House of Commons Hansard #252 of the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament's site.) The word of the day was airports.

Topics

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

Chrystia Freeland Liberal University—Rosedale, ON

Mr. Speaker, we absolutely understand the urgency of climate action. That is why I am delighted that today we are publishing a timeline for our investment tax credits. They are so essential to Canada's green transition and our economic plan, which is creating jobs today and the jobs of tomorrow.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

Yvan Baker Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON

Mr. Speaker, in the past number of budgets, we have seen the federal government commit significant funding to support the people of Ukraine in their fight against Russia's genocidal invasion.

We just saw Conservative Party MPs vote against the Canada-Ukraine free trade agreement, basically voting against support for Ukraine. Could the minister clarify what this government's position is on support for Ukraine?

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

Chrystia Freeland Liberal University—Rosedale, ON

Mr. Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition described our measures to build new homes for Canadians as “disgusting”. I will tell members what I would describe as disgusting: the failure of the official opposition to support the country fighting the world's fight right now for democracy and the rules-based international order. I am truly appalled.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

4:35 p.m.

Carleton Ontario

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre ConservativeLeader of the Opposition

Mr. Speaker, after eight years of this Prime Minister, inflation is at a 40-year high. Work does not pay anymore, and the cost of housing has doubled. Crime, chaos, drugs and disorder are common on our streets. The Prime Minister is trying to divide Canadians and distract them from all his failures.

First, we must acknowledge the country that the Prime Minister inherited when he came to power. I will start with interest rates and the inflation rate.

These rates were low. Taxes were falling faster than at any time in our country's history. The budget was balanced. Crime had fallen 25%, so low that small-town folks often left their doors unlocked. Our borders were secure. Housing cost half what it does today. Take-home pay had risen 10% after inflation and taxes. The New York Times said that, for the first time, Canada's middle class was richer than America's, despite an unprecedented financial crisis in the U.S. as well as wars in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine. It is funny how, when Stephen Harper was around, those wars did not cause inflation in Canada.

Since the current Prime Minister came to power, prices have skyrocketed. Let us look at where we are now, eight years later.

After breaking 40-year records, inflation is once again too high. The economy is shrinking. Yes, the economy is shrinking even as the population is growing. Per capita GDP is smaller today than it was six years ago. For the first time in our history, we have seen the economy and per capita GDP shrink over a six-year period. According to the OECD, Canada's growth is projected to be dead last in the OECD, not just for the next six years, but for the next three decades.

Housing costs have more than doubled in eight years under this government, despite its promises to lower them. It now takes 25 years to save up enough money for a down payment in Toronto. Before this Prime Minister, it took that long to pay off an entire mortgage. Now, some families are having to stretch out the terms of their mortgages to 90 years. That means that a person may have to live to be 120 before their family is mortgage-free. In reality, the children and grandchildren are the ones who will have to pay off their parents' and grandparents' mortgages. Never before has this been seen in Canada, or anywhere else in the world, I imagine. Homes in Canada now cost over 50% more than homes in the United States.

That is the reality after eight years under this Prime Minister, who promised to make life more affordable. What are his solutions today?

First, he wants to increase taxes on fuel, which will increase the cost of everything. Everything that is transported will cost more because of the carbon tax that the government just confirmed. It will increase the price of gas by 17¢ a litre, and by 20¢ a litre if we add the sales tax. This is a tax that the Bloc Québécois wants to radically increase on the backs of Quebeckers.

Furthermore, he is again promising to invest billions in housing construction. These are the same promises he has been making for eight years, but all they do is create more bureaucracy, not build homes.

Finally, he is adding $20 billion in new spending that will cause inflation and interest rates to go up. Scotiabank has already said that two percentage points of the current interest rates are the direct result of the deficits, which the government is proposing to increase.

Let us talk about the debt. Next year, for the first time, we will be spending more on debt interest than on health care. More than $50 billion will be spent on interest. That is more than will be sent to the provinces for our nurses and doctors. Bankers and investors in Manhattan will get the money, but our teachers, nurses and doctors will not. It makes no sense.

