Madam Speaker, I am pleased to address the government's financial and economic response to the pandemic as we are doing in the debate on Bill C-14. Obviously the pandemic caught the world by surprise, not just folks in Canada following up on the 2019 election.
What became clear very quickly was that, without an appropriate public health response, medical systems around the world were overwhelmed. People were dying because they could not get access to care as there were simply too many people who needed care all at the same time. That meant that in order to prevent the rapid spread of the coronavirus and to keep people safe, there had to be a serious reduction in economic activity because people largely had to stay home.
That has been responsible for enormous costs, not just here in Canada but around the world, and governments around the world are facing similar kinds of financial stress that the federal government here in Canada and provincial governments across the country, regardless of political stripe, are also facing. The NDP government in B.C., and Conservative and Liberal governments right across the country, are all facing significant financial strife, just as so many governments around the world are, because that is the nature of the situation we are in. The question is how are we going to deal with this?
It has been very interesting to listen to the debate today. I have to say that I am having trouble squaring some of the claims made by my Conservative colleagues. On one hand, they are very quick to point out that the pandemic relief measures, whether the Canada emergency wage subsidy or the Canada emergency response benefit, now the Canada recovery benefit, or a number of programs brought in to help Canadians cope with the financial stresses of public health measures, passed with unanimous consent, which means that the Conservatives also supported those measures. They are very quick to say they supported those measures and endorsed that spending, but on the other hand they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to say that all of this spending has to be curtailed, but that they should get credit for the spending when it is happening. It is a bit of an incoherent message, frankly. I am at a bit of a loss as to how to explain it. I do not think it has been adequately explained.
What I do know is that, if we take them at their word, they want to roll back pandemic support spending. This seems to be a pretty clear implication of their attacks on spending in the pandemic. Even earlier today, in question period, they asked about access to various EI benefits that are part of the spending package they are apparently opposed to even though they supported it. One starts to get a sense of the incoherence that I am trying to get at as I bounce around. I am trying to capture what I have heard of the Conservative position here today.
As long as we continue to need these kinds of public health measures in place and there is a corresponding reduction in economic activity, that cost has to be borne one way or another. It can either be borne on the public books or privately. The question that we face as a country, which we faced at the beginning of the pandemic and we still face, is this: Who pays for that? This is the kind of decision that the NDP tends to support and that we certainly supported through this pandemic. It is the right approach.
New Democrats do not agree with the Liberals on all of the details, but the debt that has been caused by the drastic effects on the economy ought to be borne collectively by Canadians together through their government, rather than being put haphazardly on the backs of individual Canadians who would be affected differently, depending on whether they were financially vulnerable prior to the pandemic. Many seniors, people living with disabilities and others, such as students, for instance, were already vulnerable. If they were put in a position where they had to bear that privately and could not, they would then end up in default or homeless, or worse.
That is one scenario. That scenario also includes Canadians who, by virtue of the industry they happen to work in, may have had very successful careers and were able to provide for their families, but who, because they happen to work in an industry that was severely affected by the pandemic as opposed to another, might incur serious costs and find themselves without a home. That is what things look like if we do not have a serious and significant public spending package. It is one way things could have been dealt with.
The other way to do it was to say that this is not anybody's fault, that no one deserves to be ruined by the pandemic. In fact, the pandemic has shown how connected and interdependent we all are and how much we already rely on each other, despite the fictions of radical individualism that drive certain ways of thinking about the economy. The fact is that we do all rely on each other, and the pandemic has really shown that.
The other way to respond to the pandemic, which I am glad Canada largely chose, was to bear the costs of this together and make sure that Canadians are not left out in the cold by virtue of the industry they happen to work in or their financial position prior to the pandemic.
We need to think deeply about how we are going to pay for this big bill, and not just what has been spent already in the pandemic, but the very real cost we will have to continue to incur, as governments across the world will also continue to incur, in order to get us to a full economic recovery. There is that question.
