Yes.
Evidence of meeting #87 for Finance in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was ministers.
A video is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #87 for Finance in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was ministers.
A video is available from Parliament.
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
I was hoping maybe MP Dzerowicz had some more insights on the Beatles for us.
The song concludes, “my advice for those who die/Declare the pennies on your eyes/'Cause I'm the taxman...And you're working for no one, but me.”
I know that's the way Canadians feel when they read this bill or hear what the minister wants to do, because it's clear that the carbon tax is not only a tax on the car and the street; it's a tax on your seat; it's a tax on the heat, and it's a tax on your feet, as the Beatles said. It almost sounds "Dr. Seuss-ish". Dr. Seuss would probably be appalled by the impact of this bill on the cost of the carbon tax on the production of pulp and paper for the printing of his books.
In the end, back to what MP Chambers said, this is not some sort of theoretical thing; it can all be solved by the minister agreeing—and I'm sure the PMO has told her, wherever she is travelling to, that the committee is asking for two hours. I'm sure they've informed her of that. There was some implication that she would not know until a motion was passed here. The parliamentary secretary Mr. Beech, I'm sure, in his many conversations with the minister, will have informed her about what's going on in the committee and what it would take to solve this, to address the issues, that Mr. Blaikie so rightly raises, that we want to hear about from Canadians.
It appears that the government doesn't want to hear from them, because we've been given notice of essentially a closure motion to try to keep Canadians from hearing about the budget, or to try to keep us from hearing from the minister. I know it's on notice, so we'll deal with that when it comes. We may have a few things to say about a closure motion and may perhaps quote the Liberals on their past practices and promises around closure.
If you'll recall, Mr. Chair, the document that was very insightful, which I'm sure all ministers have read, was this Treasury Board document called “Meeting the Expectations of Canadians: Review of the Responsibilities and Accountabilities of Ministers and Senior Officials”. For those who have not been watching or who have just joined us, I won't start from the beginning—because there are 55 pages, and I have about 30 or 40 pages left to read—but I will mention to you, just as a reminder, as a great summary, what this requires. It says in here that, “Parliament is sovereign”, and also states that “the House of Commons is a central feature of [our Westminster] system, and its efficacy depends heavily on the will and capacity of the House to hold ministers accountable.”
That's how our democracy works. That is why some may find this process frustrating, but that's all we're trying to do. Even the Treasury Board of Canada said that an essential and fundamental part of our democracy is for Parliament to be able to hold ministers to account. That's what we're talking about here. We're not talking about having her appear before the committee five or six times, even though she has been invited; we're asking her to give us one more hour. “Brother, can you spare a dime?” was sort of a saying in the dirty thirties and what happened in that global depression.
Finance Minister, can you spare us an hour or two, please?”
One more hour is not a lot to ask for on a $3.1-trillion spending package. In fact, I think if I were putting forward a motion—and I might actually put forward a subamendment at some time—asking the minister to appear for as long as this discussion has gone on so that we could get to the root of all of these budgets, and so MP Blaikie could pose all the questions he wants to, because I'm sure the five-minute and two-and-a-half-minute spots he'll get in a one-hour thing would be totally inadequate for the NDP to ask the questions they want to ask the minister, and that's all the NDP would be allocated in a one-hour hearing with the minister on this budget.
I don't think the dental plan and the pharmacare plan that are part of the supply agreement with the Liberals could adequately be questioned as to, one, whether one is adequate, and, two, why the other one isn't in the budget. I don't think it could be done in that short a time.
By the way, for those of you who don't know parliamentary rules, the five minutes that MP Blaikie will get and that two and a half minutes on a subsequent round are not just for his questions. It's for the answers. The NDP will get a total of about seven and a half minutes to question the minister on a $3.1-trillion spending bill and on why the things they have put in their supply agreement with the Liberals have not been addressed, presumably to their satisfaction. I'm presuming that.
If we stay for two hours—if she grants us another hour—all that does is double the amount of time Mr. Blaikie gets, roughly—
11:45 a.m.
NDP
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Yes, you don't get the first round, so it's two-and-a-half-minute cycles.
If this chair...I don't know...if this chair is a very generous chair.... The chair of the industry committee, Mr. Lightbound, is very open to how the flow of questions goes, and that might be a way to look at the two hours: to say, okay, I like the form of questioning here. Maybe, if Mr. Blaikie's questions are so insightful and the minister's answers are so penetrating and revealing, he might let him go for eight minutes in a session, as Mr. Lightbound does sometimes in that committee, but that's just—
11:45 a.m.