Fortunately, we have a common-sense plan. We have a plan to cap spending and cut waste in order to bring down inflation and interest rates. We will eliminate taxes to reduce the cost of living for every Canadian. We will cut taxes to make work pay once again. We will rebuild the Canadian dream, where work enables anyone, anywhere, to have a good life, to own a home and to live a peaceful life in their community.

In the next election, voters will have two choices. The first is to vote for a costly coalition that will take money from taxpayers, raise taxes and enable more crime. The second is to vote for the common-sense Conservatives, who will free people to earn more powerful paycheques that buy food, gas and homes in safe communities. That is the choice, and we will be the only common-sense choice for all Quebeckers and Canadians.

As we stand here today and witness the misery visible across this country, it is hard to forget how good things were only eight years ago when the Prime Minister took office. Let me review the hard facts.

Never before has a prime minister inherited a richer legacy. Inflation and interest rates were rock bottom, taxes were falling faster than at any time in Canadian history and the budget was balanced. It took 25 years to pay off a mortgage, not just to get a mortgage. Crime had fallen by 25%. It was so low that many small-town folks actually left their doors unlocked. Do members remember those good days when we could leave our doors unlocked? No one would do that today.

Our borders were secure, housing costs were half of what they are today and take-home pay had gone up 10% after tax and inflation. The New York Times had calculated that Canada's middle class was, for the first time ever, richer than America's middle class. All of this was despite a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis in the U.S. and wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and, yes, Ukraine. It is funny how those wars did not cause inflation when Prime Minister Harper was leading our economy. It is true that when the Prime Minister took office, Canada was rich, affordable and safe.

It is also true that the very wealthy had not done particularly well. In fact, their share of the economy had shrunk during the Harper years. Now the wealth concentrates among the very, very rich, and that is because inflationary policies always help the richest people. When government concentrates wealth in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, it is given to the most politically influential people. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Now we are seeing the biggest gap ever between the rich and the poor. The Prime Minister promised to help the middle class, but he has demolished the middle class. That is the reality.

Inflation, after hitting 40-year highs, is back on the move. The economy is now shrinking. If we add in per capita terms, it is plummeting. In fact, the GDP per person is smaller than it was six years ago. This has never happened. Canada's growth is now projected to be the worst in the OECD between now and 2030, and the worst for the next four decades, according to the OECD. That is out of 40 countries.

It now takes 25 years to save up for a down payment in Toronto. It used to be that one could pay off a mortgage in that time. Since the Prime Minister has taken office, families have stretched out the terms of their mortgages to 90 years. Today the minister bragged that she is going to create a charter that will allow them to stretch out their mortgages longer so they can now have a 100-year mortgage. People are supposed to thank the government. What wonderful news. I imagine she will send it out in the mail so people can open their mailbox and find out that their great-great-grandchildren will still be paying off the mortgage on their home.

Canadian homes now cost 50% more than in the United States of America. In fact, one can now buy a 20-bedroom castle in Scotland for a lower price than a two bedroom in Kitchener. Vancouver is now the third most unaffordable housing market in the world when we compare median income to median house prices. It is worse than New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and London, England. Even Singapore, a tiny island with 2,000 times more people per square kilometre than Canada, has more affordable housing. Toronto is rated by UBS to be the worst housing bubble in the world. If we had even imagined to say such a thing out loud eight years ago, people would have laughed. Today it is the reality and people are not laughing. They are actually crying.

All of a sudden, after eights years, we should believe in the government's multi-billion dollar promise to build homes. The Liberals built fewer homes last year than were built in 1972, 50 years ago. That was at a time when our population was half of what it is today. We are building fewer homes now that we have 40 million people than we built when we had 22 million people.

It is no wonder we have this new phenomenon of middle-class working homeless people. We have never seen this before, but now we have nurses, electricians and carpenters living in parking lots, something they could not even imagine. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Speaker's province and ironically the province of the housing minister, there are 30 homeless encampments in one city. This would have been unimaginable. Now the Liberals expect us to believe that this time, they mean it, that their billions of dollars of new spending are going to change what the billions of dollars they spent over the last decade have caused, and that is the worst housing crisis in Canadian history, perhaps the worst in the world today.

The Prime Minister has doubled our national debt, adding more debt than all of the previous 22 prime ministers combined. He continually tells us that there are no consequences for that debt. The consequences are now becoming clear. Next year the government will spend more on dead interest than it does on health care. Instead of the money going to doctors and nurses, it will go to bankers and bondholders in Manhattan and in London, England. It is another transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthiest people, from the working class to the smirking class.

