Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to speak to Bill C-29. I do in fact want to talk about this, because it is a budget implementation bill that follows a budget that we believe is deficient in many ways.
What I find most deplorable is that the bill, which is over 200 pages long and amends over 130 sections, was introduced Tuesday morning. The technical briefing to members of Parliament was Tuesday evening.
Here we are three days later, on a Friday, beginning to debate a bill that has not been read by 95% of the members in this House, I guarantee, and may never be read. Still, it is a very important bill, because it implements several budget provisions and leaves out many other elements that should have been in the bill.
I found it funny earlier when the parliamentary secretary talked about everything the government had done. Regarding the Canada child benefit, which is being indexed through this budget bill, I asked why the government was refusing to admit it had forgotten to index this key measure. The parliamentary secretary replied that it was not true, that the Minister of Finance had mentioned indexation before. Well, I did a bit or research. The Minister of Finance did not mention indexation at all before the parliamentary budget officer tabled a report pointing out this serious flaw. The PBO stated that if it was not indexed, the Canada child benefit would be worth less by the year 2025 than the Conservatives' former program.
Answers like this from the government regarding such important measures are really insulting. Liberals are far from perfect; however, to hear them talk, it sounds like they are the most progressive and innovative government in recent years, which is absolutely not the case.
The bill does contain elements that we cannot argue with. For example, we certainly cannot be against indexing the Canada child benefit. If it is not indexed, its value will decline over time and it will help fewer and fewer people. The bill also contains provisions to help put a price on carbon at some point in time. On this side of the House, this is something we cannot disagree with.
However, many things were left out of the bill. The Liberals promised—like we did and like the Conservatives did—to reduce the small business tax rate. Of course, the NDP was the first party to propose reducing the small business tax rate from 11% to 9%, in 2008. The Liberals maintained the first reduction to 10.5%, which had already been made, but broke their promise.
In terms of tax evasion, the bill contains provisions aimed at meeting OECD standards. Again, we cannot disagree with that, even if, frankly, the efficiency of these standards should be challenged and analyzed because it is becoming more and more apparent that they are lacking in that regard.
My colleague from Joliette had introduced a bill that questioned the tax agreement signed with Barbados. I asked some questions about that today. The Liberals opposed it, except for a single member.
These tax agreements, which are supposed to be treaties to prevent double taxation, actually make it possible to avoid paying Canadian taxes altogether. This is costing Canada billions of dollars. It is not illegal. It is legal, because Canada made it legal by signing the treaty.
When I hear the meaningless answers given by the Minister of National Revenue who does not seem to know what we are talking about when we talk about these tax agreements that are not working or these treaties that are being signed to share tax information with certain countries and that, ultimately, provide us with no information, it soon becomes quite clear that this government likes to look good, but really, it has no intention of making any changes whatsoever to the structure of our Canadian economy.
I will stop there in terms of my comments on Bill C-29 because many other members from all parties want to debate this bill.
I wish to draw the attention of the House to one issue in particular, namely the government's intention to move towards the privatization of our infrastructure. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is clearly written in black and white, and it was expressed when the budget was presented in March 2016. At that time, in March 2016, the government included the following:
New institutions could provide Canada an opportunity to improve infrastructure management across the country by working with our partners to:
Where it is in the public interest, engage public pension plans and other innovative sources of funding—such as demand management initiatives and asset recycling—to increase the long-term affordability and sustainability of infrastructure in Canada;
That was written in black and white in the federal government's budget 2016.
What do we mean by asset recycling? Asset recycling is another way of saying privatizing assets. It is basically taking money and trying to convince provinces, municipalities and the federal government to privatize the infrastructure that belongs to them. However, when we have to deal with provinces and municipalities, we entice them to privatize their assets so they can raise money to invest in other infrastructure. This is called privatization. It is black and white in budget 2016.
What do we see these days? Last week, we heard that the federal government asked Credit Suisse to study the benefit of privatizing airports. Credit Suisse has an interest in this. It is buying airports. It will advise the government on the benefit of the government privatizing public infrastructure. This is what is called asset recycling. This is one part of the infrastructure that the government intends to privatize. We are not going to ask a bank, which is in the business of buying airports, if we should or should not privatize our airports. It wants to buy them. The money the government might get will actually be part of the money it intends to put into this Canadian infrastructure bank.
Yesterday morning we heard from Mr. Martin, who is the head of the advisory council on economic growth. We learned that it was the intention of the government to find $40 billion to put in that bank, which would attract private assets, private retirement funds, which could be a caisse de dépôt et de placement, or CPP board, or whatever other funds, but also private equity firms such as BlackRock could put money into it. We they will not do that out of the goodness of their hearts. They will want a return on this.
How do they get a return on infrastructure that is being used by Canadians? There are not a thousand ways to do it. There are two ways. Either we give them infrastructure to manage, so privatizing the asset itself, or we privatize a stream of revenue, basically saying the government will keep the asset, the infrastructure. The property will still belong to the federal government, but we will have tolls, or fees, or whatever that people will pay for the use of it. That income stream will go to those private investors because they will want a return.
Michael Sabia, who, if I am not mistaken, used to be the head of Bell and is now the CEO of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, has clearly indicated that he is looking for new places to invest in order to get better returns for the Caisse than it is currently getting, since, in some cases, it is getting negative returns. He is therefore looking to make these investments profitable.
We are talking here about pension funds. Some may say that this is not a bad thing because, if those funds get better returns, it will give people more financial security. However, it is not just pension funds. If we open this door, this will also apply to private investment funds and large private investment firms, such as BlackRock.
