Debates of April 2nd, 2019

Financial Statement of Minister of Finance

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

Order. What is the point of order that the hon. member for Barrie—Innisfil is making, or was he just debating?

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the point of order I am making is to look for unanimous consent to have an emergency debate on—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

I am afraid we just did that.

The hon. member for Carleton.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I was saying, this is a Prime Minister who has, through his entire public life, attempted to convert public office into private riches.

He did it when he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from charities for speeches he should have been giving as part of his role as a member of Parliament. Many of those dollars also came from public school boards and unions. He was taking money from workers and school children for speaking fees for the kinds of speeches that all of us in this House of Commons give for free all the time because we know that we are already handsomely paid as MPs to do this job as it is. He did so while having one of the worst attendance records in the House of Commons as an MP. He was paid to be here working; meanwhile, he was charging school children, workers and charities for doing the job that all of us would otherwise do for free.

That is his history. Then he has the audacity to look the working poor in the eye and say, “You are not paying enough tax.” It is a kind of arrogance that can only come when someone has been marinated in privilege for their whole life.

We have seen that same kind of elite arrogance from the Prime Minister on display recently—

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I just want to make reference to our rules, in particular with regard to unparliamentary language.

On page 623, it states that:

The proceedings of the House are based on a long-standing tradition of respect for the integrity of all Members. Thus, the use of offensive, provocative or threatening language in the House is strictly forbidden. Personal attacks, insults and obscene language or words are not in order. A direct charge or accusation against a Member may be made only by way of a substantive motion for which notice is required.

The Conservatives consistently have taken personal attacks, virtually from day one, for the last two years, and I think it is time for members to be held accountable. As the rules say, they are not allowed to personally assassinate character in this House.

I would ask that the member be called to order for his comments.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

The hon. member brings up a very good point of order. It was a discussion that was taken among the Chair officers earlier. I would remind hon. members that when criticizing the other side, regardless of which side it is going to, they can criticize the party but not the individual.

The hon. member for Carleton.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, members will note that I was referring to the Prime Minister's then decision to vote against a 2014 budget that eliminated a tax loophole from which he had benefited during his entire adult life. That is very much related to—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

I want to remind hon. members that they cannot do indirectly what they cannot do directly.

I will let the hon. member for Carleton continue.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, somebody should have told the Prime Minister that when he tried to directly pressure his attorney general. I hope that you pass that on to him, Mr. Speaker.

Now that the member wants to talk about personal attacks, I have here a letter from the Liberal member and former attorney general, the member for Vancouver Granville, that she has now submitted to the Liberal caucus. If we are going to talk about personal attacks, then let us do that. I think this is very much apropos and I am very pleased that the member rose on that particular point of order at this moment.

She wrote this to the whole Liberal caucus:

Now, I know many of you are angry, hurt, and frustrated. And frankly so am I, and I can only speak for myself. I am angry, hurt, and frustrated because I feel and believe I was upholding the values that we all committed to. In giving the advice I did, and taking the steps I did, I was trying to help protect the Prime Minister and the government from a horrible mess. I am not the one who tried to interfere in sensitive proceedings, I am not the one who made it public, and I am not the one who publicly denied what happened. But I am not going to go over all of the details here again. Enough has been said.

Growing up as an Indigenous person in this country I learned long ago the lesson that people believing what they wish about you does not, and cannot ever, make it the truth—rather than letting authority be the truth, let the truth be the authority. Indeed, if I had succumbed to interpreting the beliefs of others to be the truth, I never would have been able to push forward in the face of the racism and misogyny that far too many Indigenous women, and others, still experience every day.

Ultimately the choice that is before you is about what kind of party you want to be part of, what values it will uphold, the vision that animates it, and indeed the type of people it will attract and make it up.

She of course is writing to the caucus about the ongoing Liberal deliberations whereby members of the Prime Minister's inner circle are trying to have her expelled from her own party.

Why? It is because she blew the whistle. She saw wrongdoing and she blew the whistle. That is apparently, we are now hearing from numerous media reports and comments from Liberal MPs who support the Prime Minister, an offence punishable with expulsion.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Carleton has been referring to and reading from a letter I believe from the member for Vancouver Granville that apparently has been given to the Liberal caucus. Apparently the Liberal caucus members all have this letter; however, I am not sure if the rest of the House does. I feel that the member reading the letter and not tabling that document puts us at a disadvantage. I would ask if we need unanimous consent in order to table that letter so that all in the House could have a copy of it.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

The hon. member for Carleton wants to comment on the point of order.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, out of respect for the House of Commons, I take this letter that was written to the caucus chair of the Liberal Party by the member of Parliament for Vancouver Granville and I offer to table it in the chamber.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

Is there unanimous consent?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is remarkable that Liberal members would not consent to the tabling of a letter to Liberal members. This is a letter from a Liberal to other Liberals, and the Liberals want to ban it from being tabled in the House of Commons. It goes on and on.

The member across the way talks about personal attacks. The former attorney general stood on the solid ground of truth. She first spoke truth to power, and when power would not listen to truth, she spoke truth to the people. When power contradicted truth, she provided evidence to prove truth. Now she is being punished for it.

If that party, the once great party of Wilfrid Laurier and St. Laurent and Mackenzie King, has descended to a point where someone is punished merely for telling the truth, what message is it sending to all Canadians? What message is it sending to young people who want to come and serve in this place? If they tell the truth, they will be called names and insulted, and their gender and ethnicity will be raised as points of contention. Finally, at the end of it all, they will be kicked right out of their party altogether.

That is not the message we should send to our young people. We should send them the message that this is a place full of truth-tellers; it is full of people who will say what they know to be true. More than that, it is a place full of leaders willing to accept the truth when they hear it.

That is not the kind of leader we have at the head of the government today. Rather, he has played a game of cover-up, denial, contradiction, evasion and, finally, shutting down debate altogether. We have two parliamentary committees that have closed their doors to this matter because the Prime Minister's majority voted to do so. The Prime Minister kept his members here all night long, for 30 hours straight, voting in the House of Commons rather than just accepting a very simple demand from the official opposition that the former attorney general be allowed to complete testimony before a committee.

Now the government refuses to end my speech by simply agreeing to my one simple demand, which is for a parliamentary committee, namely the justice committee, to convene all the witnesses involved in the political interference in the SNC-Lavalin corruption scandal, question them under oath and without restriction, and issue a final report all Canadians can read before they vote in the next election. If the government announces right now that it will agree to that demand, I will terminate my speech immediately. Otherwise, I will continue to speak about this absolutely fundamental issue at the heart of our democratic system and the rule of law.

There is nothing members can do to silence members of the opposition on this. They might attempt to silence their own former ministers with threats, expulsion and denigrating comments in the media, but they will not silence members of the other side of the House. Ultimately, they will find they cannot silence Canadians either.

The people of Canada are too wise. They know that where there is smoke there is usually fire. In this case, there is a heck of a lot of smoke. We have a Prime Minister who is changing his story from one day to the next and making statements that are soon disproved by written evidence and audio recordings.

We have a Prime Minister shutting down an investigation at the justice committee and another investigation at the ethics committee. Here we have it: a justice committee with no justice and an ethics committee with no ethics. That is what it has come to with this Liberal majority.

However, we should not worry, because Liberals have a political strategy to get around it. Their plan, as witnessed by the motion we are now debating, was the Liberal three-step: a massive scandal, step number one; massive deficit spending to distract from it, step number two; and a massive tax increase to pay for it all after the election, step number three.

I have already spent a lot of time talking about step number one, the scandal itself. Let us talk about step number two, the massive deficit spending. The Prime Minister famously promised in the lead-up to the last election that the budget would balance itself. He said it would happen in the year 2019. Well, that time has now arrived. Here we are debating a budget with a deficit of $20 billion, not zero as the Prime Minister promised, but—

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, about a minute ago, a member delivered food to the member for Winnipeg North. He is consuming it at this moment. He has been consuming it for about the last 45 seconds or so. I know that is not allowed in the House of Commons, and I would like you to issue a directive on that.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Guilty, Mr. Speaker. Someone handed me a little candy. I ate it and I am sorry. I do not know if there is a way for me to bring it up to satisfy the member across the way. The reality is that I should not have eaten the little candy in the chamber, and I trust no one else eats candies in the chamber. I am sorry.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

I would remind hon. members that consumption of food is not allowed. Consumption of water or sparkling water is allowed.

I thank the hon. member for Brantford—Brant for bringing that up.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, on the same point of order, my understanding is that inside the chamber members are allowed to drink water. I do not know what the member for Carleton has in his glass, but it does not look like it is just water. Are we allowed to have other things in our water while delivering a speech in the chamber?

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

People are allowed to have water or sparkling water. If there is lime or something in the member's water, that is allowed.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know if the member wants me to submit my glass of water to a chemist so that it can be studied. It is a glass of water, albeit a little cloudy. I will not blame it on the plumbing system in this 150-year-old building, but so far it has not killed me, so I am left to trust that it is, in fact, water.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

The hon. member for Carleton can continue.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his very substantive intervention on the matter at hand.

As I was saying, there is the Liberal three-step: massive scandal, massive deficit to distract from that scandal, and of course massive tax increases to pay for it all after the election. We are now on step number two, the cover-up budget.

The Prime Minister believed he could extricate himself from this scandal by spraying $41 billion of new cash spending at Canadians in this recent budget. There would be a chicken in every pot, he told us. The money certainly did flow. That spending, as I said, is $41 billion on a cash basis, or $23 billion if we use accrual accounting. Either way, it is a lot of money. He believed that if he could pile up that money on top of the scandal, no one would be able to peer through and see what was going on underneath it all. Canadians would be so grateful to see dollar signs flying at them in the lead-up to the election that they would forget all about his interference in a criminal prosecution and re-elect him to keep that money flowing.

However, the bad news for the Liberals is that Canadians know it is their own money. They know the Prime Minister has not generously bestowed upon them money of his own. He has taken it out of their pockets and out of their children's pockets by growing debt to pay for all that spending.

He promised the deficit would never exceed $10 billion in any year. Multiple times it has been $20 billion. He said the total debt he would add is no more than $25 billion. We are already up to $60 billion and headed to three times as much as he promised. He said the budget would be balanced in 2019, and yet here again we have a large deficit.

It is not just that he is breaking his word and spending excessively to little end and with few achievements. It is that he is putting us in this precarious situation of debt at a time when the world economy has done so well.

In the first years of the Prime Minister's governance, growth in the U.S. economy was among its highest in over two decades. Of course, one-fifth to two-fifths of our economy is dependent on the United States. We often go as it goes. Additionally, the government had huge amounts of cash pouring into its coffers as a result of the sugar high from booming housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto, unsustainable levels of housing speculation that led to tax revenues for the government, and of course recovery in natural resources prices from their historic lows the year before the Prime Minister took office.

In other words, everything went in his favour. He inherited much good fortune in his public life, just as in his private life, and he squandered all of it. Not only did he receive massive revenue windfalls, vastly exceeding what anyone had projected only years ago, and not only did he spend every penny of those windfalls; he then went $20 billion deeper in deficit year after year after year.

Here is the problem. What happens when things go badly? We live in a country that is susceptible to the impacts of the global economy. We are a trading nation. In other words, problems abroad can very quickly arrive on our shores. We all remember when the U.S. financial crisis struck in 2008. It was a crisis that hit Canada from abroad, but one that affected us nevertheless.

Here is the good news. Governments, both Liberal and Conservative, paid off a phenomenal amount of debt in the roughly 10 years leading up to that crisis. To their credit, the Martin and Chrétien governments ran surpluses and paid down debt. They understood that they make hay when the sun shines.

Then, when Harper and Flaherty took office, they too paid off about $40 billion in debt. Combined, well over $100 billion had been wiped out from our national debt in just over a decade, and it had shrunk to the lowest level as a share of GDP of any country in the G7. This allowed us an enormous buffer, so when that crisis struck we were in a position to absorb the impact, to protect our citizens and to lower rather than raise taxes as countries around the world had done in order to recover their plummeting revenue.

We were able to lower the GST from 7% to 6% to 5%; to bring income taxes down, particularly on low-income people; erase a million people off the tax rolls; bring in a working income tax credit that effectively gives a pay bonus to the lowest-income workers; bring in tax credits for kids' sports, public transit, tradesmen's tools and numerous other targeted savings for individual Canadians. We were able to drop the small business tax rate and lower the corporate business rate from 22% to 15%. We did all of this to help our people and businesses plow through that terrible global recession almost, though not entirely, unscathed.

We went into the recession last and came out first. We had a million jobs coming out of that recession. We were among the first countries in the developed world to balance our budget. When it was all over, our debt as a share of GDP had actually remained the same. That was extraordinary at the time, given that the Americans and Europeans were stacking up massive debts in relation to the size of their economies.

UNICEF marvelled at how child poverty fell in Canada during the great global recession while children around the world were falling perilously into want.

That was due to good economic management at the time. However, if we are being fair, it was also due to the decisions of leaders of both parties in the late nineties through to the mid-2000s to pay off debt and prepare our country for troubled times ahead.