We see the social breakdown this has brought in our communities with crime raging out of control. Shootings are up 101% across Canada over the last eight years. There have been 30,000 drug overdoses. Social breakdown is the obvious consequence of the economic breakdown the Prime Minister has caused.

What has he spent all of this on? He spent $54 million on the ArriveCAN app, which we did not need, which did not work and could have been done in a weekend by a couple of IT workers. We know that because they did. A couple of IT workers, as a lark, bought a few boxes of pizza and a case of beer and redesigned the entire ArriveCAN app in a weekend. It did not cost them $54 million. Maybe we should send that app to the Prime Minister and call it the “ResignCAN” app.

Then the Liberals blew a billion dollars on a so-called green fund. The top bureaucrats who were involved in it say that it is a money-for-nothing scheme with gross incompetence that reminds them of the sponsorship scandal. The chair of the fund gave $200,000 of the money to her own company. Now, we find out that the $15 billion they are giving to a single battery plant is going to pay for 1,600 foreign workers, who do not even have a place to live. There is a housing shortage in Windsor. The Prime Minister's solution is to spend precious tax dollars on paycheques for people on the other side of the world to come here temporarily, collect the money and take it back to South Korea. We all love South Korea, a great country, but there is no reason why Canadian taxpayers should be subsidizing South Koreans' paycheques. Canadian tax dollars should go exclusively to Canadian paycheques; that is common sense.

The Prime Minister, of course, wastes money through missed opportunities. We could develop our resources. For example, we could be breaking dependence on the world's dictators. Let us talk about this for a moment. Today, the Prime Minister's party shamefully voted to impose a carbon tax on the people of Ukraine. Its members voted to amend the existing Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement, which Conservatives negotiated, and which has been a success, to require that both countries have and promote carbon taxes. This is exactly the opposite of what the people of Ukraine need. They do not need a carbon tax when they are trying to fight and win a war. They need the ability to rebuild their economy, which takes energy. That is why Conservatives will oppose any imposition of a carbon tax there, here or anywhere around the world.

Do members know what else they did? They voted against an amendment that would allow Canadians to build the arms that would allow Ukraine to win the war. We proposed an amendment to the update of the agreement, which would have allowed Ukrainians to benefit from our incredible Canadian workers who produce munitions and equipment, and they voted no. Let us get this straight. They believe the best way to counter Putin is with a carbon tax. We believe the best way to do it is by breaking European dependence on his energy sector and by providing and selling great Canadian arms to win the war.

Canadians understand that the way to help a country rebuild is by selling technology for energy. We proposed as well that we would both provide civilian nuclear technology and sell our civilian-grade uranium from Saskatchewan to power nuclear plants that would give emissions-free electricity to Ukrainians, as they have to replace bombed-out electricity plants. The Prime Minister did not include that in his deal, because he does not want affordable energy. He does not want the jobs to come back to our resource sector. All he wanted was to try to save his carbon tax. That is just how desperate he is and, in fact, how sick he is, on this matter. We all know that he was desperate to save his carbon tax, but for him to use the people of Ukraine as a pawn in his scheme to save the carbon tax is a level of cynicism that we did not expect even from the Prime Minister.

When I am prime minister, we will have a free trade agreement with Ukraine, and that agreement will not include a carbon tax. It will include the ability for us to provide clean Canadian nuclear energy and natural gas to have a strong energy superpower status for Canada and a secure Ukraine for the future, absolutely.

There are hypocritical members over there who pretended that they supported Ukraine, but who then supported the Prime Minister's signing off on a turbine to go from Montreal to Putin so he could power his natural gas pipeline and pump that gas into Europe to fund his war.

That is the Prime Minister's priority: to give Putin more money selling natural gas. Our priority and our common-sense plan turns dollars for dictators into paycheques for our people in this country.

I do not think this debate is going how the Liberals expected it to go. Their heads are all looking down and rightfully so. It will be a good moment for them to atone for the cynical approach they have taken on this and everything else and, frankly, for the misery that they have unleashed in this country. This is the worst time in Canada's history for the Canadian people and particularly for the middle class.

