Debates of Nov. 17th, 2022

Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2022

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons (Senate)]

Mr. Speaker, I will start by reading this quote: “[G]overnment is ruining the Canadian dollar, so Canadians should have the freedom to use other money, such as Bitcoin.” This is what was said by the Leader of the Opposition about six or seven months ago.

We know that since he made those comments, Bitcoin is now down by 65%, and the reality is that when we look at scandals like the FTX scandal, it is very obvious that the decentralization of currency is not a stable form and will never compare to something like the Canadian dollar.

I am wondering, since he made that comment, if the Leader of the Opposition has had the opportunity to reflect on his position, and if he has since then adjusted his position on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, people should have the freedom to invest in whatever they want, as in the quote, as long as they follow the law and pay their taxes, just like everyone else. What is illegal in fiat currency should be illegal using digital or cryptographic or blockchain assets as well. If it is illegal to evade taxes using fiat currency, it should be illegal to evade taxes using any other type of asset. The rule should be simple, consistent and clear.

However, one thing is also clear. Only the Canadian dollar will be legal tender in this country, regardless. I believe there is only one legal tender, and it is the Canadian dollar. The government has been ruining the purchasing power of that dollar by printing half a trillion dollars of it. It went from $1.8 trillion to $2.3 trillion in M2 money supply. That gave us the worst inflation in 40 years. It was entirely predictable. I predicted it: I warned the Liberals, and I wish they had listened.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Madam Speaker, I am having difficulty following the speech by the leader of the Conservative Party. First, he spoke about cutting spending. Then he talked about providing a family doctor for every Canadian who does not have one. That does not make sense.

Yesterday, there was a CBC story about CHU Sainte‑Justine, a children's hospital in Montreal. A child was in respiratory arrest, and they did not know if they could save him. Even though he was swamped and there were a lot of people in the emergency room, one ER doctor agreed to speak on camera and said that it is ridiculous, investments need to be made, people are tired and there is a shortage of ER staff. Clearly, the health system is on the verge of collapsing.

On the other side of the House, they have made their decision. They are not going to invest in health. They have said no several times. They even repeated it during question period today.

My question for the leader of the Conservative Party is the following. As much as we would not want it to happen, if the Conservatives were to take power tomorrow morning, would they increase the health transfer from 22% to 35%, as every province in the country has requested, without imposing any conditions? Yes or no?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, first of all, it is important to recognize the Conservative Party's record. We increased health transfers by 6% per year when we were in government.

This government has reduced the annual escalator for health transfers. Our party's policy is to continue to provide stable transfers that increase from year to year.

My colleague criticized me for saying that the government was spending too much. He just mentioned the failures in the health care system. Has the $500 billion in additional spending that the federal government racked up over the last two years solved these problems? Obviously not.

Just because we have a more costly government in Ottawa does not mean we will have better health care systems in our provinces.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Madam Speaker, week after week we hear the leader of the official opposition stand in this House and outline point by point the economic violence of capitalist corporate greed, yet he never has the courage to name the real cause of high inflation, which is the Conservatives' endless appetite for obscene corporate profits while everyday Canadians struggle to put food on their tables.

Does the leader of the official opposition not have the guts to take on the corporate greed of Bay Street, or is he simply happy to continue to serve them?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I suspect corporations were just as greedy seven years ago as they are today, so why is it that inflation is three times as high? The reality is that we have a government that has facilitated the so-called “greedflation” we have.

When governments print money and pump it into the financial system, those who first touch that money are the ones who profit from it. That is why, when we see these massive money-printing deficits anywhere in the world that it has been tried, it has not only caused inflation but caused a massive increase in the wealth gap. The richest people, who have stuff, benefit when that stuff goes up in price. The poorest people, who need stuff, suffer because they have less purchasing power with which to buy it.

It is the money printers and the big government state capitalism of the Liberal government that are allowing this outrage and injustice to occur, and it is the member, by being part of this costly coalition, who is serving that government greed and corporate greed.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Madam Speaker, for several weeks now, day after day, we have been illustrating how rising taxes and inflation are affecting Canadian families. Every time, all the government ministers duck the issue, pointing fingers at everyone else in the world and refusing to talk about their own culpability.

In his speech, the Leader of the Opposition said that the Prime Minister was responsible for inflation. Can he confirm that the Prime Minister is indeed responsible for the inflation we are experiencing here in Canada?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister is definitely responsible for it.

