Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise virtually today to join the debate on Bill C-14, an act to implement certain provisions of the economic statement.
The bill has seven parts, mostly containing items to which I do not object and aims that I support under the circumstances that Canada currently finds itself. Having said that, I have three main criticisms of the bill. First, it does not contain a plan or indeed any reason for hope for the millions of Canadians who own, work for or otherwise depend on small businesses, especially new businesses that have been ignored in aid measures that have been either adopted or proposed by the government. Second, the bill contains nothing to address the significant problems that were facing the Canadian economy before COVID. Third, the government should not be granted the unnecessary increase to the borrowing authority contained in the bill.
To my first two issues, some would say that it is not fair to criticize a bill for something it does not say. Ordinarily I would agree, but this is not an ordinary bill, nor is this an ordinary time.
The government is closing in on two years without a budget. The fall economic statement is as close as the government has come to tabling a budget, and that statement followed a period of chaos and crisis management. Here I am not referring to the COVID crisis, but to the tumultuous months during which we saw a government that should have been procuring vaccines, approving and distributing rapid at-home test kits and figuring out ways to allow the economy to function, if and when the second wave would hit. Instead, it was consumed by the scandal that saw the resignation of the former finance minister, prorogation of this Parliament and the appointment of a new finance minister. The bill is the government's missed opportunity to help small businesses that have fallen through the cracks in its aid measures and to fix its series of failures that left Canada on the brink of a recession before COVID.
As the shadow minister for small business and the member for Calgary Rocky Ridge, I have spoken to many small business owners who had been left behind by the government. These small business owners are the pillars of our communities.
There are millions of owners, workers and customers who depend on small businesses and who are paying the price for the government's failures, like the owners of the Bitter Sisters Brewing Company in Calgary, whose owners live in my riding. They do not qualify for the wage subsidy or the rent subsidy, because they reopened their business in March 2020 after spending most of 2019 refurbishing it. The owners of this business exhausted their capital. They went through a lengthy period when reinventing their business, and they opened literally within days of the declaration of a global pandemic. They do not have access to government aid measures. I spoke to another constituent last week who had expanded his successful tattoo studio in early 2020. As a result, he does not qualify for either the rent subsidy or the wage subsidy. His rent is $30,000 a month and his revenue is zero.
I know that every member of the House has heard similar stories from their constituents and from other members during debate on the bill. The fall economic statement and the bill do not help these constituents.
It is easy to forget the extent to which the government's fiscal and economic mismanagement was coming to a head before COVID. This is a government that was elected in 2015 on a promise, which it immediately broke, to run modest deficits to fund infrastructure for three years, returning to surplus in the fourth. Its maximum deficit of $10 billion was to be its fiscal anchor.
That anchor was cut immediately after the Liberals took office, and the 2015 election promise was seemingly obliterated into an Orwellian memory hole never again to be acknowledged by the government. It was replaced by a new anchor: that Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio was low and would always shrink.
The finance minister clung to that anchor until it was clear, before COVID, that the deficit was going to rise as a percentage of GDP, and replaced that anchor with the last one, which was maintaining Canada's AAA credit rating. That anchor was cut loose as well, and there have been no fiscal anchors articulated by the government since then.
We saw all of this backsliding into a serious structural deficit before COVID. The Liberal government piled on nearly $100 billion in new debt at a time when it should have been running surpluses, like the one it inherited, in order to prepare for a financial disaster like COVID, but it did not. Furthermore, the government piled on job-killing laws, like Bill C-69 and Bill C-48 that devastated the western economy and will harm Canada's ability to recover from COVID.
This bill does not contain elements that would undo the damage the government did to our economy that prevent and reduce our ability to recover from COVID. It brought in a carbon tax in the last Parliament and has announced that it will almost immediately break its promise not to raise it in this Parliament.
There is nothing in this bill that will address the hostility of the government to the energy industry, which is an essential part of the federal government's tax base. It is historically Canada's largest and most valuable export. It is the creator of great high-paying jobs in every province across Canada, not just in Alberta.
The fall economic statement that this bill is to implement does not address the past economic mistakes the government made and that had Canada teetering on the brink of recession before COVID. It does not repeal the red tape that killed projects, like Teck Frontier, and scared off the private sector investors that would have built Trans Mountain without taxpayer support.
There is nothing in this bill for the thousands of Canadian workers who will lose their jobs due to the devastating Keystone decision or those already without jobs, whose hopes for returning to work are now reduced in the wake of the Keystone decision.
There is nothing in this bill to rein in the culture of wasteful corporate welfare that the government has and the ease with which it ran up significant debt, again, before COVID.
This brings me to my third criticism of this bill and that is the unprecedented increase to Canada's borrowing limit. Make no mistake, and I will say this again, that at a time when governments force businesses to close and lay off workers, governments need to support them. Governments do need to support Canadians who are being compelled not to work and to support businesses that are being compelled to close their doors.
This crisis has created a temporary necessity for extraordinary spending measures to support Canadians, but the government's proposal in this bill to increase its borrowing limit to $1.8 trillion is simply not justified. It is not justified by the government's present needs, not by its short-term needs, not by its medium- or long-term needs, and certainly not by its past enthusiasm for non-crisis deficit financing.
Parliament at its most basic function exists to authorize taxation, expenditure and borrowing by the government on behalf of the governed. As legislators, we have a responsibility to vote whether or not to grant the government these powers, and there is simply no reason to grant such an extraordinary sum for the government to borrow when its own fall statement and the estimates that have already been voted on do not require the authority for the level of borrowing that is contained in this bill.
If the Liberal government, or indeed a future government, needs to increase the national debt to $1.8 trillion, then that should be left for a future debate in this Parliament or a future Parliament. In the meantime, I urge the government to focus on establishing a coherent COVID policy, one that would result in a vaccinated population, a reopened economy and a full employment workforce fuelled by private investment into Canada's economy, unshackled by job-killing regulations.
We must return to an employment-based economy as soon as possible. While there are items in this bill that would help some Canadians cope with the difficult circumstances of the present, I urge the government to get serious about giving Canadians more hope for the future, especially for those small businesses that have consistently fallen through the cracks of the government's aid measures.
With that, I look forward to questions from the floor.
