Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-9, although the bill itself does not please anyone following our debates here. It is an honour to speak after the Leader of the New Democratic Party and to note a few aspects of this bill to illustrate to what extent it would be unacceptable for the House to pass it, especially since the Conservative government, as we all know, is a minority government.
My leader raised a number of points that bear repeating, namely the fact that the Conservatives, with their now legendary hypocrisy, keep saying they are a law and order government. Take Canada Post for example. The courts ruled that the activity of certain companies falls within the mandate of Canada Post and that this was a clear violation of the legislation.
These same companies have convinced the government to introduce within this omnibus bill, provisions in their favour. This is clear to the House. Instead of being punished for breaking the law and told to stop breaking it, these people have convinced the Conservative government to change the law so that they are no longer in violation of it. The government claims the legislation was the problem and not the people who were violating it. Such is the Conservatives' hypocrisy.
We also saw this with the theft from the employment insurance fund. Some $57 billion had been collected from all the employees and all the businesses in Canada for a specific purpose: to cope with the cyclical nature of unemployment in Canada. The Supreme Court ruled that by taking this $57 billion, the government was, in a way, violating the law. No matter, it will simply change the law again to no longer be in violation of it.
With impunity, those who broke the Canada Post Act are now finding justification ex post facto through a legislative amendment. With impunity, the government has shown that the law only applies to others. That the law applies equally to everyone is the very foundation for a free and democratic society. In French we call it une société de droit. In English, we call it the rule of law. We have seen that, for the Conservatives, the rule of law consists in saying “do as I say, not as I do”.
There is a direct link between another matter in Bill C-9 on the environment and the destruction of what used to be a balanced economy in Canada.
In Canada, since WWII, we have built a balanced economy with the primary sector as the engine. The makeup of our country dictated that it was the strength of our economy from the beginning. We had mines all over the country. We mined the different minerals and moved onto the forestry sector. It is our primary sector. The secondary sector is based on processing and manufacturing. It is well distributed across the country but concentrated, to a certain extent, in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario for historical reasons. Finally, in the last generation, the service sector has been growing.
The Conservatives have been destroying this balanced economy since they came to power. There is a term for the reality in Canada today. In economics, it is known as the Dutch disease. When the Netherlands discovered oil and gas resources off their coasts two generations ago, they quickly began their exploitation. At the time, the Euro was not Europe's common currency and every country had its own currency. In the Netherlands, it was the guilder. The value of this currency rose significantly, compared to other European currencies, with the result that the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands was destroyed in one generation. We learned not to do this. That is not the case for the Conservatives, who, I would remind you, continually boast about being excellent administrators and people who understand the economy.
Let us look at the facts. Last year, they posted the largest deficit in Canada's history. That is the reality.
That is not rhetoric; that is the reality of the Conservatives.
Since they came to power, they have emptied the employment insurance fund. In fact, they picked up where the Liberals left off and finished looting the EI fund. They are making it official with Bill C-9. They created some $60 billion in tax room, so it is no coincidence that Canada's richest companies received exactly $60 billion in tax cuts.
Why do I say the richest, wealthiest, most profitable companies? It is simple. Let us take the example of manufacturers in Quebec and Ontario and forest companies in B.C. Our strong loonie is a direct result of the Conservatives' work, because they imported huge numbers of U.S. dollars by exporting huge quantities of Canadian oil without internalizing environmental costs. Because the number of U.S. dollars is artificially high, the loonie is too high, which makes things more difficult for the manufacturing and forestry sectors. When a company does not turn a profit, it does not pay any tax, which means that the $60 billion in tax cuts did not benefit the companies in the manufacturing and forestry sectors, which needed them most.
Who did these tax cuts benefit? Companies like Encana, which was already making a fortune developing this country's natural resources, the oil sands, without internalizing environmental costs, and received a $500 million windfall. The government is leaving not only an environmental mess, but an economic mess for future generations.
The worst part of the whole thing is that the companies that tanked are paying the price, because if a company loses money, it does not benefit from tax cuts, but it still has to pay employment insurance premiums for all its employees. The companies most in need therefore wind up subsidizing the richest companies in Canada. That destabilizes our economy.
Before the current crisis hit, in the fall of 2008, Quebec, Ontario and the other manufacturing sectors had already lost 400,000 well-paying jobs. The government will say that that is wrong and that we can see from the figures and the statistics that other jobs are being created. Okay, but they are not factory jobs that pay $35 an hour and come with a pension. Sustainable development also means thinking about outcomes for future generations. It is not just an environmental concept, but an economic one as well.
Future generations are the ones that will pay because those people may now be working in a store for $12 an hour. I do not wish to take anything away from someone who works for $12 an hour in a store, but make no mistake, these people cannot truly provide for their families and they definitely do not have a pension plan. We are just continuing to dump our problems onto future generations.
According to OECD, Canada has the highest debt-to-financial assets ratio for households and families. That is the reality.
So when we hear the Conservatives say that this is normal and that their banks are absolutely brilliant on the global stage, we look at the facts. For the first six months of this year, the Canadian banks have set aside $5 billion for bonuses for their executives.
These same banks have made more than $19 billion in profit since the beginning of the recession, not because they are financial geniuses, but because there is a quasi-monopoly, because no one controls the simple things such as ATM fees and because no one does anything to control interest rates.
The differential that exists between the basic rate and what they are charging for mortgages, on credit cards and on lines of credit is the largest in history. It is not because our banks are financial geniuses, it is because they are abusing the system. But no one in this government is doing anything, no one is lifting a finger, to act in the public's interest. It is an outright failure, and it is entrenched in Bill C-9. However, we know the Conservative government's cynicism.
They tell themselves that it does not matter because the Liberal leader has already demonstrated his incompetence, his mismanagement and his inability to act, so they can put anything and everything into this omnibus bill. And they will say that we have no choice but to support them. The public will not soon forget. We are going to oppose Bill C-9.