We now know that every excuse the government has come up with does not hold water. For example, it says that COVID‑19 caused inflation. However, it has now been more than a year since we stopped shutting down large swaths of the economy because of COVID‑19, and yet the rate of inflation keeps going up. The government says that inflation is due to the war in Ukraine, but our inflation rate was already double the target before the war even began. The government also says that it is due to the high price of oil, but the price of oil was the same when the Harper government was in place, and we never had an inflation rate over 4%. Finally, there were wars in the Middle East, in Iraq, in Syria and in Afghanistan when the Harper government was in place, and we did not have inflation like we are seeing now.

What we have today is $500 billion of inflationary deficit that is driving up the cost of everything we buy and all the interest we pay. It is just inflation, and the Prime Minister is indeed responsible for it.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, let us go to some very basic economic theory. The leader talks about economics and productivity. One of the ways we can increase productivity for a nation is by increasing the size of the workforce. The national child care program is going to increase the size of Canada's workforce.

Why would the Conservative Party of Canada oppose a national child care program, when we know for a fact that it will contribute to increasing the productivity of our nation? Why would you want to get rid of it if you form government?

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

I want to remind the member that he is to talk directly to the Chair, and I want to remind the leader of the official opposition to be careful when he is talking about inflation and putting the Prime Minister's name in front of it.

The hon. leader of the official opposition has the floor.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, with regard to the member's question, the Liberals have been making these promises now since 1993. That was the first Liberal red book. They promised there would be a national day care program. Every single child would have access to an affordable day care space, they said, way back then, and still they have not kept the promise. To this day there are wait-lists right across the country for affordable day care.

We believe that if the government is going to promise these sorts of things, it should deliver. We also believe that the money should go directly into the pockets of parents, and that is why we originally created the child care benefit that exists today. It was to put the dollars right in the hands of parents, so they could make their own child care decisions.

Trickle-down government, where Liberals make promise after promise but then fail to deliver results, is exactly the problem to which I was pointing in my original speech. Yes, it is easy for them to make big promises, and yes, it is easy for them to spend big dollars, but it is much harder to achieve results. When we are in government, we will achieve those results.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Madam Speaker, we are here talking about the Minister of Finance's fall economic update. It is really just an update on how government spending is going in relation to the budget from some months earlier this spring.

The bottom line is that we are going further and further into debt. Inflation is at a 40-year high, and interest rates, inevitably, are going up to combat out-of-control inflation and spending. The Liberals say they had no choice. We were in a crisis, and we had to avoid a financial crisis around the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, we have learned now from the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer that a large amount of that spending was not even COVID-related. This is the Liberal government, with the support of its NDP cousins, saying that it just wants more government spending, and that government should be involved in a bigger piece of the economic pie. It is saying, “Down with free enterprise, and up with big government”.

Our leader, the member for Carleton who just spoke, has been warning for a long time that this type of reckless fiscal policy is going to lead us into trouble. We are seeing that now. There are real-world consequences. We are seeing signs of these pressures on everyday Canadians. Almost half of Canadians are less than $200 away from not being able to pay their bills. Twenty per cent, one out of five, are skipping meals, and 1.5 million Canadians have used food banks within the last month.

I received an email from a constituent. I am sure every member in the House receives these types of emails. Cory wrote to me recently. He said:

Me and my wife have a high cost of living like everyone else. With the cost of living increasing at an insane rate, we're not sure what to do.... We've done the following: driven to the United States to get our child medication...cut down on our spending, including buying less meat. We don't want to go to a food bank, so we are eating cheaper food on a regular basis.... We have both started driving on our extra time with Uber Eats but we find we are making less than minimum wage.

Cory sums up with this, and I could not have said it better myself, “I honestly don't know what to do from here. This is ridiculous and the government has [messed] up our lives.” There are many Canadians who feel that way.

When we are talking about the economic statement, we need to talk about the flip side of the government's happy-go-lucky “spend, spend” attitude. The Bank of Canada's driving up interest rates is the response. That is the consequence, the only tool it has available to react to the government's reckless fiscal policy.

Other than bond holders, no one is happy with high inflation. Let me talk about a young family who reached out to my office just recently. They bought their dream house two years ago. They tied down their mortgage rate for two years. They have just recently received a letter from their bank saying that, unfortunately, interest rates are up, so their mortgage payments are going up $700 a month. That is $8,400 a year. They get nothing extra for that. They do not get a new car. They do not get a trip to Disneyland with their kids. All they get is more money from their hard-earned paycheques going to people who are already wealthy, investors who can afford to lend out mortgage money.

