mr. Baker or Ms. Chatel talk is ever a waste of time. I believe my colleagues have valuable input. I believe that they were put here, and the taxpayers spend those billions of dollars, so that we can talk out those debates and talk out those discussions.
As in Good to Great, if anyone's read that book by Jim Collins.... It's a fabulous book. I highly recommend it. I see I got a smile. One of the things that he writes in there is that a lot of ideas are bad ideas. If you propose an idea, it's more likely to be bad. Think about it. It's more likely to hurt than help. That's why Parliament is meant to be like this. It's meant to be a vetting process, so that we have those hedgehog ideas that get through and empower Canada to own the next century.
However, part of that is it's important to say no. It can't just be “Yes, yes, yes”, because if you have a hundred priorities, you don't have a priority. When we are going through this, it's our job as His Majesty's loyal opposition to critique this and to be the ones who fearlessly say no, that is not a good idea and, in fact, that is incorrect.
Like I said, as Jim Collins wrote in Good to Great, the chances are that we're right more often than we're not when we say “no”, and sometimes the best thing a government can do is say, “No, let's not do that”.
As Edmund Burke said many years ago, why would we just on a whim throw out the tried and true for something new and unproven? The hours that we spend in Parliament, I think, are incredibly valuable.
I will continue to discuss it unapologetically. Quite frankly, like I said, I don't care who I irritate or who I annoy. I'm here for the people of Northumberland—Peterborough South and for Canadians, and if that means angering or annoying people, that's fine. I do it to my 7-year-old daughter all the time, and I'm happy to do it here in Parliament as well.
There's one element that I want to go back to, because I'm hoping it might actually be a fertile area for future discussion and amendments. I had a PMB with respect to propane and natural gas for farmers and giving them an exemption from the carbon tax. Actually, it's being carried forward by Mr. Ben Lobb, the member for Huron—Bruce. The private member's bill is Bill C-234. I think it will do some great things. I'm looking forward to it receiving royal assent, because some farmers are paying tens of thousands of dollars.
In the discussion on that legislation, the part that I actually found most shocking was the fact that we charge GST on the carbon tax. Like, how does that make sense? If a private corporation did that, the NDP would be absolutely losing their minds. The government is charging a tax on a tax. In what world does that make sense? The most bizarre part about that, though, is that as part of the PMB discussions, we had a member from the finance department come before us. I had some initial ground-setting questions. When I asked if we charged GST on the carbon tax, he said no.
This was the ministry of finance. They didn't know that they charged GST on the carbon tax. Of course, a couple of months later, without apology but just by a way of explanation and in as many words as possible, in as fulsome a word salad as you'd ever hear, he admitted that, yes, they do in fact charge GST on the carbon tax.
Later in my questioning about charging the GST on the carbon tax, as to why they did that...because I know that we have a number of individuals here who are experts on tax policy. They even worked for the federal government to great esteem and to high regard. They would be aware that nowhere in tax policy does it say that it's good policy to charge tax on a tax. There are different schools of thought that say where someone's wealth increases, they should pay their greater share. That makes sense. But your belief that you should be paying more GST because you pay more carbon tax doesn't hold water. It doesn't make sense.
So an easy fix, and I think one that would be relatively consistent with what the NDP are calling for, along with us, would be the removal of GST on home heating. Let's at least reduce the carbon tax by the GST we pay on the carbon tax.
By the by, it also blows up the Liberal narrative that the carbon tax is revenue-neutral, because that GST you don't get back. You don't get that as part of the carbon tax rebate. That GST is just money that goes, through government greed, into the coffers of the government. Through the ever-expanding and insatiable greed of the government, it's getting more and more and more Canadians....
Let's also put this into context here. The single mom starts paying tax at $14,000. That's the personal exemption. However, then there are the trillionaires and the billionaires. Do you know how many people from the Panama papers have paid taxes on those claims? Zero. Do you know how many dollars have been collected from the Panama papers?