Larry Maguire
Presuming she doesn't speak during the first question....
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Well, she could talk out the five minutes. That's the other option. If Mr. Blaikie is excessively polite, which I know he is, he might ask one question and the minister could fill up the five minutes, unless he does as MP Erskine-Smith does quite artfully and did brilliantly against the CEOs of the telecom companies in saying: “That's not my question. You're not answering my question. Please focus on my question.”
At the end, of course, after dealing for two hours with the CEOs, much like the experience we have with government ministers, I found it interesting that MP Erskine-Smith condemned the three CEOs for not answering questions and for going from talking points. Talking points...that's something that apparently happens quite a bit, as we see in the House.
You'll know that I'm not using any talking points here, but I am using some very important documents that are put out by the government to explain the minister's role in being accountable to Parliament.
On page 16 of the Treasury Board document that I've shared.... That's to help the translators, folks, just so they can follow along. I am conscious of my pacing, because I know that if you speak too fast it makes it hard for the translators to follow. Also, I know the members on the government side don't want me to slow it down too much for the agony of perhaps prolonging it, from their perspective, but I will take the occasion, just in case I haven't articulated well, to spell some of the words here, particularly those words “ministerial accountability” and feel groovy. Slow down and feel groovy. That's another great line from a Beatles song. I think everyone is blessed that I didn't quote any songs from The Monkees.
On page 16, we were talking about something called the main estimates and the minister's accountability for main estimates. They contain the spending proposals.
This Treasury Board document says:
In the Main Estimates, the government presents Parliament with spending proposals for a fiscal year and provides details on individual programs and on the plans and performance of departments and agencies. It indicates the areas in which it will spend funds and defines the limits to what the government may legally spend on a program without returning to Parliament to request more funds—
That is critical to do. We will recall that at the beginning of COVID this government wanted to actually not have to go back to Parliament for two years, to just have blanket authority to spend whatever they wanted, something that you find quite frequently in the supposed legislature dominated by the Communist Party of China in Beijing.
—which is done through a supply bill or an appropriations act. If called, ministers must appear before a committee of the House of Commons to answer questions....
It doesn't say “may appear” or maybe “at will, if they're not out travelling the world”. I don't know why the Minister of Finance would be attending NATO meetings, but apparently she's been spending a lot of time there. It doesn't have “will”. This committee invited, very politely, the minister to appear on estimates this year. She ignored the Treasury Board guidelines for ministerial responsibility and did not come. It says right here in this Government of Canada Treasury Board guidelines that the minister will appear on estimates.
The final sentence is even more direct. If you didn't get to that sentence, the final sentence of this paragraph is “If called, ministers must appear before a committee of the House of Commons to answer questions on spending”—that's a “must”. Why is it this minister doesn't feel that she must appear for two hours—two hours—on this bill?
It goes on about several other committees and their roles, such as the Standing Committee on Government Operations. In the interest of brevity, I will skip that paragraph. Actually, I'll skip the next one too, because it is about the public accounts committee. We're in the finance committee here. I know everyone is impressed with my brevity.
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON
There is a public accounts meeting later on.
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Oh, there is a public accounts meeting later today, so it's being requested that we actually hear just a little more, for the usage of those who have dual committee responsibilities, what the Treasury Board says the roles of ministers are with respect to the public accounts committee.
It has in the final paragraph on page 16, “The Standing Committee on Public Accounts”—otherwise more colloquially known as the public accounts committee—“scrutinizes all reports of the auditor general and The Public Accounts of Canada once they are tabled in the House of Commons.”
If viewers want to see what the agenda is for those committees or for this committee, they can go to Ourcommons.ca and click under “Committees”, pick out the committee they're interested in and see the agenda. If, for some reason, this committee's not being broadcast on CPAC, those who are watching this will know already, I guess, that they can go to ParlVU. They can watch anything that's going on online in Parliament. They just click on the committee. They can actually go back and view past things. They could go back and start to watch from the beginning, if they wanted to, my presentation on ministerial accountability and these important government documents.
It's being pointed out that these are in both official languages, because I do respect immensely my Bloc colleagues and want to make sure people know that they can get any of these presentations or minutes and can watch or view in both official languages. It's easy. There's a button to click at the bottom. You just choose between English and French. That's very important, because we are an officially bilingual country.
We only have one officially bilingual province, though: New Brunswick. Canadians have a right to ask for government services in the language of their choice.
This final paragraph continues about the public accounts committee, “The Committee helps ensure that public funds are spent for the purposes authorized by Parliament.” It doesn't say that the committee helps understand or oversee the monies spent by the Minister of Finance on her own, without anybody watching over her shoulder, except for, maybe, the chief of staff of the Prime Minister. It doesn't say that here in this Treasury Board document.