As the member of Parliament for Langley—Aldergrove, I speak to many small and medium-sized businesses in my communities, including a woman who runs a small retail business in the business district of Langley. She told me about what inflation is doing to make running her business much more difficult. She was talking about what interest rates are doing. She is paying more money on her operating line of credit with the bank right now. Profit margins are already very tight, and they are just becoming tighter. She thinks that maybe she is going to have to cut costs by laying off workers. Nobody is happy with that except, of course, the Bank of Canada governor, Tiff Macklem, who is signalling that, in order to tackle inflation, we have to kill jobs.

I heard our leader, the member for Carleton, ask earlier this week if the government's position agrees with the Bank of Canada governor that we need to kill jobs in order to tackle inflation. Is that the government's position? I do not think we have heard an answer to that yet. Maybe we will get some comments on that.

I want to mention a meeting that took place in Vancouver just recently with the ministers of health of the provinces and territories. They met with our federal Minister of Health. It was a disaster, quite frankly. Everybody was pointing fingers at everybody else, saying it is everybody else's fault that this meeting fell apart. The provinces want more money for health care, with no strings attached. They say the federal Minister of Health just is not listening.

On the other hand, the Minister of Health is finally feeling the reality of scarce resources. He says the provinces just do not understand his dilemma. On the one hand, he is having to work with his government's inflationary spending, and that it is never enough for the provinces. On the other hand, he knows that inflationary spending is driving up inflation and driving up interest rates.

We are now in a position where just the interest cost to service the national debt is going to be roughly equivalent to the amount of money the federal government pays to provinces in health transfers. The Bank of Canada's posted interest rate of 3.75%, times $1.3 trillion, if my math is correct, works out to roughly $40 billion. The federal government pays $45 billion in health transfers. These are the pressures we are facing. This is the result of the government's reckless inflationary spending. This is the legacy the current government is going to have to carry with it.

What will the Conservative Party do when we form government? When I listen to my constituents, that day cannot come early enough. As our leader has said on many occasions, instead of creating more cash, we will create more of what cash buys: more homes, more food and more resources here at home. We will remove government gatekeepers, get more homes built and make Canada the quickest place in the world to get building permits.

I was talking to marine operators in the Port of Vancouver, and they were telling me how long it takes to get an approval for any kind of project. One who also operates in the United States told us that within 18 months of applying for the approval, they actually had shovels in the ground. We can compare that to what happens in Vancouver, in Canada, and it is no wonder our productivity is so low. Everything gets bogged down with government gatekeepers.

We will make energy more affordable by approving projects more quickly. We will tackle climate change by making alternative energy cheaper, not by making Canadian energy more expensive.

We will reform tax and benefit systems to ensure that whenever anybody works and puts in some extra hours, it will pay off for them. The message I want to give to Cory in my riding is that a Conservative government will ensure that hard-working Canadians will be able to keep more of their paycheques to feed their families.

We will be voting against the fall economic statement because it did not respond to the demands we put forward, which I believe Canadians think are very reasonable.

First of all, we had asked that there be no new taxes. This includes cancelling all planned tax hikes, including the payroll tax increase that businesses in my community are fearing is going to make business even more difficult. We are asking for no new spending: a dollar for a dollar. If the government wants to spend an extra dollar, it needs to find a dollar somewhere else, pay-as-you-go style. This, I think, is completely reasonable.

Canadians are expecting the government to manage its finances properly. Under the current government, our economy is not being managed well.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Madam Speaker, one thing our government did was believe in students. We believe, in particular, in university and post-secondary students, and we have done many things to help those students. We have doubled the Canada summer jobs. We have doubled the Canada student grant, and in this last fall economic statement, we have raised the threshold of repayment from $25,000 to $40,000. It is key that we have also eliminated interest on Canada student loans, which the party opposite has said was a bad decision and wasteful.

I am wondering if the member agrees with his party's position on our elimination of interest for the Canada student loans.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Madam Speaker, a good idea would be to have a government that manages its fiscal responsibilities. That would keep taxes lower and would bring inflation down so that the prices of houses and other assets do not go through the roof.

What would be really helpful to university students I speak to is to have a hope that they might actually be able to buy a home one day. Under the Liberal government, house prices have more than doubled. Many young people feel that they are never going to be able to get into a home, a dream that all Canadians have had until now. That would be a good solution.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Madam Speaker, I really enjoyed my colleague's speech. He seems concerned about the well-being of his constituents, and that is very commendable.

He talked about the cost of living and the cost of housing. We know that things are not easy right now in that regard. I talked about it earlier in the member's statement that I made. In Quebec alone, 600,000 people will experience hidden homelessness at some point in their lives. That is 7% of the population. Right now, there are 6,000 homeless people in Quebec alone. Those numbers grew during the pandemic.