What I want to highlight here is the fact that whether we chose the collective model or not, the cost to the economy was going to be there. It is a question of who is going to bear it. As we move forward, the other things that do not show are the economic effects and the cost of all the private bankruptcies, with people losing their homes. All the things that would have happened had there not been a meaningful financial public response do not show up on the ledger. It is hard to quantify what did not happen.
It can also be hard to quantify, although many people have done a lot of work over the years to quantify it, the cost of homelessness and poverty for people who, because they do not have a home, end up in emergency rooms and end up struggling with addiction. They end up overrepresented in the justice system and have many more interactions there than people normally would because they are poor and do not have the resources that many other Canadians enjoy. Those things all have a price tag as well. They are harder to quantify, but researchers over the years have done a good job of showing that when we invest in people in the long term, we can save money.
In one moment, we were forced into massive public expenditure by our circumstances, and I think there was a will and sense of solidarity that enabled that kind of expenditure. However, we are going to need more of it going forward. This is a moment for Canadians to realize the extent to which we can actually save money in the long term if we make the right investments now and if we continue to make those investments on an ongoing basis.
There is therefore one question: How do we pay for these things? Well, when I look at where the country has been and where it has been going over the last 20 or 30 years, this issue is not new to the pandemic. As much as the Conservatives want to rail against the prevailing tax rate, the fact of the matter is that the corporate tax rate has gone from 28% in the year 2000 to just 15% today. One of the huge emerging industries over that time period has been on the Internet. It is the digital economy, with Facebook, Netflix and Amazon. Quite frankly, some of these economic monsters, which did not exist 20 years ago, do not pay any meaningful taxes here in Canada.
To some, the idea is that the wealth does not exist for us to make these prudent investments, to recognize the dignity of humanity and to allow people to live a decent life, with a roof over their heads and enough money in their pockets to go to the local grocery store and fill their fridge. However, that wealth is there.
Canadian taxpayers, or Canadian “citizens” is frankly a better word, would be saving more money in the long term because we would be spending less on some of the main line budget items. What are some of the huge budget lines? Whether it is the federal government or more particularly provincial governments, where the real costs of not making these investments are borne, what are some of the biggest items? It is health and justice. Those are some of the biggest items.
We have an opportunity here to do more at the federal level, which is something we do not see in this economic update. We are missing an opportunity again. We just had a vote on the legislation that could create a framework for pharmacare in Canada, which is an opportunity to save money. It is going to be more money on the federal ledger, but overall we know from many studies conducted that Canadians are paying more for their prescription drugs than it would cost to have a national pharmacare plan. We know that from the commission the government just had. We know it from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. We know it from a report that was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal back in 2014 I think it was.
We know this all over the place, and it is no coincidence that Canada does not have a national pharmacare plan and we pay among the highest rates. This is another example where an upfront investment and a rearrangement of the way we pay for things between governments could actually issue in real savings.
We know the sticker price of a guaranteed annual income appears high, but we also know we already do this in many ways. We do it with a guaranteed income supplement for seniors. It is not good enough. Too many of our seniors who depend on the GIS are living in poverty. They are legislated into poverty by the GIS rate that this House and the government accountable to it set.
We already do a fair bit of that. We do it through the universal child benefit. We have many ways in which we are already supplementing the income of many Canadians. The marginal cost of getting there is something that could be bearable if we could have a real conversation about how much the wealthy pay. The wealthiest in Canada have already increased their wealth by $37 billion during the pandemic. It is just ridiculous to say the money is not out there and these are not things we can do.
There is a lot of opportunity when we talk about investment we make in recovery to help create jobs, and to create jobs in a new lower carbon economy that actually helps Canada meet its climate change commitments and try to avert a climate catastrophe, which is also going to be very expensive.
We hear a lot from the Conservatives about how they think they are these great fiscal managers, but the policy ideas they are presenting to respond to the pandemic are either those of the Liberals, because they say they supported all this stuff so we should give them the credit, or they do not want to do it. They need to just be honest about what tree they are actually barking up. Is it the “get rid of these programs in order to balance the books immediately” tree or is it something else? What are the kinds of supports they want to provide? Put the ideas on the table.