What it has is, “The Committee helps ensure that public funds are spent for the purposes authorized by Parliament.” Only Parliament can authorize spending, right? This is part of this process, this massive omnibus bill amending 51 acts. It's important, to get to an understanding of that act that we be able to ask the key questions, and we need to ask them to the minister responsible. It's a fairly basic thing.
It actually goes back to the basic establishment of the mother of all parliaments in Great Britain. For those of you who don't know, the reason the House of Commons is green is that the first House of Commons in Britain was held in a farmer's field. It wasn't held in the winter, so the grass was green. That's why that's our colour—to represent the commoners, the farmers, agriculture, the roots of our country, the common people, because the common people have common sense. That's what we should be following to bring it home.
The Treasury Board report continues to say that the public accounts committee does not assess the appropriateness of policies adopted by the government. It's actually for committees like this to examine the appropriateness of those issues. Public accounts' job is to ensure that the money that was allocated to change the symbol on the king's crown from a religious symbol to a snowflake—because apparently Canada is the only country with snow—has been spent correctly, and that it hasn't been spent on enforcement of rules regarding elvers—although, Lord knows, we need that since the RCMP is refusing to enforce the law in Nova Scotia around illegal poaching. Maybe some of that money could be diverted there—but, no, the public accounts would find that a misuse of public funds, because that is not what Parliament will be approving. If Parliament approves this bill, it will approve those specific changes.
It's funny though. Even though this bill deals with symbols around royalty, I was shocked to learn that the bill doesn't deal with the imagines on Canada's passport. The government decided on its own that we should remove the image of Terry Fox and replace it with a squirrel eating a nut. Apparently a squirrel eating a nut is more Canadian than Terry Fox.
That would be an interesting question to pose to the minister. Maybe the minister is thinking that she has to squirrel it away for a rainy day. I don't see any squirrelling away for a rainy day in this budget with $130 billion of debt projected to be added to our national debt, bringing it to almost $1.4 trillion, by the way, of which $1.1 trillion will have been added by the two Trudeaus. For those who don't know it, the current Prime Minister's father was also prime minister for a number of years and left our country in—oh, I've been asked which years, because we have some young people in the room.
Specifically, he was first elected in 1968 and then defeated—which was a glorious day—on February 23, 1979, if I am correct, but I will defer to my Beatles expert, who may know more specifically.
Unfortunately, nine months later, that government of the Right Honourable Joe Clark.... By the way, for those who don't know it, after Pierre Trudeau was defeated, he resigned as leader. He drove away from Parliament Hill in his rare Mercedes Gullwing car because he didn't have the limo anymore. That car, which the son now owns, is worth something around $30 million or $40 million. The car is actually worth more than the $14 million that apparently the Prime Minister is worth. The car is actually worth more than his other assets. That doesn't seem right, but he inherited a beautiful car, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau left town with his tail between his legs in a very expensive, collectible and rare car.
In early 1980 a very colourful finance minister, who later in the Mulroney government went on to serve as justice minister and trade minister, someone by the name of John Crosbie, who was Joe Clark's finance minister in 1979, presented a budget, accountable to Parliament. That budget proposed the outrageous idea that in order the help pay off the debt and deficits that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had built up—which was the reason he lost his finance minister, by the way, in 1975 when John Turner resigned over that—there would be a tax on gasoline of 18¢ a gallon. We hadn't converted to metric yet, but that would be 4.5¢ a litre. For those who don't know what a Canadian gallon is, it's not a U.S. gallon. They would have been pikers compared to this government and the carbon tax, which, before the end of the decade, is going to add 41¢ a litre to the cost of gas. Unfortunately we lost John Crosbie a couple of years ago, but John would blush at the thought of presenting a budget that imposed 41¢ per litre of tax because the result of John Crosbie's tax of 18¢ a gallon or 4.5¢ a litre was that the Liberals and the NDP got together, I believe with the Union Nationale from Quebec, to defeat the Crosbie budget and send us to an election.
You would think that, at the time since the Liberals didn't have a leader, they wouldn't have done such a thing and would have respected the fact that somebody was trying to clean up the mess they had caused, but apparently not, so the wily old Allan MacEachen from Nova Scotia got Pierre Trudeau back into the saddle to fight the 1980 election, where he ran around calling himself “The Gunslinger”. Can you imagine that? A Liberal Prime Minister called himself the gunslinger. Given what the Liberals are doing with Bill C-21, I find it hard to believe that they would be proud of the legacy of a Liberal prime minister who served ultimately from 1968 to 1979 and then from 1980 to 1984 called himself the gunslinger.