What we need to do is build housing. I was talking to an economist from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation recently who said that, if we allow market forces to run their course for the next 10 years, 500,000 housing units will be built in Quebec alone. However, 1.1 million housing units are needed.

Our Conservative friends are always saying that we need to cut spending, but somewhere along the way, the government needs to intervene to build 600,000 housing units if we want to address the issues of affordability and availability.

How do we do that?

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Madam Speaker, the way to get more houses built is to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit of Canadian business people and to bring interest rates down so that housing is more affordable.

I was talking a home builder in my riding who wanted to put up a large project of 400 or so units of affordable housing within the definition of CMHC's rules about affordable housing. He cannot afford to do it. It just does not work out with high interest rates.

We are not looking for the government to spend more money. We are looking for the government to get out of the way as gatekeepers so that private enterprise could build more houses, 1.5 million across Canada, including in Quebec, and also in my province. That is what is required.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Madam Speaker, there was some interesting news out of the United Kingdom today.

It does have a Conservative government in power, and it is the Labour opposition that is tackling them for the exact same issues, complaining about the high cost of living and the fact that the Conservative government is not doing enough.

To the U.K. Conservative Party's credit, it announced today that it was going increase the windfall tax on oil and gas companies up to 35% because the people of Britain are tired of the way those oil and gas companies are making out like bandits.

Why do the U.K. Conservatives have the courage to do the right thing, while it is so lacking in Canada's Conservatives?

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Madam Speaker, of course Conservatives are always very concerned about fairer taxation, and the natural resources of our nation should be for the benefit of the nation.

That does not mean that we get in the way of what private enterprise wants to do. We also want to attract investors to invest in our natural resources and to build our big projects. That is what is going to make Canada strong.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to address the fall economic statement.

Recently, I had the honour and privilege to go to Washington with the defence committee. My friend from Calgary Rocky Ridge was also on the trip. I want to thank the ambassador publicly for her contributions to the utility of our trip. We could not have been treated better. We went to the Wilson Center, the Pentagon, the Atlantic Institute, and other places. With respect to defence contacts, Washington is, frankly, the centre of the geopolitical universe.

In addition to chairing the defence committee, I also co-chair the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, which harkens back to the times of Roosevelt and Mackenzie King. I want to assure hon. members that I was not chairing the board at that time, but can expect some push-back from the member for Kingston and the Islands on that. It is an opportunity, on an annual basis, for our respective militaries to exchange public policy issues, in particular, to update their own military policies. The American government has just updated its military policy and the Canadian government is about to update its “Strong, Secure, Engaged” policy, because, frankly, the threat environment has changed dramatically in the last 12 months.

Members may wonder why I would start a speech about the fall economic statement by referring to defence. Over the course of these many meetings, I started to joke that we really should rename the defence committee to the defence, trade and commerce committee, because the threats that Canada and other western nations are facing are not merely threats that relate to what we would describe as security and military threats. Rather, they are societal, economic and business threats, which are in fact far more insidious and multi-faceted than stand-alone military and security threats.

It was clear when we arrived in Washington that the Americans regard China as what is called a pacing threat. A pacing threat is a threat to which we have to maintain our technological military superiority. They clearly regard Russia as an acute threat, one that can literally do damage, but it does not penetrate into the threat analysis in the same way as does China. The pacing threat that China is creates a grey zone of conflict. This is where it relates to our fall economic statement, because in the grey zone of conflict, there is an economics challenge, a business challenge, a democracy challenge, an intellectual property challenge, a rule of law challenge, and we could isolate many more.

The PRC uses all of these areas of access points to undermine the very fabric of our society, to steal when it is appropriate to steal, to loot when it is appropriate to loot, to sow disinformation when it is appropriate to sow disinformation. Anything of any value gets returned to Beijing one way or another, which in turn takes those intellectual, scientific and technological advantages that we currently enjoy and uses them against our western society.

Those who briefed us expressed a real worry that we need to keep ahead. A cold war mentality is setting in, but unlike the Cold War mentality of the mutually assured destruction that existed between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. in times past, it is a top-to-bottom, layer-by-layer contest over anything of any value in western societies. There is a huge advantage for the Communist Party of China, because it is a closed society. Ours are relatively open societies, and the contest is heavily weighted in favour of a closed society that has a unitary view of dominance at all costs and wishes to turn us all into vassal states.

In sharing our intellectual resources, we will see our universities are relatively open. The concept in western society is that we share knowledge with a view to building knowledge, and the real question is whether we can actually continue that. The argument, if one was looking at this from a threat analysis standpoint, is that we cannot.