The good news is that we have a common-sense plan that would axe the tax to bring home lower prices, cap spending and cut waste to bring down inflation and interest rates, remove bureaucracy to build more homes so that once again people can afford to pay their rent and mortgages. This will be a country that works for the people who do the work, for the common people and for the common sense of the common people united for our common home, their home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

4:55 p.m.

Outremont Québec

Liberal

Rachel Bendayan LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance

Mr. Speaker, our government's fall economic statement announces new measures in order to get more homes built faster. The leader of the Conservative Party has called that, and I quote, a disgusting scheme.

Why does the leader of the Conservative Party think that investments in the construction of 30,000 new rental apartments is disgusting? Why does the leader of the Conservative Party think that new federal investments for the construction of 7,000 new affordable homes is disgusting? The leader of the Conservative Party owes us and Canadians an explanation.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

4:55 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Mr. Speaker, those houses cannot be characterized with any adjective other than “non-existent”. They do not exist. The Liberals stand up day after day and list off the thousands of houses that they have not built. They have had eight years. It would be one thing if they were still promising to build homes in their first year, maybe their second year; okay, we will give them three years.

It has been eight years and the only thing they have accomplished on housing since promising to make it affordable is they have doubled the cost. They have doubled the rent, doubled mortgage payments, doubled the needed down payment for a home. Now we have $900 billion of mortgages that are coming up for renewal. That is two-thirds of all mortgages. The IMF says we are the number one at risk of having a mortgage crisis.

It is disgusting to think of the families who did everything right and risk losing everything because of the irresponsible policies of this Prime Minister and his NDP government.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

4:55 p.m.

Bloc

Alain Therrien Bloc La Prairie, QC

Mr. Speaker, we often hear the Conservatives bickering with the Liberals, but they are really one and the same.

The Liberals did not mention homelessness in the economic update, and nor did the Conservatives in their response. The Liberals are not talking about small businesses and are not helping them, since the government refuses to extend the repayment of the Canada emergency business account, or CEBA, loans by an additional year. The Conservatives never even mention it. The Liberals are doing nothing to help seniors. What are the Conservatives doing? They have nothing whatsoever to say about seniors.

The Liberals have given $82 billion in assistance to oil companies. Will those folks over there talk about it and eliminate those subsidies? On the contrary, the Conservatives are lobbyists for the oil companies. The Liberals do not talk about housing at all. The Conservatives, meanwhile, decided to do something original. They decided to blame the municipalities and punish them if they ever find out that they are not building enough housing.

It is a party of slogans and catchphrases. They have no substance. It is six of one and a half dozen of the other.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Mr. Speaker, the member is so angry. Give me a break. I cannot understand why he is upset, because his leader just said he is going to support the Liberals and keep them in power. I thought he was going to stand up and applaud all the great things the Liberals are doing, like increasing inflation, forcing interest rates to go up and drastically increasing the carbon tax. The Bloc Québécois wants this drastic increase and the Prime Minister agrees.

The Bloc agrees with the Liberals on everything except the country's capital. That is the only sticking point it has with the Liberals. Fortunately, Quebeckers will be able to vote for a commons-sense party, a party that will lower prices and give people bigger paycheques. That is what common sense is all about.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5 p.m.

NDP

Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB

Mr. Speaker, Canada is not going to get out of the housing crisis we are in without significant investments in social and affordable housing, and the Liberals simply have not been building enough of that. We saw today that even the recapitalization of a program to build affordable housing is being put off until 2025.

We never hear the leader of the Conservative Party talk about building new affordable and social housing. In fact, Canada is still losing way more affordable units than we are building. When he was housing minister, the government decided to cancel the operating agreements that made rents affordable in co-op and other forms of non-profit housing across the country. Will he finally start talking about the need to build more social and affordable housing in Canada to help address the crisis?

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Mr. Speaker, I have been talking about almost nothing but making housing affordable for the last three years. When the NDP and the Liberals and the entire establishment were dismissing me, I told the country we were headed for a housing crisis. Now everybody is playing catch-up.