Do we want to put the ownership of all of our infrastructure—our bridges, our roads and our transit infrastructure—in the hands of investment or pension funds, so that those funds can make money from them by charging users additional fees? The Liberals never mentioned this approach during the election campaign.
On the contrary, the only time we heard anything about tolls during the election campaign was when the Liberals, following our example, claimed to be opposed to a toll on the new Champlain Bridge. For the rest, there was no mention of privatization, no mention of this infrastructure bank that could generate private investments of up to 80%. I cannot find the words to express how shocked I am at the cynicism of a government that is going in this direction, when it claimed it wanted to help the middle class and keep its promises, but failed to tell Canadians about this plan during the election campaign.
The privatization of airports to get money to allow us to privatize other infrastructure strikes me as a significant restructuring of the Canadian economy, and as such it should have been a major part of the Liberals' election platform, but it was not.
This is not a conspiracy theory. I can back everything I am saying with accounts from Dominic Barton or by citing budget 2016. I would like to say a few words about three of the members of the Advisory Council on Economic Growth that the Prime Minister was talking about.
Dominic Barton, who was appointed chair of the advisory council, has spent his life with the McKinsey group identifying ways to mobilize private capital in exchange for public capital investments. He has spent the better part of the past 10 years promoting the privatization of infrastructure. For his part, Michael Sabia, from Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, clearly wants to diversify his income and investments through Canadian infrastructure. Mark Wiseman, formerly of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, is now at BlackRock, one of the largest private investment firms in the world, and he too is on this advisory council.
There is no doubt that these people are going to recommend privatization.
It is very obvious. They will recommend that we create this Canadian infrastructure bank and provide $40 billion, and we do not know if it is going to be out of the $60 billion promised to cities or if it will be from the privatization of those other assets, in the hope of getting $150 billion or $160 billion of private investments. For those people who have an interest in doing this, like Credit Suisse, which has an interest in airports being privatized, I would be very surprised if their recommendation is otherwise. Dominic Barton was very clear on that yesterday morning. He does not see any problem with this.
We can hold a debate on privatization and we know what side the Conservatives will take. They are generally in favour of it. In fact, their finance critic already projected that in his response. We also already know what side we are going to take: a public asset should never be handed over for the purposes of privatization.
Recent studies by the OECD, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank clearly show that the privatization of public infrastructure assets did not produce positive results, not for the users, nor for the infrastructure itself.
The Conservatives' position is clear and so is ours. It is the Liberals' position that I do not understand. During the election campaign, they never mentioned that this infrastructure bank that was set up would be used largely for privatization. When Canadians heard the Liberals talk about their infrastructure plan, they expected the money would come from the government. They expected the infrastructure plan to be paid for out of the Liberals' deficit, which was supposed to be $10 billion and is now $35 billion, but that is a topic for another debate. It was never a question of privatizing our Canadian infrastructure.
We are at a crossroads. That is not the purpose of Bill C-29, which is one component of the Liberal government's economic agenda. It is one of the things that will come out ahead of the Minister of Finance's economic and fiscal update.
Will there be anything in the update about privatization, asset recycling and the Canada infrastructure bank? That is what we are going to find out on November 1.
I am wondering what will take place during this economic and fiscal update. Will he be talking about privatization? Will the minister be talking about asset recycling? Will he be talking about the Canadian infrastructure bank? We will see.
However, we also know that on November 14, there will be a meeting in Toronto with retirement fund and private equity investors who will actually be very happy. Obviously, Mr. Barton will be there, as well as other members of that advisory council on economic growth.
What do members think they will be talking about?
They will be talking about what we can do to improve infrastructure. Obviously, the fact that the government has neglected this for so long, the fact that we have reduced the fiscal capacity of the government to fix these projects, to improve them, to enlarge them, will not be part of it. We are not going to be talking about the $10 billion to $20 billion annually that we have lost through the reduction of the corporate income tax, since 2000, and the GST, as well. That money reduced, eliminated, the fiscal capacity of the government to invest in infrastructure over the last 15 years.
Now we are at the point where there is an infrastructure deficit in the country. It is largely due to the fact that the government has decided to shackle itself, has refused to invest in that infrastructure, preferring, instead, corporate income tax reductions that were supposed to promote private investment and promote real investment.
I can tell members we lost all that capacity to invest in our infrastructure without bringing a spurt of growth in real investment. For whatever reason, the private sector is still shy to invest all that money it received from the federal government in tax reductions.
There is no mention of how the federal governments, Liberal and Conservative, which have succeeded each other for the last 15 years, are responsible for the current situation we are in. We have the reputation, in the NDP, of not knowing how to manage money. We are over $650 billion in debt, without a single year of the NDP governing in this country. If we look at the record of the NDP provincially, in terms of fiscal management, it is very good.
However, we cannot say that the NDP has caused the problems that we have right now. We cannot say that the NDP is responsible for the infrastructure deficit that this country is experiencing. We cannot say that the NDP is responsible for the lack of ability of the federal government to invest in the needed infrastructure, and we certainly cannot say that the NDP is responsible for the fact that the Liberals, right now, are looking at the possibility of privatizing our public assets without having said a word to that effect to Canadians.
Members can be sure that we will be watching. Members can be sure that we will be making certain that Canadians know what is going on here. We will be watching very carefully what happens with the fiscal and economic update, because the direction the Liberals want to take us to fix the infrastructure problem is a solution that will be unacceptable to the majority of Canadians. We will ensure the NDP will be there with them to fight it.