We have a patent regime that exists to protect investor and property rights. Again, a society that routinely abuses the patents that exist and takes no responsibility to compensate the creator is a system that may not continue to be able to exist.

Further, we have open real estate markets. We have heard a lot about the cost of living. What is, in part, driving the cost of living are massive infusions of monies from abroad, somewhat from China in particular, which drives up the prices of housing. In turn, that makes housing unaffordable to our own population and distorts our entire market system. That cannot continue.

We have an open investor system in mines and minerals. Again, we cannot allow state-owned enterprises to own critical minerals and critical mines.

We have an open democracy. We cannot continue with the misinformation and voter influence campaigns that are run from the People's Republic of China. When we hear the threat analysis from the people in the Pentagon and leading thinkers in all of these institutions, we realize all these layers of threat are significant to our way of life and significant to the prosperity that, frankly, is reflected in our fall economic statement.

These are just a few examples of the layered threats that go from a traditional military threat right through to abuse of our democracy.

I looked at the fall economic statement and compared it to the Parliamentary Budget Officer's view of the same set of numbers. Frankly, there is not a great deal of difference between the two. Occasionally the government is a bit more optimistic than the PBO and on occasion the PBO is a bit more optimistic than the government, but on several layers we are necessarily simply going to need to adjust.

Capital flows from the PRC are going to need to be restricted, and these capital flows will need to be replaced internally or from abroad, probably primarily from the U.S. In fact, the United States military has set up a fund, where it is available to invest in various technologies but also various mines and minerals that will be needed to keep ahead of a pacing threat.

I have a relative, for instance, who works at a leading research company, and the Department of Defense is actually one of the significant investors in that company. Rare earth minerals require a lot of capital and are critical to the 21st century economy. They are also critical to weapons technology.

Canada is treated as a domestic supplier for defence procurement. We will start to draw down on that status much more vigorously as we reshore, we nearshore and friend-shore critical investments.

I see that Madam Speaker is hinting that my time might be finished, so I will end here.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Madam Speaker, I was following along with the member's speech with the member for Calgary Rocky Ridge and we have just one observation to make. According to the government's own fall economic statement, within seven years we will pay more in debt interest payments than we pay right now for the defence department's annual budget.

If the member is as concerned as we are with the national security of Canada and ensuring that we can protect our country into the future, should the government not get control of debt interest payments and make sure it is not taking on even more debt, thus assuring that entire government departments will be gobbled up by debt interest payments to the big banks?

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to note that the government has actually handled its debt management quite shrewdly by buying, when the interest rates were low, long-term bonds. That has actually brought our management of debt into line.

I also encourage the hon. member to look at comparators with other nations. If there is any other nation that wishes to have the debt-to-GDP ratio that Canada has, I would be interested in the hon. member telling me who it might be.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Madam Speaker, I will try to take no offence in the fact that my hon. colleague forgot to mention that I, too, was on that trip. I did get quite a lot out of it, of course. It was fascinating.

One of the things that our defence committee is studying is Arctic sovereignty and how Canada is investing into NORAD and its modernization and our role in that. We have heard a lot about how we can continue to be that partner in NORAD to help with the security that is at threat through the Arctic, to the Arctic and in the Arctic. While we are focusing as the defence committee on “through” and Canada's role in that, maybe the member could talk about some of the investments his government needs to make and has not made in the Arctic.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Madam Speaker, I offer to my colleague an insincere apology for not seeing her down at the other end of the chamber hiding behind her mask, but that is another thing altogether. I do appreciate her contribution to the defence committee.

The investments in the Arctic are necessarily going to be massive. As climate change takes hold, the reality is that the Arctic is opening up. Canadians need to get their heads around the notion that we are going to, not only as a defence initiative, invest heavily in the Arctic; but we also need to build ports and we need to use the facilities that we have. It is going to be extremely expensive to build the new early warning system, a massive technological enterprise.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Madam Speaker, the member mentioned resource extraction and expansion of that. Alongside that critical mineral expansion, is there a plan from the Liberal government to protect indigenous women and girls from exploitation and man camps and all of those things that come alongside resource extraction that have never been considered by the government in the past?

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Madam Speaker, one of the unique advantages that Canada has is the way in which particularly the Canadian military has integrated indigenous people into the Rangers and into the larger military. They, in effect, create our sovereignty presence in the north. There has been a great deal of conversation about how to do it appropriately. As the Arctic opens up, I see this as a unique opportunity to get it right with indigenous folks. Frankly, the testimony before the defence committee to date has been that we are starting to get it right and the consultations are real and meaningful, and I would like to be optimistic about it.