Here is the problem for the NDP: The facts are that, when I was housing minister, one could rent the average one-bedroom for $950. Now, under the NDP-Liberal government, it is almost $2,000. One could buy an average home for a mortgage of $1,400 a month. Now it is $3,500 a month. The needed down payment for the average new home was $20,000; now it is well over $50,000.

The NDP has been in government now at least two years and supported the Prime Minister for long before that. Since they signed the coalition agreement, rent inflation has been at its worst in Canadian history. We do not need more bureaucracy. We need my common-sense plan to clear away the red tape and the gatekeepers to build millions of new homes Canadians can afford and allow them powerful paycheques to pay for them.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

Mr. Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition tried to excuse himself and his caucus out of the way they voted earlier with respect to the Ukraine free trade agreement. I want to tell him that nobody believes him.

President Zelenskyy asked us to vote in favour of this. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress asked us to vote in favour of this. As a matter of fact, “international trade lawyer Larry Herman said that the Conservatives' concern about reference to a carbon pricing makes them look ‘petty and hyperpartisan.’”

It is nothing more than a red herring. The reality is that MAGA Republican politics now lives and resides within the Conservative Party of Canada.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:05 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Mr. Speaker, the hyperventilating member for Kingston and the Islands only proves my point with those falsehoods.

The Conservative Party initiated the original free trade agreement with Ukraine. We backed Ukraine against Crimea. We led the charge to kick Russia out of the G8, and that is why we now have the G7.

The Prime Minister has betrayed Ukraine. He signed off on an export permit for a turbine to go to Russia so Putin could pump gas and raise money to fund his war. He refused to sell natural gas from Canada, forcing Europeans to continue to fund that war; we want to defund Putin. He embarrassed the President of Ukraine by allowing a Nazi to be recognized on the floor of the House of Commons during the president's visit.

Now the Prime Minister betrays Ukraine while the country has a knife at its throat. He uses it as an occasion to try to bolster his carbon tax by putting in, for the first time in the history of trade, a carbon tax in a trade agreement. Ukrainians do not need a carbon tax. Canadians do not need a carbon tax. That is why my common-sense plan will stand up to dictators such as Putin, turn dollars for dictators into paycheques for our people and axe the tax for all.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:05 p.m.

Conservative

Luc Berthold Conservative Mégantic—L'Érable, QC

Mr. Speaker, I really wanted to ask the Conservative leader this question. It is a very important question. We are dealing with a government that has forgotten what common sense means for all Canadians.

Can the Conservative leader tell us what common sense means to him and how a common-sense government will help Canadian families?

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:05 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Mr. Speaker, common sense means getting rid of the carbon tax to lower the cost of living for all Canadians. Common sense means capping spending and getting rid of waste to balance the budget and lower inflation and the interest rates. Common sense means cutting taxes to make hard work pay off again.

That is what common sense is all about.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:05 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

Mr. Speaker, I would first like to remind the House that this is an economic statement. It is not a budget. As we know, a budget sets out the government's policies and presents the legislative, fiscal and budgetary measures required to implement them. An economic statement has a more modest purpose. It is supposed to present the evolution of the economic and fiscal situation since the last budget.

What this statement now tells us is that the deficit may change according to the government's forecasts, contrary to what the Parliamentary Budget Officer had calculated, which is worrisome. The statement outlines the government's response to these changes. There is not much there. For example, at the end of the summer, the Prime Minister asked the new President of the Treasury Board to cut $15 billion from various departments in order to balance the budget. They promised to give us an outline by mid-October. That did not happen. We were expecting to see it in the economic statement, but all they are doing is putting things off again without any concrete targets. Another objective has been missed.

What is the purpose of an economic statement? It is used to present the measures the government plans to take to deal with the emergencies that have cropped up since the last budget. There have been quite a few emergencies since the last budget. The economy has changed a great deal. There is a lot of struggling and difficulty. The economy is not doing well. Many people are affected by that. We were really expecting the minister to address the major emergencies that have come up since the last budget. Unfortunately, this is such a missed opportunity that we might wonder what the point is in having an economic statement. I will come back to that. There are several emergencies that we could have focused on that were simply not even mentioned in this statement.

