Madam Speaker, it is an honour to speak virtually today, and I thank my colleague from Nanaimo—Ladysmith for this opportunity to split the time.
I want to acknowledge that I am on the traditional territory of WSÁNEC nation, part of the Coast Salish nations of the beautiful area of Saanich—Gulf Islands. Over time perhaps we could change the name Saanich to WSÁNEC to spell it in SENCOTEN, because that is the source of the name of the Saanich Peninsula. I am honoured to represent the wonderful constituents of this area.
I am taking a different approach to looking at Bill C-14, and I am afraid that I may end up being very boring. That is because we have before us really important legislation. I wish it had been passed long ago, when it first came forward, because it does provide important supports, as my colleague from Nanaimo—Ladysmith just said, that we will support from the Green Party: supports for low and middle income Canadians; relief on student debt; more support for virtual care, mental health and substance abuse programs; and help for businesses with their rent. These are things that we would like to see passed, but that does not mean that we do not have some significant concerns about the fall economic statement and the upcoming budget.
This is where I am afraid I am going to perhaps be boring. I would love to give a speech to make the point that my colleague from the Bloc Québécois just made, that our recovery needs to be focused on renewable energy, on a green economic recovery and the need to actually hit our Paris commitment to hold to 1.5°. The current government legislation in Bill C-12 does not come close to ensuring that we have anything like accountability for this.
I want to focus on the question of what our role as parliamentarians is when we look at budgets. What is our role as parliamentarians when we look at the fall economic statement? What is our job? In theory, parliamentarians are responsible for the public purse, and some will know that when I start speaking in the House of Commons about what is supposed to be happening in theory, members can be pretty sure it is not what is happing in practice.
We are responsible, as one of our core jobs as members of Parliament, to control the public purse. If we are going to control the public purse, it suggests that we should actually know about the measures we are voting for, be able to analyze the budget and get enough information to be effective and responsible parliamentarians.
I will be speaking in general first and then zooming in on the specifics. In my experience of reading budgets, and that goes back to well before I was honoured to be elected in this place in 2011, I used to go to pre-budget lock-ups. This was when I was the executive director of Sierra Club Canada and was one of the founders of something called the green budget coalition, and I sat down with the minister of finance and worked through budgets after the fact. In pre-budget lock-ups I would usually bring previous years' budgets with me so that I could quickly reference which department was getting more money, which department was getting less money and what this looked like in terms of our accountability and where the money was going.
I have been trying to remember the last time I saw a budget that actually included the numbers. This will strike Canadians as odd. How can we have a fall economic statement or a budget that does not include the numbers? Well, there are numbers there, but they tend to unrelated one from the other.
In preparing for this speech, I found a column from December 2015 that was written by three friends of mine: Kevin Page, our former parliamentary budget officer; Bob Plamondon, a noted Conservative commentator; and former MP and friend, Pat Martin. They penned an article for the Globe and Mail on this very point. Members of Parliament do not have enough information to actually do the job we are supposed to do, which is controlling the public purse.
To quote my three colleagues, in the article they wrote, “It is well nigh impossible for mere mortals to follow money.” It is well nigh impossible. We used to have budgets where we could actually add up the various departmental budgets and get to the number that the government was going to spend.
Departmental budgets stopped appearing in the spring budgets some time after Stephen Harper became prime minister. I have been trying to remember the last time I actually got a budget to read that included what most people would consider a budget. For some time, I have said that we should stop calling it the budget, which we will see next week, April 19, or the fall economic statement, or the spring budget, Unless the new Minister of Finance is going to do something remarkable and actually give us the numbers, what we have had for many years now has been what I have referred to as “the big thick spring brochure”. It is about party policy. It is about governmental policy. It sometimes announces how much will be spent in an area, but there is nothing we can use for purposes of comparison. Is that new money? Is that from a departmental A-base that they had last year and is just being reallocated? Can we track what is being spent, where the priorities are and can we add this all up and get a number we can count on?
On top of that general statement of a lack of transparency around numbers, now we have gone from what was spent in the 2019-20 budget frame, which was $363 billion, and in 2020-21 we are spending something in the order of $642 billion. Now, this was all approved by us as parliamentarians and mostly by unanimous consent. Because of the nature of COVID, we worked fast, and goodness knows, I have nothing but praise for all the hard work of civil servants and I include our ministers. Everyone has worked very hard to roll out the programs. However, by this point, more than a year into the pandemic, we should know how those programs are doing and where the money has actually gone.
We now have, believe it or not, over 90 different new COVID emergency programs. Can we trace them? Can we track them? Do we know where the money is going? In big numbers, in the rough sense, we do, because we know how much went to CERB, wage supports and so on.
Again, I turn to Kevin Page, whom I referenced earlier. He was our first parliamentary budget officer and is now the president of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa. In December, he put forward an opinion piece looking at the fall economic statement and identifying the transparency gaps. Kevin Page said that “...There is limited disaggregated administrative data related to people, sectors and regions, and virtually no data and analysis on the monthly flow of supports.”
My colleague for Nanaimo—Ladysmith mentioned other countries that have done better at getting to zero on COVID as opposed to trying to just flatten the curve to avoid having our emergency rooms overwhelmed. Other countries decided to actually try to eliminate the virus. Well, here we are. Some of those countries that did better than us have also done better on financial reporting. New Zealand publishes very clear visuals that any citizen can use to track and understand where the money is being spent. Australia publishes detailed monthly reports explaining their statistics, and so does the U.K. All of these countries provide more information. The United States provides a detailed dashboard so that any citizen can track all government programs from one place. Canada does not have any of that in place for people to track where the money is going by sector. We know in general that this kind of money went to individuals because it was the CERB, this kind of money went to businesses because they were employers, but we do not have details.
On the fall economic statement, our current Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, commented favourably on the fact that the fall economic statement does include clarity around some essential fiscal planning information, such as the detailed five-year fiscal outlook, but Mr. Giroux also commented, as had—