He would actually stand with his fingers pointed like guns in his belt loop when he was campaigning. The gunslinger. I guess he had a different view on firearms from the one the current government has.
If I could go on to the next sentence of the report, it's the last sentence on page 16—
11:45 a.m.
An hon. member
[Inaudible—Editor]
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
I'm being reminded we have many knowledgeable members of Parliament here who are very familiar with history. MP Maguire, who has an extensive background in elected office, understands and remembers those times, as well, and remembers that, not unlike his promises in 1974, Pierre Trudeau said he wouldn't oppose wage and price controls and made fun of the Tory leader Robert Stanfield by saying, “Zap, you're frozen.”. When he then got into government, unusually for a Liberal, he flipped his position and brought in wage and price controls.
He said he would not impose an 18¢-a-gallon tax or 4.5¢-a-litre tax on Canadians on gas. He said it was outrageous.
When he was brought back.... It was without a leadership convention, by the way.
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
They just put him in and appointed him. It's not very democratic. What did he do when he got re-elected and defeated the government of Joe Clark? He brought in the tax that he ran against.
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
I know it's unusual and people will find it hard to believe that they—
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON
What about the GST? Didn't they do that again?
11:45 a.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Peter Fonseca
MP Perkins, I think I mentioned—for the sake of the interpreters, for their health and safety, and for members—the crosstalk that's coming across affects the interpreters.
First, it doesn't allow them to do their job professionally, and it affects them because they're not able to do the interpretation. They're getting bad sound, so could we allow just one speaker at a time?
I have MP Ste-Marie on a point of order.
11:45 a.m.
Bloc
Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC
Thank you for that important reminder, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to clarify something. The honourable member wasn't sure about the name of the party in Quebec. I think he meant to say the Social Credit Party, which was led by Réal Caouette for many years. I don't think he meant the Union nationale, a party in the National Assembly, in Quebec City, led by the “Cheuf”, Maurice Duplessis.
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Rick Perkins Conservative South Shore—St. Margarets, NS
Thank you very much.
That was yet another insightful historical intervention, not on the Beatles, but one the correct name of the party that was in Parliament at the time. I very much appreciate that. Nonetheless, the result of their joining the vote to defeat the government resulted in Canadians actually having to pay the tax anyway and a Liberal Party surprisingly promising one thing in an election and doing another. That's the one thing I know Canadians depend on. It's like saying we're going to balance the budget and not, and then saying in 2022 we're going to balance the budget and then six months later we're not.
There are many other things I could talk about that happened between 1980 and 1984. We could talk about the fact that between 1980 and 1984, once Pierre Trudeau was back in, we didn't have a goods and services tax in Canada. We had something called the manufacturers' sales tax. I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the manufacturers' sales tax, especially the young people in the room. But if you're not familiar with it, there was no tax on sales like you see now on your bill. Back then what we had was a tax only on things that were manufactured, but it wasn't once the thing had been manufactured; It was a tax on every level of the process of manufacturing. Between 1980 and 1984 that tax rose 7% to 14% on all manufactured goods.
If you were manufacturing something and you bought a piece of wood to manufacture it, you paid a 14% tax on it. Then if you bought a saw to cut it, you paid a 14% tax on that. Then if you cut that into something that then got made and sold to another company for that company to turn it into part of, say, furniture, it got taxed again. All through the system it got taxed 14%. It wasn't visible. Nobody knew it existed except for Parliament and people in Parliament. That government almost doubled the hidden tax in four years.
Yes, it's true, and that tax continued to exist from 1984 to 1988 during the first term of the Mulroney government, although his government signalled in an economic blueprint released in 1985 that they were going to restructure the economy and look at trade rules around the world. There was no free trade anywhere in the world. There was not even a WTO. There were some rounds of GATT, but there wasn't much going on in free trade. There were 10 or 12 tax brackets back then. They had to look at that. There were issues with the inefficiencies of the sales tax as we were moving from the manufacturing economy to a services economy. That's why in the 1988 campaign the Conservative government said, "You know what? We're going to get rid of the 14% manufacturers' sales tax". That was the election on free trade, a unique concept in the world at the time. They said they were going to get rid of the 14% manufacturers' sales tax and cut it in half down to 7%, and make it fair across the whole economy so that manufacturing wouldn't be unduly penalized versus the services industry, because we have a competitive economy. The tax actually got reduced, but the most important thing that was done was that, unlike the Liberal manufacturers' sales tax, the goods and services tax was made visible.