I will give another example. The first chapter has to do with housing. While we are short on housing and social housing and the situation is desperate, we find out that there will be $37 million in cuts this year. For next year, not one penny more will be added to what was already presented in Bill C‑56 to get rid of the GST on social housing construction. We will have to wait two years to see the $54 million and $1 billion promised for subsequent years to tackle housing. Is that enough when we know that most of that $1 billion is money that was already announced and not spent? It is unfortunate.

A few weeks ago, we presented our requests to the minister. What we asked the government to do in the economic statement was to respond to existing emergencies, the urgent situations that we are currently facing. Take, for example, homeless people. As we know, it is starting to get cold outside. This morning, the temperature was below zero. There are people who are sleeping in tents and in the streets. It is truly awful. We are asking the government to do what Quebec did in its fall economic statement and to allocate emergency funding to immediately address homelessness. We want to set up an emergency fund to help cities and municipalities support homeless people in their area and give them the resources they need to do so. There is nothing about that in the economic statement. This is a real emergency that we are dealing with, and yet we have here a government and a minister who are ignoring the real emergencies. There was no response to that request in the economic statement.

On the housing front—and I will come back to this in more detail later—we provided the minister with ideas of how to create an acquisition fund for non-profit organizations and set up an interest-free or very low-interest loan program to stimulate the construction of social and affordable rental housing. Our program could be easily implemented and rapidly deployed without costing the government a fortune. The main measure being announced here is that builders who want to develop a real estate project will be allowed, in partnership with their financial institution, to pay only the interest on the loan and will not have to repay the capital until the building is built and sold.

While this would improve liquidity somewhat, it is not really something that was asked for by the groups that we heard at the Standing Committee on Finance, for instance. At the end of the day, we do not think it will contribute to building additional housing. Let us just say that the impact of this remains to be seen, and we do not see it in this statement.

We know that seniors are in dire straits. With the current inflation rate and what was announced this morning, the consumer price index is not as high as what we have seen over the last few months and the last few quarters, but it is still above 3%. Low-income seniors and seniors in general are struggling, and we need to restore some measure of fairness.

The government decided to increase old age security for seniors aged 75 and over. However, since then, with my friend and colleague, the member for Shefford, who is our critic for the rights of seniors, we have been saying that fairness must be restored. The increase must start at age 65. People who are struggling need this support, which will not be enough to make up for the lack of indexing to inflation or to the average wage that the program originally offered. Still, it could give seniors a little breathing room in the current inflationary environment.

The repayment of CEBA loans is another urgent situation. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, or CFIB, chambers of commerce and many organizations representing SMEs are raising the alarm with elected officials in the House and with the government. They are asking that the deadline be extended by another year. These loans were granted during the pandemic, but after the pandemic, SMEs have had to deal with rising inflation and a difficult economic recovery. Many of them are falling further into debt. Now, the government is asking them to repay their loan or they will lose the grant portion.

According to the CFIB's numbers, approximately one in five SMEs could go bankrupt if the deadline is not extended. When we asked the minister about that, she said that it would cost too much. No serious studies were done to determine what it would cost the government, the economy as a whole and society if as many as one in five businesses went bankrupt as a result of this.

We in the Bloc Québécois are willing to bet that pushing the loan repayment deadline back one year would be much more profitable. It would strengthen the economy in the sense that it would prevent a lot of predictable bankruptcies. A few weeks ago, the Journal de Montréal published an assessment of the risk for each region. My riding, in the north of the Lanaudière region, was particularly at risk, given the minister's refusal to extend the deadline for repayment of CEBA loans by one year. That is very disappointing. We tried and tried to negotiate with the government. We could not get access to the studies it had used to make that decision because, as we understand it, there were no such studies.

In the end, the government chose to team up with its natural ally, when we could have come to an agreement in exchange for that condition, which would have greatly helped our SMEs. The government chose to turn its back on struggling SMEs. We can only conclude that the government's ally did not really care about that too much.

There are other emergencies. As I said, the purpose of the economic update is to respond to existing emergencies.

We can think of our media. Small, local and regional media, newspapers and radio stations are struggling. They are falling one after the other. The situation is catastrophic. Even the bigger media outlets are having a tough time. We do not even know if they are going to make it to Christmas or next summer. The situation is that dire. We saw the sad announcement of upcoming layoffs at Groupe TVA, with more than 500 employees affected. Even the biggest media outlets are struggling to overcome the crisis. We called for an emergency fund for the next few months at least, but that did not happen either.

