Mr. Speaker, it truly is an honour to stand today on behalf of the hard-working residents of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford to debate Bill C-29 at report stage. It is very unfortunate that I am doing so under the yoke of time allocation. I feel that today's motion to limit the ability of members of Parliament to give viewpoints on behalf of their constituents was truly a reprehensible motion. The government brought down a guillotine to cut off our ability to speak on behalf of our constituents. When it comes to budget implementation acts, they are vast pieces of legislation. They cover so many different areas. If any bill deserves close scrutiny, it is this type of legislation.
We have had some odd occurrences in this debate. On Friday, one of the first motions moved by the government was a motion to delete the short title. It was moved by the member for Winnipeg North. I am not sure why the committee had not decided to do that, but the government found the wisdom to do it. There have been some strange occurences with this bill.
I find that when members of Parliament move to that side of the chamber, they tend to suffer from short-term memory loss. The Liberals used to be the most vocal opponents; they used to scream with moral outrage every time time allocation was invoked. I think it is helpful to go back to some actual quotes to help to remind them.
On February 8, 2012, the member for Winnipeg North said:
The only way in which the government has been able to deal with the legislative agenda as opposed to working with the opposition is to ram it through the House of Commons in an undemocratic fashion.
Why has the government been a total and absolute failure in not recognizing the importance of working in negotiation with the opposition and ensuring that Canada is served better through the normal process of...debate?
I would love to ask that question of him today. I wonder what answer he would give, the 2012 version versus the 2016 version.
Report stage is a particularly important time in the legislative process. It gives members of Parliament who were not able to participate at the committee stage the chance to move important amendments. The fact that we have only had Friday, and now cutting it off today, I think shows an extreme disrespect.
That being said, I want to move on to talk about some of the substantive measures of the bill and my views on it.
The Liberals ran strongly on extolling the virtues of their middle-class tax cut. What I have to keep reminding my constituents, and indeed all Canadians is that this is not a middle-class tax cut. They will not see the full benefits unless they are earning a six-figure income. That is certainly not members of the middle class in my riding, and indeed in Canada. When the median income is $31,000 a year, those people are not receiving any benefit. Even if they had a decent income in the $60,000 to $70,000 range, their benefits would certainly not be as much as someone earning $150,000, or even up to $199,000. It is important to bring that up. The Liberals like to sell this as a middle-class tax cut, when in fact it is anything but.
I also want to speak up on behalf of the hard-working small business owners in my riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford. They really are fantastic people. Over the last seven years, I have had a lot of opportunities to work with small businesses when they have had problems with their taxes. I was given the very privileged position, in my former life as a constituency assistant, to see the details of small business tax returns. I know how difficult it is for them to survive in today's environment. Often, small business owners are paying themselves very meagre salaries and cutting corners for themselves personally to ensure their employees have jobs and that the business continues to be a source of employment for the local community. That is a pattern that we see across Canada. Therefore, it was quite disappointing to see that the Liberals did not move ahead with their promised small business tax cut.
Also, I think there was a real opportunity in the budget implementation act to take some meaningful action on credit card fees. Credit card fees can be an enormous expense for businesses. If they do not have the machines that take credit cards, they are not going to get customers, but there are huge fees for using that service. There was a missed opportunity to take some meaningful action on that measure, and it would have done some great work for businesses across the country.
The next thing I want to talk about is the child benefit, which is another program extolled by the Liberals. I would agree that it is a good thing any time we can provide families with money, because I know very well that families struggle a lot.
We do not want to overextend ourselves in praising this benefit, considering the situation that many families are going through with the lack of affordable child care spaces and the maximum child benefit being around $6,400. That is only going to meet parents halfway when they are looking for child care spaces with how expensive it is.
Furthermore, if there are no good full-time jobs out there with a standard living wage, then a lot of parents will not be able to afford a second job because the cost of child care completely outweighs their income. There is no chance for upward mobility, and that is the main thing. It has been proven time and again that if decent affordable child care is provided, then families will be able to make their way up. Furthermore, a strong, safe minimum wage is an added benefit.
I am disappointed that families will have to wait until 2020 until the child benefit gets indexed to inflation. That leaves a big question for me: Why is the Liberal government not taking action and implementing indexation next year? I have not yet received an adequate answer to that simple question, and I will remind my constituents of that point time and again.
The next part that I want to talk about goes to the infrastructure bank proposal. We first heard about this in budget 2016, earlier in the spring, when the government started talking about asset recycling. I am always wary when new terms, new technical jargon, come up. It usually means trying to change the meaning of something so people get confused about what is really going on.
Andrew Coyne had this to say in one of his columns earlier this year. He stated that asset recycling “can finance capital projects like roads and bridges by charging the people who use them. Once these would have been known as user fees or road tolls; in the language of today’s technocrats, it’s called “asset monetization” or “asset recycling.”
When private investors make these substantial investments in infrastructure projects, they are going to want a good rate of return. When Michael Sabia appeared before the Toronto Region Board of Trade on March 3, 2016, he said he was looking for stable, predictable returns in the 7% to 9% range. Canadians were not acquainted with that during the Liberal campaign promise. For 7% to 9% rates of return, we would have to look at charging tolls and user fees to ordinary Canadians and residents. That goes way above and beyond the kind of interest rates that Canadians were hoping for when the federal government can use its borrowing power at extremely low interest rates to finance these kinds of capital projects. That is a far cry from the 7% to 9% that private investors are going to be looking for.
Those are some of the major concerns overall. There were some incredible missed opportunities in this legislation. We in the New Democratic Party have been raising this consistently. There were some real opportunities that could have been made use of to help lower-income members of our society move forward, such as showing leadership on a federal minimum wage, providing child care spaces, and making sure the federal government uses its borrowing power to make those much-needed investments in infrastructure, rather than relying on the private sector and the tolls and user fees they are going to extract. We also hope the child benefit will be indexed to inflation starting next year.
I will leave it at that because I have made my points. I appreciate this opportunity to speak on behalf of the amazing constituents of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford.