Madam Speaker, the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes has risen and stated his case, the report is public and the information is before Parliament. Canadians can render their own decision.
I, too, add my voice those who thank him for showing up here and making his case in person. I know that must not have been an easy thing to do, but it takes courage. I thank him for carrying out his duty to hold government accountable and to the highest standard of ethics.
That being said, the controversy is about the disclosure of financial assets, so I would not be parting very far from the subject at hand if I were to talk about the government's non-disclosure of its financial assets. If we are going to require a Liberal MP, or any MP, to disclose assets and therefore interests, surely the assets that belong to the Canadian people should be equally disclosed.
The subject here is ethics and transparency, so I turn the House's attention to the hundreds of billions of dollars's worth of assets that are owned by the Canadian people but for which we have not experienced adequate transparency. The government spent $80 billion without giving serious transparency to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and further to that, the Bank of Canada has purchased 400 billion dollars' worth of assets without disclosing all of the financial implications, the costs, the buyers and the sellers for which those transactions occurred.
This represents a monstrous transfer of wealth. Since the crisis began in March, the bank has begun purchasing financial assets, mostly government bonds. This has driven up the value of those assets and therefore the wealth of the people who hold them. It has been noted in the House that the 15 wealthiest billionaires in Canada have seen their net worth rise by over 30% since the pandemic began, and that cannot just be pandemic profiteering, because many of these billionaires have assets in fields that have not done well during the pandemic.
What has caused these assets to inflate in value? The answer is that whenever the government, through its central bank, prints 400 billion dollars' worth of money and pumps it into the financial assets of the system, those who have assets become wealthier. That would be just wonderful if there were no consequences for anyone else. However, the historical experience is that when governments print money to pay their bills, which is effectively what the government is doing here, eventually it raises the cost of living for everyone else.
The bank claims it is technically not printing money. Well, the data that is available tells exactly the opposite story. In fact, the number of banknotes in circulation, which are the $5, $10 and $20 bills that one can purchase things with, is up 8%, even at a time when people are using less paper cash than ever before. This is the largest percentage increase since the mid-1980s.
M1 money supply is up 17%, even while the economy shrinks, and when the supply of money exceeds the production of goods and services, eventually, though not immediately, we experience inflation. It is a phenomenon, the Governor of the Bank of Canada admitted to me before the finance committee, that falls heaviest on the shoulders of the poorest people. Why is that? It is because they deal disproportionately in cash. Whereas the wealthy can protect themselves from inflation by shovelling their money into assets that inflate in value, the poor deal mostly in cash and therefore have their very limited net worth eaten away.
Here we have a monstrous policy of transferring wealth from wage-earners to asset-holders, from the working class to the wealthy. The Prime Minister should know this, because when he was asked his definition of rich versus middle class, he said the middle class are the people who live off wages and the rich are those who live off assets. Here we have a policy that is specifically designed to transfer wealth from those who earn wages to those who earn capital gains through their assets.
There is no doubt that this phenomenon will lead to a greater concentration of wealth, that the wealthiest 1% who own the most expensive and luxurious real estate and have in their portfolios the most stocks and bonds and other financial instruments will continue to see their net worth expand, having done nothing, by the way, to deserve that expanded net worth. It is not because they invented a new product or delivered a new service; it is simply because they sat back in their rocking chairs, while the Governor of the Bank of Canada and the banking system that it creates pumped air into those very same assets.
Members should try talking to a young person who is attempting to buy a house these days. The asset inflation of real property has put that out of reach. Whereas the wealthy who are already landed and in possession of luxurious real estate properties become wealthier and wealthier still. Here we are debating the disclosures of one member's personal assets and I cannot get the Bank of Canada to give me information about the amount it paid and what it got for its purchases of these assets.
One of the very interesting things about how this all works is that the Bank of Canada is the financial agent of the government. Therefore, when the government runs these huge deficits, it raises the money by selling bonds into the marketplace to investors. However, with this new program of printing money and purchasing assets, the bank is now buying back the very same bonds that it sells out. It sells a bond to a wealthy investor to raise money for the Prime Minister to spend and then, sometimes in the same week or month, purchases the same bond right back from the same investor.
I have asked the Bank of Canada officials if there have been cases where the bank sells a bond and then buys it back at a higher price, thereby profiting the investors at the expense of the taxpayer-owned bank. In other words, the investor gets rich by arbitraging the difference between the price at which he or she purchased the bond from our central bank and the price for which the bank bought it right back.
The bank will not tell me that this is happening, but when we are talking about $400 billion worth of transactions, that is bigger than the normal program spending of the Government of Canada for a year. It is twice as much as the governments of Canada spend on health care, to put it into perspective. It is an absolutely enormous sum of money, yet the bank will not release information on who is profiting and at whose expense.
Therefore, I asked the finance minister and she said that I should ask the Bank of Canada. I did ask the Bank of Canada and it will not give me the numbers.
Therefore, we have in the House of Commons MPs who are squabbling. The NDP is squabbling over a $6 billion wealth tax. The Liberals are bragging that they brought in a new tax on stock options that will raise $50 million. We are talking about $400 billion here that the central bank is playing with, many orders of magnitude larger in sum and consequence than the chicken scratch that Liberals and New Democrats are fighting over.
They always tell us they are so worried that the rich are getting richer, but when our central bank, which is supposed to be accountable to us and whose $5 million in shares are held in the name of the finance minister, pumps $400 billion into financial markets and enriches the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the working-class wage earner, we hear nothing but silence from the social justice warriors on the other side of the House of Commons. They are just fine seeing the wealth gap get bigger as long as government gets bigger along with it.
We, on this side of the House, believe in financial transparency and in merit-driven wealth rather than crony capitalism. We call on the House to demand greater accountability and transparency from our central bank and from our government, because this money is Canadians' money and we are their voice.