Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise today to speak to Bill C-74, the budget implementation bill for 2018, and to provide comments on the budget in general.
I will start by simply pointing out that this is another unnecessarily huge bill that is very difficult to digest and properly critique in the time allotted. It is not just an omnibus bill. It is really an obese bill that is 556 pages long and amends 44 separate pieces of legislation.
The Liberals decried the practice of the past Conservative government numerous times and ran on an election promise to abolish these bloated bills. However, they have not only continued the practice but have actually restricted the length of debate on these bills at committee.
The NDP, for one thing, is asking that the greenhouse gas pollution pricing act within this bill be pulled out and debated separately. This is a very important issue on carbon pricing, and I think it needs a full debate so that Canadians can hear how critical it is to our efforts to tackle climate change and meet our Paris targets. There is a lack of clarity in the greenhouse gas pollution pricing act, and a lot of details have been left out. It really needs to be studied carefully at committee.
Carbon pricing is an important tool in our fight against climate change, and we need to ensure that the positive outcomes from such legislation in British Columbia, where carbon emissions declined as long as its carbon tax was gradually increasing, are replicated federally.
In such a large bill, it is perhaps not surprising that there are a few parts of the budget I was very happy to see. One is the nature fund, a $500-million fund that will be matched by non-governmental partners to provide over a billion dollars to protect important ecosystems across the country.
Before I was elected to this place, I sat on the board of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and I was proud of the accomplishments of that organization in protecting more than a million hectares of land across the country. Many of those projects were at least partly funded by a similar fund created by the former Conservative government.
I do not often have good reasons to thank the previous Conservative government, so I will take this opportunity to do that and hope that this nature fund will do even more for conservation efforts across Canada, such as in the Garry oak savanna of southern Vancouver Island, the desert grasslands of the Okanagan valley, the native prairie grasslands, the Carolinian forests of Ontario, and the salt marshes of Atlantic Canada. This fund provides an exciting opportunity to really make a difference, and I commend the government for creating it. I wait anxiously to hear the details, because they seem rather lacking right now.
On the subject of protected areas, I must add a bit of disappointment related to the Minister of Finance's budget speech. He clearly said that the national park fees were going to be done away with for good. I actually applauded that, and I do not really applaud the Minister of Finance very often. Unfortunately, I found out the next day that he had misspoken and that the promise only applied to youth. I will say that free parks would be a brilliant way to get Canadians out into this country's most beautiful places to appreciate the natural wonders Canada has to offer.
Getting back to the good news in the budget, I was also glad to see the significant new funding for fundamental research, an action that was recommended in the recent Naylor report. I used to work at the University of British Columbia and can speak first-hand to the essential nature of basic research. While applied research is important, the most innovative and game-changing discoveries science has given us have come from the pure curiosity of scientists, and this funding is most welcome.
We in the NDP were very happy, at least initially, to hear the word “pharmacare” mentioned in the budget. Canada is the only country in the world with universal health care that does not have universal coverage for prescription drugs. The Parliamentary Budget Officer reported last year that Canada would save a minimum of $4 billion per year if we had a universal pharmacare program. We in the NDP have been championing this for years, and last year we tabled a motion asking the government to begin talking with the provinces within the next year about creating a pharmacare system across Canada. The Liberals inexplicably voted against this eminently reasonable motion, saying that it was not the right time.
Now is the time for pharmacare. Unfortunately, our initial excitement about the mention of pharmacare in the budget was dashed when we realized that this would be only another study, and a study without a dime of spending attached to it. Of course, it is not mentioned at all in Bill C-74.
The government should act immediately to bring pharmacare to Canada, and while it is at it, the Liberals might want to consider adding teeth, eyes, and ears to universal health care, and any other body parts we might have forgotten about when we created medicare.
What else is missing from this budget and from this massive bill? Despite government claims that this budget was all about equality in gender, there is not one cent in it to tackle the pay equity gap in Canada. I was really encouraged a couple of years ago, very early on in this Parliament, to see the Liberals vote in favour of an NDP motion on pay equity, but two years later, there has been nothing done to really advance pay equity across this country.
For a budget on equality, this budget completely missed the boat on narrowing the income gap between the one per cent, the wealthiest Canadians, and the rest of us. Today the two wealthiest Canadians, two individuals, have as much wealth as 11 million other Canadians. Many CEOs of big Canadian companies receive much of their salary, millions of dollars per year, in stock options, on which they pay only a fraction of the tax that we mortals pay. Fixing this inequity alone could bring $800 million to help balance the budget or fund programs that would make Canadians' lives easier.
Offshore tax havens are an even more blatant form of tax avoidance. Following the release of the paradise papers, some analysts calculated that Canada is losing between $10 billion and $15 billion per year in lost taxes. The Conference Board of Canada has suggested that the gap between what taxes are owed in Canada and what the government actually collects may be as high as $47 billion. One Canadian mining company has avoided paying $690 million in Canadian taxes simply because it reports its profits in Luxembourg, where it has one part-time staffer. It is ridiculous and shameful, but it is completely legal, because the country got written permission for the scam from the Canada Revenue Agency. The government continues to add offshore tax havens to the list available for Canadian companies and individuals, so now they can hide their wealth in Granada or the Cook Islands if Barbados and the other many countries with very low-tax regimes do not suit them.
Finally, I will wrap up by simply pointing out that there is no new spending in this budget for climate action, despite the clear signals that Canada will fail to meet its Paris climate targets. We need bold action and significant investment on this front. Instead of pouring money into Barbados, the Cook Islands, or Luxembourg, let us invest those billions in eco-energy retrofits, renewable energy incentives, and electrical vehicle infrastructure to get back on track and make Canada a better place to live for our children and their children.