Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Motion No. 131, which is sponsored by my good friend from Oshawa. He has done a great job highlighting the fact that the Liberal government lacks the transparency it promised during the last election.
Effectively, what the motion does is to instruct the Standing Committee on Finance to undertake a study to ensure that the cost of the Liberal carbon tax is disclosed to consumers, and that the government annually reports the financial impact of it on Canadian households and employers. This is important because, quite frankly, Canadians have no idea how it will hit them. They have no idea that the national carbon tax that the Liberal government has imposed will undermine Canada's prosperity, and undermine Canadians' ability to purchase the consumer goods that they have become accustomed to.
If the Liberal government is going to move forward with imposing a national carbon tax, Canadians deserve to know how much it will cost them. It was the Liberal government that promised to be transparent with Canadians. When it comes to the carbon tax, they are doing no such thing.
I refer the members to the mandate letter that each of the cabinet ministers received from the Prime Minister. It is the Prime Minister's instructions to each cabinet minister. Of course, there is a section that deals with conflict of interest, which we know the finance minister is breaching so flagrantly, as we remind the government every day here in this House. However, there is something else that is written in the mandate letter from the Prime Minister that is directed to the environment minister. It states:
We have also committed to set a higher bar for openness and transparency in government. It is time to shine more light on government to ensure it remains focused on the people it serves. Government and its information should be open by default...Canadians do not expect us to be perfect—they expect us to be honest, open, and sincere in our efforts to serve the public interest.
That is the letter directing the environment minister to be open and transparent in the job that she is doing for Canadians. Has she done that? Of course not. The Liberal government and the minister have repeatedly denied requests to provide Parliament with basic information on the impacts of a carbon tax on Canadians.
I have provided a specific request to the minister's office to provide me with any analyses that may have been done on its impact. I got a response, but it was not what I expected. It was basically a whole bunch of nothing because the attached report was almost wholly redacted. For those Canadians who do not understand what redaction means, it means purging documents of their content. Our request for some information about analyses that have been done on the impact of the carbon tax was completely purged of anything substantive in the response I got from the environment minister. We have nothing to go by or to share with Canadians.
Where do we go from there? The government is not being honest, transparent, and open.
We went to another report that The Conference Board of Canada issued. The Conference Board of Canada is a private sector think tank that has thoroughly analyzed the impact of the Liberal government's pan-Canadian framework on climate change, and the impact that carbon taxes will have on Canada. What is painted is a grim picture of what is to come. It provided a variety of scenarios and it confirmed that a carbon tax will not create jobs, and will not foster investment, despite the repeated claims made by the minister herself. In all of the scenarios that The Conference Board of Canada paints, the impact on real GDP or, in other words, economic growth in Canada, is negative, and its environmental impact negligible.
On the one side we have a negligible impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and The Conference Board of Canada says that on the other side it will suppress economic growth in Canada.
The report says a carbon tax is “insufficient...to achieve Canada's Paris accord commitments.”
The study also found that a carbon tax would weaken real household income through lower wages. It also found that business investment and trade volumes would be eroded. Canada is a great trading nation. To think that our ability to trade with other countries and to remain competitive with them when it comes to trade and investment will be eroded is a thought I do not want to countenance. I am surprised the Liberal government is going down this road runs that very real risk.
The study goes on to say that a carbon tax would depreciate the value of the Canadian dollar. It would disproportionately impact industries with a domestic focus, such as residential construction, finance, insurance, and real estate sectors. Chemical manufacturing, primary metals, wood, paper production, food manufacturing, plastics and rubber production all would be negatively impacted by a carbon tax. That comes from the Conference Board of Canada.
The study found one final thing and that was that a carbon tax and the plan the Liberal government wanted to impose on Canadians would result in federal deficit increases due to a decline in personal and corporate income tax revenues. Imagine that. This is not declining revenues because the Liberal government has found ways of reducing taxes on Canadians. This is a decline in tax revenues due to a decline in economic activity due to the fact that people will lose their jobs because of carbon pricing. That is the message of this report.
Let me quote one more piece out of that report. A carbon tax “not only creates downside economic risk, but also means that domestic policies that are designed to reduce emissions could simply result in those emissions occurring in another jurisdiction.” Essentially, that is called carbon leakage. The government imposes these heavy carbon taxes on top of all the additional business taxes the Liberals have imposed on Canadians recently, on top of all the payroll taxes they have imposed on Canadians.
Eventually Canadian companies that do business here and want to expand will decide they can no longer operate here because it is not profitable in Canada. They will decide to move to the United States or China and do business there where environmental standards are much lower than in Canada. We lose the jobs but overall global greenhouse gas emissions go up. Imagine the folly of this kind of plan, yet that is what is happening.
Today I met with stakeholders from the Canadian chemical industry. They say that they have somewhere in the order of $12 billion that is waiting to be invested in Canada. The told me that this investment was now at risk. This is a fast growing industry, with $53 billion worth of shipments in 2016. It is also a great job creator in Canada. They said that they were paying salaries of around $147,000 for highly trained Canadians to do the work. It is globally the best in class.
Canada's chemistry industry is already a world leader in low intensity carbon chemical production and an employer of a highly skilled workforce. This industry is considering moving either to the United States or to China to do its manufacturing. Guess what. We will be buying those same products, the very products that are helping us to reduce our carbon footprint. We are chasing all these jobs out of our country, yet greenhouse gas emissions will rise in the rest of the world. Why do we not do it here at home where we have sustainable practices, where we have strong standards with which our companies have to comply?
This is a sad story of another Liberal failure. The Liberal government is a disaster when it comes to tax planning and not understanding the consequences of imposing increased tax burdens on Canadians. We are all going to pay the price for that and for that, the Liberals should apologize.