Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise today and take this opportunity to share my thoughts on the recently tabled federal budget. Before I do, I want to congratulate our Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance for her historic achievement of being Canada's first female finance minister to deliver a budget in this House. It is a well-deserved honour and one that was long overdue.
In terms of this budget, the first one in two years, I would say I am disappointed. I was expecting to hear a road map that lays out a responsible recovery plan, one that would lead us out of this pandemic in a timely manner. Instead, we were presented with a document not focused on restoring and creating jobs but on Liberal partisan spending priorities.
The budget path of this Prime Minister's reimagined economy veers off into the unknown and saddles our children with debt levels and repayment obligations that will challenge their future success. When reviewing this document, it is absolutely staggering to think that each of us owes a federal debt share of over $33,000.
The government members cannot argue that they are supporting middle-class Canadians when they put the middle class and those suffering in poverty this much into debt. The government members also cannot argue that they are supporting future generations when they are spending the very savings of those generations on Liberal priorities of the day, right now and in the near future.
Many others share these concerns. In fact, well-known economist David Rosenberg recently gave the federal budget a D grade, and was quoted by BNN Bloomberg as saying, “we're definitely mortgaging our future with this extreme increase in debt.”
He also acknowledged, “We're adding on more debt in six years than we did in the previous 152 years combined”. Let that resonate for a moment. We are adding more debt in six years than in all the years since Confederation combined, including two world wars.
Alas, here we are, speaking about this long-awaited and very overdue budget. This document contains 739 pages and almost 233,000 words. By far, by these metrics, it is the longest budget in Canadian history. Unfortunately, despite all these words and pages, no recovery plan is there to lay out how we are going to go about getting out of this pandemic and into the early stages of a recovery in the near future, so we can begin returning life back to normal. It is as if with this budget the Liberals want to wish the pandemic away and pretend we have already made it to the other side.
However, here is the reality. On the day the budget was announced, Ontario reported more than 4,400 new COVID cases, along with 19 more deaths. Record COVID numbers are also being felt in British Columbia and in Prince Edward Island, which has effectively closed its provincial borders to travellers from outside Atlantic Canada.
Our worst fears at the start of this pandemic are being realized in this severe third wave. As the provinces and territories struggle mightily to contain COVID-19 and the new variants of concern, they are without sufficient supplies of badly needed vaccines, which were already badly needed over a year ago to manage hospitalizations and protect our health and well-being.
Provinces and territories can only combat COVID with the resources they have. While many are ready to vaccinate, including Ontario, they are without vaccine supply because the federal government has failed to secure them. It is a shame that the federal government used its first budget announcement as a flashy attempt to turn the channel on this pandemic at a time when it is the worst it has ever been.
It was either that, or the Liberals prematurely assumed that COVID-19 vaccines would be here by now and that cases and hospitalizations across the country would have subsided by April 19, 2021. Either way, these are massive miscalculations by the Liberal government. It is also evidence of irresponsible and poor governance.
In addition to lacking a recovery plan, there is scant to no mention of additional vaccine acquisition and distribution, and it is the same for rapid testing. Everyone knows that rapid testing must be a key component in any reopening and recovery plan, as we have seen in countries around the world that are much further ahead than we are in vaccinating their populations and reopening their economies.
Canada's Conservatives have been calling on the Liberal government to implement widespread and publicly available rapid testing devices since the early days of the pandemic, including at our international border points. However, when we review this budget, we see they do not even mention our land border crossings, of which I have four in my riding alone, despite the misleading title on page 73 of this budget. It is inappropriately titled “A Plan for the Safe Reopening of Our Borders”.
Just yesterday, the finance minister met virtually with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. Businesses are seeking clarity and certainty from the government and are asking for the federal government to lay out the criteria it will be using to determine whether and when border restrictions can end. According to a press report, the finance minister reported by indicating that “everyone needs to be flexible at the moment as the country continues grappling with the pandemic.” Then, according to the media, “she suggested rapid-testing kits could soon be flowing to companies”. This is peculiar, as nowhere in the budget is rapid testing even mentioned.
Before the pandemic, Canada's travel and tourism industry was the country's fifth-largest sector, responsible for $105 billion in GDP or 2.3% of GDP. It employed one in 10 Canadians, 10% of Canadian jobs, and had 225,000 small and medium-sized businesses across Canada. COVID hit our travel and tourism industry first, it hit it the hardest and it will take this industry the longest to recover.
As special adviser to the Conservative leader on tourism recovery, I hear this from sectors of the industry when I meet with stakeholders. In fact many, including the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, have predicted that a recovery will take up to four or five years just to achieve the levels of success we had attained in 2019. Yet, in budget 2021, the federal government is only extending the Canada emergency wage subsidy and the Canada emergency rent subsidy until September 25 of this year, while an additional 12 weeks will be added to the Canada recovery benefit. However, subsidy rates for both CEWS and CERS will begin to gradually decrease beginning on July 4. For the Canada recovery benefit, the $500 payment usually received will be reduced to $300 for the last eight weeks of the benefit.
Travel and tourism industry stakeholders have been asking for these essential programs to be extended right through to the end of 2021 for those who have been hardest hit. They have also provided ample warning that travel and tourism will not resume right away, as if we were switching on a light, but rather, it will take time before we begin welcoming international or even domestic tourists back to our Canadian destinations.
The extended CEWS and CERS support, as well as changes to the Canada recovery benefit in budget 2021, clearly fall short of industry and worker needs, which is incredibly disappointing, from my perspective. Coming from the riding of Niagara Falls, where tourism is heavily dependent on the summer season, it will be devastating for many tourism businesses and workers if the CEWS, CERS and CRB rates decrease while COVID cases remain high, the borders remain closed and tourists stay away. Why are these emergency business support programs, which have been so essential for so many, set to these arbitrary timelines to end?
In a perfect world for the Prime Minister, his promise of everyone being vaccinated by September would be fulfilled and the economy could be instantly reopened as good as before. Unfortunately for the Liberals, this is another imagined world. The world we live in today is one with a severe vaccine shortage in Canada, without widely available rapid testing devices and with an overabundance of COVID variants that are driving a severe third wave. What happens to the CERS, CEWS, CRB and the workers and small businesses that rely on these emergency support programs if the variants continue unabated into the summer?
What if borders remain closed through the summer and into the fall, significantly damaging our prospects of having international tourists visit our destination. Summer is the best tourism season in Niagara. However, we are on the verge of losing our second consecutive summer tourism season due to this pandemic. If businesses do not reopen this summer or tourism does not return in time for the summer season, the CRB, CEWS and CERS plan, as laid out by budget 2021, could have a disastrous outcome for workers and the many businesses that depend on them.
We are not on a good path, because the Liberals have failed us. To make matters worse, as the COVID conditions across Ontario have intensified, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a level 4 “Do not travel” health warning about Canada due to COVID-19, and it did this just one day after the Liberals announced their budget.
So many of us were looking to budget 2021 to provide a recovery plan, a real, solid, tangible recovery plan supported by science, metrics and data, so we could finally plan to reopen our borders and our economy and bring life back to normal. If there was an ideal time to unveil a federal recovery plan to get Canadians to the other side of this awful pandemic, it was on budget day. Unfortunately for Canadians, the Liberal government and the Prime Minister have failed us once again.