The NDP has lots of ideas about what we could do. We hear a lot of the negativity from the Conservatives, but we do not actually hear a lot of the positive proposals for what they would do differently. Here in Manitoba, I was astounded when the provincial budget came out this week and the Conservatives here in Manitoba chose to cut property taxes to accelerate the timeline on which they were reducing property taxes. As if that was going to help anybody with the pandemic.
Again they are screaming about how much debt and deficit there is. They are asking the federal government for more money, although they are not flowing that money out to people during the pandemic, which is partly why their popularity here in Manitoba has tanked. They have been doing a bad job, and what they come up with is to further reduce revenue in a way designed to help the people who already have more money and more resources than others. It is a completely bogus way to try to respond to a pandemic.
Now, that is not to say that everything has been done right in the House. One of the real frustrations for the New Democrats is that while, yes, the Liberals are willing to spend, they do not put the kinds of checks and balances in place that need to be there, because they are not willing to take on the wealthy and the well-connected. This is not just about what the tax rate is. It is also about the details for program spending.
When we look at the Canada emergency wage subsidy, for example, we see this very clearly. First of all, the Liberals proposed a 10% wage subsidy, which was not going to be enough. It was a bad enough idea that it precipitated a joint letter from the labour movement, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and the NDP, which is not something we see every day. They called for a 75% wage subsidy.
When we moved forward, the New Democrats were quick to say that we needed to have rules in place right away to make sure the companies that ended up doing well overall in the first year of the pandemic were not able to keep their wage subsidy money and could not pay dividends to their shareholders and bonuses to their CEOs based on profits if they were receiving money under the Canada emergency wage subsidy. This was something that many other jurisdictions did when they brought in similar programs in their own countries. It was a key component of getting the wage subsidy right, but the Liberals failed to get it right because it involved standing up to some of the more powerful people in the country. I am not talking about people who are powerful in the democratic sphere, but people who are powerful in the economy.
We saw that again with the WE Charity fiasco. Instead of running more money through the Canada summer jobs program, a successful student employment program that goes back decades, the Liberals decided it would be better to invent a whole new program with, it just so happens, buddies of the government and particularly an organization that the daughter of the previous finance minister was working for.
With these kinds of things, the Liberals ended up giving a lot of public spending, which could have been good and could have been in the public interest, a really bad name. They mismanaged it because the culture of entitlement endemic in the Liberal Party and the Liberal government got in the way of good implementation, which is quite frustrating.
We need to have a conversation in Canada, which the NDP has been trying to lead, about how the wealthy pay their fair share after decades of tax cuts. We cannot kid ourselves. Taxes have not been going up on the wealthiest Canadians and the biggest corporations. They have been going down significantly. They still have options to shunt their earnings out of Canada and into tax havens located across the world so that they are not paying their fair share. We ought to have seen action on that from the government by now but we have not.
There are ways to pay for these things, and real savings can be accrued if we make these investments. If we do not make these investments in the context of the pandemic, then costs are not going to disappear. They are just going to be put on the shoulders of individual Canadians already struggling to figure out how to live their lives in this new, unsettling and challenging context. Then they will have even more to worry about when it comes to paying their rent or mortgage.
That is not the right approach. We needed to support people, and we will need to support people a lot more. This is not government supporting people with some father-knows-best attitude. This is people electing representatives to work on things they want, like more accessible prescription drugs and more affordable prescription drugs. They elect people they trust to set up a system that can deliver that appropriately. It is like making sure that we are not paying for homelessness through emergency rooms and the justice system, and that we are doing it up front by investing in housing, putting roofs over people's heads and allowing them to live a decent life despite the fact that they may not have a lot of personal wealth. Those are the things we are talking about.
This is a really important debate. I wish we could have had this debate without a pandemic forcing it upon us, but these are some of the things that I hope Canadians are keeping in mind as they listen to the debate at home.