Believe it or not, I as a young fellow with a lot of hair would sit in as a staffer at some of those cabinet meetings. In the way staff sit behind us here today, I would sit in on some of those cabinet meetings where they discussed whether or not it should be made visible. It was a big political debate because, politically, why would you remind people every time they bought something that you had imposed this tax? That was the beauty from a political perspective of increasing the manufacturers' sales tax, because you could increase it and nobody would know, no consumer would know it because was just buried in the price. But if you made the goods and services tax visible, then you would be accountable to the people who elected you if you decided to increase it or decrease it.
A good public policy choice was made after an extensive debate to say that we're going to do the right thing, because even though perhaps the current government doesn't realize they won't be in power forever, we realized that unfortunately we wouldn't be in power forever, and we weren't. If future governments wanted to change the goods and services tax, doing os would have to be visible to Canadians. They would have to be held accountable, like this committee tries to do, to Canadians for changing one of the most fundamental things of a democracy, taxation. Whether the Crown did it before we had a Westminster system, or whether you had the American Revolution over taxation and the Boston Tea Party, taxation is a fundamental thing, particularly when you want to have taxation without representation. Indeed, you can't have representation if you don't know the tax exists.
The GST was made public and visible and it was not a good thing for the Mulroney government for its reputation with people. All of a sudden people thought, “What's this? Why are we getting a new tax?" It wasn't a new tax; it was a replacement tax at half the other rate, but they thought they had a new tax.
The government paid a political price for that, amongst other things. Trying to bring Quebec into the constitutional family, through the Meech Lake accord and the Charlottetown accord, also had an impact among the public. Doing “big things”, as the Prime Minister's mandate letter asks ministers—to do the “big things”—was what that was about. It was trying to make sure Quebec was part of our Canadian family along with “big things” like doing the right thing and making sure future governments would be held accountable for any changes in the sales tax that we would collect as a government or would be responsible for as a government.
Do you know what? It worked. It has been a financial bonanza, far beyond the thoughts of what our humble minds could envisage at the time we brought it in, in terms of the amount of revenue, because as the economy grows, the revenue to the government grows because people spend more.
On top of that, guess what. Nobody has increased the tax. That visibility has kept at bay what was happening before. In fact, some may recall that one of the greatest prime ministers we ever had, Stephen Harper, actually reduced the tax by 2% from 7% to 5%. What happened afterwards was puzzling because this goes to the whole issue of accountability and visibility. For efficiency, many of the provinces, over the years, have managed to combine their provincial sales tax with the federal sales tax in something called the HST, or the harmonized sales tax. The harmonized sales tax was for administrative efficiency. It also allowed provincial governments to expand the number of goods and services that their provincial sales taxes were on, because the GST was the broader one, so it increased revenue.
What a number of provinces did, except for Alberta.... In most provinces, the combined provincial and federal sales tax, between the GST and the provincial tax, when harmonized, was 14% to 15%, except in Alberta where they have no provincial sales tax. Alberta is the only province today that has seen the benefit, in a long term, of Stephen Harper's reduction from 7% to 5% of the GST.
In my home province, when the NDP were in power, that's what happened. The one term and only term NDP government under Darrell Dexter, who I consider a friend, decided to take up the room and to increase the provincial sales tax from 8% to 10% keeping the HST at 15%. Nobody in Nova Scotia got to see the benefit of that reduction in tax. I think, if I stand corrected, a lot of other provinces thought that was a great idea, because we could hide our tax increase and not get the blame for it.
Again, it goes to the issue of this subamendment to the main amendment about accountability of ministers. If you don't know the tax is increasing, it's pretty hard to hold them to account. That's why the final sentence of this page, on page 16, says, “It is concerned solely”—that is the public accounts committee—“with the economy and efficiency of government administration, and it tables reports”—the public accounts committee—that “are answerable to Parliament”. In the same sense...oh, I'm sorry. I went back to page 15 from 16. It's almost like I was a Liberal. I counted backwards.
I'll read that sentence again. “It is concerned”, the public accounts, “solely with the economy and efficiency of government administration, and it tables reports on ways to improve managerial and financial practices and controls in departments. A member of the official opposition chairs this committee.”
This is to MP Lawrence's question earlier just to make sure that we understand the role of public accounts versus the role of the finance committee. Public accounts oversees and makes sure that, where the government says in its estimates that it will spend the money, it only gets spent there. Unlike the habit of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to—
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Philip Lawrence Conservative Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON
Mr. Chair, I just have a quick point of order here.