However, the current Prime Minister, who inherited good times by contrast, has squandered them completely and rendered us extraordinarily vulnerable for the trouble that may be ahead. We already see signs of that trouble. Canadian households are among the most indebted in the OECD. Their levels of household debt are about $1.75 for every dollar of income, which is a massive increase over the last several years. This makes them vulnerable to increases in interest rates.

Furthermore, if we add household, corporate and government debt together, we have a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than Greece by that measurement. Greece, of course, has much more government debt as a share of its economy, but we have much more household debt as a share of ours. We have one economy and it has to support all of that debt. All three categories, household, corporate and government, are all supported by the same $2 trillion Canadian economy. The more we add to that debt, the more difficult it becomes for the economy to carry it around.

Therefore, what would be a wise course of action? The wise course of action would be to live within our means today and make adjustments now, before it is too late.

There is good news and bad news. The good news is that we are not broke yet. The bad news is that with another four years of the current Prime Minister, we will be. When that happens, life will get ugly. It will become unavoidable that difficult decisions, not pleasant ones, will have to occur if we do not make the modest adjustments now that can avoid those difficult times.

It is kind of like the situation of a family who sits around their kitchen table. They know they are not going bankrupt and are not on the edge of losing their house or car, but they notice that their debt is growing more and more every year. They realize that if they keep doing that, in about five, six or seven years, they will, as a family, be in a crisis. That family then realizes that they have two options. Option one is to say that it should enjoy the good times while they last, forget about the future and when the repo man knocks on the door in six years, they will cross that bridge when they get to it. Option two is that the family can make a few adjustments now that are not particularly painful, and maintain their existing quality of life without adding further to their debt and vulnerability. That option will ensure that in six years the family will be on solid ground, with savings built up and debt paid down, a house secured with a small mortgage, and enough financial freedom to make good decisions for the future.

The other option, the one that the Prime Minister has our country following right now, is for the family to keep on spending until the repo man knocks on the door. That is not how Canadians run their household finances. Anyone who has not inherited a family fortune or a multi-million dollar trust fund knows what the Prime Minister has never understood, that budgets do not balance themselves, one cannot borrow one's way out of debt and one cannot make others pay for one's mistakes. Every Canadian family who has had to pay a bill or raise a child without inherited wealth knows that is the basic reality of life.

Unfortunately, families who are sitting around that kitchen table are finding life more and more difficult. Wages have been absolutely flat since the Prime Minister took office. He has raised taxes on middle-class families by $800. That does not even include the carbon tax, which kicked in for Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick yesterday, or the increases to CPP premiums that he is imposing right across the country, outside of Quebec. Families are getting by with less and less. They are telling us that they are getting by, but they are not getting ahead.

The mission of our leader, the Conservative leader, is to open up a free enterprise, low-tax economy where people can get ahead through their own hard work. That has a little something to do with his life story. He is the son of a working-class family. He paid his way through university by working at a restaurant before he moved to Saskatchewan from Ottawa and met his wife, and worked in insurance before he was elected to Parliament. He did not have a famous last name, but he managed to win by working really hard and showing that he had the right values and experience for his Saskatchewan community. Then he won the support and respect of colleagues from across party lines in becoming the Speaker of the House of Commons, possibly the youngest in Canadian history.

What is most amazing about our Conservative leader's story is that most people who have a career trajectory like that would have relied on a family lineage, a well-connected family with a big name. This particular leader has had none of those things. He had a great family. They were rich in love, common sense and good values, but they were not rich in money. He took those working-class values to Parliament Hill. He wants to create a country where everyone else can get ahead the way that he did, by working hard, putting forward his best foot and trying his best to serve others. That is how he got ahead, and that is how other Canadians want to get ahead when they walk out the door in the morning to their jobs. They should have the right to get ahead through their hard work and their own enterprise, and we should create a free market economy where that is possible, where everyone gets ahead based on meritocracy rather than aristocracy.

That is the Canada that the Conservative leader is attempting to build with a platform that allows people to get ahead. He has already started to clarify exactly what that means, for example, cancelling the carbon tax to make life affordable and taking GST off home heat so that we do not punish Canadians for staying warm in Canada's record winters. He has decided that he would take taxes off EI maternity and parental benefits, so that it is more affordable for moms and dads to stay with their children in those precious six to nine months after a child is born. Those are the early announcements he has made that will be designed to allow Canadians to get ahead. Basically, the formula has three parts, which are that the government should live within its means, leave more in people's pockets and let them get ahead.