Of course, the Panama papers listed a number of Canadians with respect to tax evasion. These are not small numbers. Maybe the CRA could back off the small business owners trying to make their way. Instead of, in the fall economic statement, asking for thousands more dollars so they can have thousands more auditors, maybe they could focus on the Panama papers. That's now many years back and they have not collected a single penny.
I understand that it might be easier to audit a small business owner who's trying his best to earn money, but what about the billionaires and the trillionaires who are named in the Panama papers and are still not out one dollar? Not one dollar has been collected. Not one individual has gone to jail—not one—and these are serious, serious dollars.
Let's focus our guns where they should be instead of cracking down...as the former finance minister called small business owners when he called them tax cheats. Yet his friends, the folks he vacations with in the millionaire islands, the billionaire islands—they're fine; they're fine.
Let's just let the Panama papers and all the people who are evading taxes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.... Did we see any update in the fall economic statement about that? I didn't see any.
I know that I've certainly heard Peter Julian from the NDP and many others—and our Leader of the Opposition has always been clear—say that every Canadian should pay their fair share. I'm calling on this government again. Let's get an update. Before we shake down another innocent hard-working Canadian business owner with another needless audit, let's go after the trillionaires. Let's go after the folks who were named in the Panama papers for illegally avoiding Canadian taxation. It's those tax havens that this government should be going after if they're in need of that revenue.
When we have that revenue—right now, we have record revenue because of inflation and because we've taken so much more from hard-working Canadians as a percentage—let's apply that to debt reduction. Well, we have to start with deficit reduction, of course, and maybe one day, miracle of miracles, maybe we'll pull out Adam's sock there and we'll actually get a dollar of debt reduction, which will help all of us. It will help Canadians by reducing—hopefully—the tax burden going forward. It will also help social democrats, as they'd have more money to spend on the projects they would like, but a bigger deficit—a bigger debt—doesn't help anyone.
When we look at the future, we need to have a fall economic statement that I'm hoping.... In fact, I know that underneath a Poilievre government, we won't have a fall economic statement that is just a litany of failure after failure. When the Liberals fail, the good news is that they get to reannounce the same program over and over again, and that's what we saw in there.
After seven years of these Liberals being in charge, we have high interest rates that are driving up the costs for everyone and making it nearly impossible for many Canadians to afford a house. In fact, some are giving up the ability to ever own a home, which is just so sad.
We have continued high inflation, which drives up the costs of everything. Like I said, if you're a millionaire, a billionaire or a trillionaire, you're watching some of your assets continue to increase in value, but if you're a hard-working person, if you're like family members of mine, who are on the line or are working at a steel plant or in a mine or in a field growing crops, that inflation hurts, and it hurts a lot. It's not just a number on a spreadsheet. It's their ability to feed their families. Quite frankly, we've seen the evidence of that. We've seen record food bank usage. Food bank usage has increased by over 20%. In one month, 1.5 million Canadians went to a food bank, 500,000 of whom were children.
We have high interest rates and high inflation and the government says, “Oh, by the way, in order to counteract the inflation we created, which both the current Governor of the Bank of Canada and the future Liberal leader, Mark Carney, said is a Canadian phenomenon”—so we have the self-inflicted wound of inflation—“in order to fix that ailment, we're also going to slow the economy.” Of course, slowing the economy isn't just numbers either. It's not just GDP going down. It's good hard-working Canadians, women and men across this land, who are going to lose their jobs.
This is their document. They produced this document. What they're telling Canadians is that they have high inflation to deal with and high interest rates. There's no doubt that some Canadians will lose their homes, because those who are having to re-up their fixed mortgage or who have a variable, depending on how it's structured, have probably seen an increase in their payments.
Before this, Canadians were within $200 of insolvency, so guess what happens if your interest rate goes up by $200? It continues to increase. On top of that, you now have slowing economic growth. We have economic growth that, according to this projection, is either just on the knife's edge of being a recession or, in their downward projection, is indeed a recession.
We have high interest rates, high inflation and low economic growth. This is a triple economic nightmare that seven years of Liberal government has led to. It's increasingly pricing Canadians out of their own country.
Mr. Chair, who is up next on the speaking order?
