Madam Speaker, I am speaking to the House from my home, a little farther down the 401 than the last member, from Kingston and the Islands.
Before I go any further, I want to thank all the people behind the scenes, who are making this hybrid session of Parliament possible, for their incredible work. I was thinking of this as I was sitting here watching them control this Zoom meeting. The fact that so many people are contributing to making this work really says something about the incredibly dedicated people on Parliament Hill on and off site who are assisting with this.
Today I will be sharing my time with the member for Brampton North.
I will touch on my position on this opposition motion as best I can, and give some insight as to why I am not supporting it. This probably does not come as a surprise to members as it seems as though, based on what I have been hearing today, none of the parties other than the one that moved the motion will be supporting it.
In particular, I have trouble with two clauses toward the end of the motion. The first was postponing the increase of the Canada pension plan adjustments. For starters, just because there is a pandemic right now does not mean people suddenly do not have to plan for their retirement anymore, and that the government does not have to play a role in that. I would argue that now, more than ever, people have anxieties surfacing about how they are going to be retiring and whether there is going to be security there for them.
Especially in the economy we live in right now, where there are more precarious workers and more people are moving between jobs throughout their careers, we need to make sure they are properly taken care of. A strong, robust Canada pension plan is the way to do that as we continue to move through the changes our economy is facing, so I have an issue with that.
The next issue, and I have risen in the House on a number of occasions to speak of it, is specifically with respect to the carbon tax, as the Conservatives like to call it. I have said many times in the past that it is not a tax, because all of the money is returned to people. It is a market mechanism: a way to incentivize the market to make certain choices. I am always baffled by the fact that Conservatives do not get this. They have always claimed to be the champions of economic policy, and that they would know better than anybody if that was the case, which I think more people are questioning now than ever before. They would know, if that was the case, that incentivizing the market by putting tools in there to help people make choices is the only thing in a free and open market that can actually have a good lasting impact on that market.
That is why the government never chose to use the opportunity to tax. A tax would take that money, put it into general revenues and utilize it for other purposes. Instead, this is a tool to collect money and then redistribute that money back out, in particular benefiting those who are having the least environmental impact possible. Of course, that takes time. These things take time to change, but at the same time we will see the price on that continually increase. Rather than happen all at once, it was scheduled to slowly be ramped up so it could have that impact in the marketplace to encourage and incentivize consumers in the market to make different choices.
Because this motion completely talks about government support of small businesses, it is appropriate to discuss the plans that have been put in place: the various programs that the government has set up and executed over the last several months that have supported small businesses. I would start this discussion by referring back to the fall economic statement.
In a question to the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, I asked about tourism, which came up in the fall economic statement. I asked specifically about support for the tourism sector, which has been hit really hard during this pandemic. Tourism represents a large part of the economic activity in my riding, as is the case in his riding, and no doubt we have seen a tremendous impact given the way the pandemic has affected small businesses in the Kingston area.
That is why I was pleased with the government's regional relief and recovery fund. It is $1.5 billion specifically to support businesses that were unable to access other federal pandemic support programs. It has supported over 100,000 jobs and 14,700 businesses, but had a really important impact on the local tourism sectors in my community of Kingston and the Islands. To date, it has provided $202 million in support to more than 2,800 tourism-related businesses.
I was very happy to see, in the fall economic update, the Minister of Finance commit an additional half a billion dollars to this particular fund. These are the businesses that are going to be impacted by this pandemic the longest, in my opinion. Tourism, unlike some other sectors, will not immediately start up again in the strong state it left off. That is because there is going to be a lot of concern among people who are looking to travel. I do not think the confidence right after the pandemic will be as high as it was before the pandemic, and there will be less desire to immediately get on a plane and go to other parts of the world.
This sector, therefore, is going to be hit longer than some other sectors that might be able to bounce back relatively quickly, and this additional half a billion dollars really gives the opportunity to make sure everyone is taken care of for the long term. There are a number of other programs as well.
One thing I like to do often when I am speaking, because I think that sometimes we can get lost in the details of only talking about what is going on in Canada, is to compare Canada with some of the other countries in the world. That is what I want to do for the last two minutes I have today.
According to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business's October 2020 survey, 66% of Canadian businesses are fully open and 3% are fully closed because of the pandemic. This was as of September 20. I raise this because I want to compare it with what is going on in the United States, where 100,000 businesses have fully closed. About 60% of businesses that have shut down in the U.S. since the start of the pandemic will not be reopening. Canada, to date, has recovered 80.9% of the jobs that were lost between February and April, versus only 60% in the United States.
Those two stats show Canada's performance throughout the pandemic, and based on the supports from various levels of government, Canada's response, comparatively speaking, has been stronger.
I will not stop at the United States. I would also like to reference the United Kingdom very quickly.
The U.K. government has a program called the job retention scheme, which is equivalent to the Canada emergency wage subsidy. Just for comparison purposes, as of November 5, it had spent 43 billion pounds, which is roughly $73 billion Canadian, and we had spent $50 billion Canadian. We have spent about $23 billion less than the U.K., but it has double our population.
When we look at the amount of money that has been spent by the federal government specifically on businesses, I would argue that this government has had a robust plan to support businesses throughout the entire pandemic. I have no doubt, and I have the greatest degree of confidence, that we will be there right through to the other side of this so that we can come back in a much stronger position than we would have been had we not helped out Canadians and small businesses.