The Conservative platform of our leader will be based on those three pillars of the stool. They are the same pillars that he and his family lived by when he grew up in a working-class neighbourhood here in Ottawa. They did not have a car; he took the bus everywhere. I guess that is one thing that he and the Prime Minister have in common: They both had a driver. The difference is that the Prime Minister had a chauffeur and the Leader of the Opposition had a bus driver. However, they both had drivers.

The Conservative leader is fond of telling the story about how hard it was to get a date by asking a girl if she would meet him at a bus station. I guess that is one of the ways he was able to gain his skill of persuasion that he has brought to bear on his political life.

That is ingenuity. People who come from modest means are able to become creative and inventive in making the most out of what they are given, and that is the great Canadian dynamism. The voyageurs who travelled across the country in canoes and our first people who survived in this wretched climate for so many thousands of years with nothing but their own courage, ingenuity and hard work are the people who set the example of how one can survive in this country of ours. Then, the pioneers came and broke in the land so that we could farm and create some of the most prodigious crops anywhere in the world, from the Prairies to the farm fields of central Canada and beyond, to the modern wineries in the beautiful Niagara or Okanagan regions.

These are all examples of Canadian ingenuity that go back thousands of years, when people very simply got by through their own hard work. That is what the Leader of the Opposition wants to be possible again. What frustrates him is that when he travels across the country, he sees how hard people are working, but they tell him that they feel they are on a treadmill that is getting faster and faster. They are running harder, but they are not moving forward. Every time that they put one foot in front of the other, the government keeps pulling them back.

Think of the number of taxes that people are hit with. I was talking with a young guy the other day on a doorstep, and he said that every time he takes a breath he pays a tax in this country. He earns income and pays income tax, and he has to pay payroll tax on the same income. With what is left after that, he makes a purchase, and he has to pay HST on that purchase, so another bite is taken out of that dollar. Now we have something called the carbon tax that hits him every time he drives to work, heats his home or buys something that is transported or made using energy. Then, God forbid, if he is tired of all the taxes and he decides he needs a beer, then he gets hit with another sin tax for the crime of drinking one, which has an escalator tax that rises automatically every single year without holding a vote in the House of Commons.

This is just one young person. On that one dollar he earns from his own hard work, he has many bites taken out of that dollar to pay for the growing cost of government. Government has grown in cost since this Prime Minister took office three and a half years ago by 25%. Do people believe that they are getting 25% better services or products from the Government of Canada? Look around at the roads that are in worse condition and the hospital wait times that continue. What extra service is there? Rural communities are not getting enough policing to protect against crime. They are all paying 25% more for the cost of government, and what are they getting in return?

When average people go to a grocery store and see that prices have gone up by 25% without anything extra for the additional cost, they shop at a different grocery store. That is the competitive system of the free market, and I believe they will go shopping for a better alternative in the next election. That alternative will be based on the sound principles that have allowed Canadians to advance throughout the ages, a system of free market where people voluntarily exchanged work for wages, investment for interest and product for payment, so that every participant was always better off.

If I have an apple and someone else has an orange and I want what he has and he wants what I have, we trade. We are both better off, even though between us we still have an apple and an orange. That is the genius of the free market system. People can sacrifice what they have for something they want more as long as they find others willing to do the inverse on the other side. In other words, every time a free market transaction occurs, the participants must believe they are better off than they were before they did that transaction.

For a young person like the Leader of the Opposition, when he got a job working at a restaurant, he believed sacrificing those four hours three or four times a week was worth it because the wage was worth more than his time. For the restaurant owner, his time was worth more than the wage he had to pay to get it. In other words, in that voluntary exchange, both worker and employer believed they gained from the exchange. We know that because they both voluntarily agreed to participate in it.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Liberal, Anthony Rota]

Order. The hon. member for Mégantic—L'Érable on a point of order.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I was listening to my colleague talk about trade. Since 10 o'clock this morning, several of my colleagues have tried to bring the debate back to my motion asking the House to hold an emergency debate on the canola crisis. Unfortunately for my colleagues, because I was not here, the House could not revert to applications for emergency debates and resume the debate.

There is a massive canola crisis happening right now, and the House must debate the issue tonight and give every member a chance to speak. I therefore seek the unanimous consent of my colleagues to revert to applications for emergency debate so that we can discuss this. It was not granted this morning because I was not in the House.