Also, in order to resolve an inequity, we called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies. We are talking about tens of billions of dollars. That has not been done either, which is appalling.

Let us talk about other extremely important points. Since 2015, this government has been promising a complete overhaul of employment insurance. Once again, it has been postponed indefinitely. A year and a half ago, we were told that it was coming in the spring of 2022. After that, they said it would be no later than that fall. Now there is no mention of it, and nothing has been done. I naively wanted to believe the Liberals' promise. Let that be a lesson to me. Nothing has been done, and now they will not even dare talk about it. Shame on me for believing a Liberal promise.

When it comes to EI reform, a specific concern was also raised that once again has to do with the need to respond to emergencies. This summer, there were forest fires everywhere. That means that a lot of seasonal workers in the forestry industry were unable to accumulate enough hours to qualify for EI during the season because they could not work in the forest. We brought this to the minister's attention. This is an emergency and the government needs to be a bit flexible. The government needs to do something and to think about those workers, and yet there is nothing in the economic statement to address this emergency either.

We often asked questions in the House, and I personally drew the minister's attention to an issue that my colleague from Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou has been working on. The government announced $1 billion for a school breakfast program for children. The money was promised during the announcement, but it has yet to be delivered so that the program can be implemented. Inflation is high, and more and more children are going to school hungry. It is time for the government to pay out the money it announced. The government could have already dealt with this emergency, but this, too, was not urgent enough for the minister.

Many of my colleagues talked to me about regional infrastructure needs. Nothing more is being done. There is also the whole agriculture sector, which was hit by the flooding in some regions this summer. The produce and horticultural sectors are struggling. They are in serious trouble. Could existing programs have been adapted? The economic statement would have been the time to do that but, no, nothing was done. Once again, agriculture was not even mentioned in this statement.

There is a slightly technical detail that affects many artisanal businesses throughout our regions that could really change things. As we know, the government increased the excise tax on wine after Australian wine producers sued Canadian wine producers. Regulations on the matter are problematic. In legal texts, everything that is alcohol is called “wine”. The Bloc Québécois managed to get apple cider and mead exempted from the tax. That was a big win, and these producers are grateful.

Afterward we realized that if cider producers put a bit of pear in their drink, they have to pay the entirety of the tax. Producers of beverages made from maple alcohol also have to pay the entirety of the tax. As soon as there are a few small fruits in these drinks, producers have to pay the entire tax. It does not bother wine producers in Australia that we help our small artisans who produce these niche products. For two years we have been calling on the minister to settle this. I understand that she is busy, that she is dealing with many challenges, but at some point these are just formalities that need follow-up. This would only help better recognize the artisans without taking anything away from anyone, without frustrating anyone in Australia. It would be easy to do. This could have been implemented in the economic statement, but no, that was not done either and it is really disappointing and upsetting.

As I was saying, the government and the minister should have developed an economic statement to respond to the emergencies. I raised a few that have been brought forward by all of my colleagues here. It is not hard. How many of the emergencies we raised did the minister respond to? A big fat zero. I am referring here to a former minister I will talk about and quote. It was a former minister of Prime Minister Trudeau, the father of the actual Prime Minister. I definitely said “actual” and not “actuary”.

Speaking of actuaries, let me emphasize that the employment insurance fund surplus has doubled. Once again, workers have to pay to fill the government's coffers.

Let us come back to the urban affairs department. What is it? In the economic update, the government has chosen to create a new department, which my leader dubbed the “department of interference” because it deals with housing. It is interference, pure and simple. It is similar to what Pierre Elliott Trudeau did when he created a ministry of urban affairs. Its minister was Mr. Ouellet. That is why I am drawing attention to it.

This is a quote from a Library of Parliament research document:

Accordingly, in March 1971, Prime Minister Trudeau appointed a Minister of State for Urban Affairs, who took on responsibility not only for CMHC but also for a new Ministry of State for Urban Affairs (MSUA). Given the inescapable constitutional limitations [of interfering with provincial jurisdiction], this ministry had no program responsibilities...

Today, the government is bringing this department back. We can see where this is going. The Library of Parliament document continues as follows two paragraphs later:

This...eventually led to the downfall of Trudeau's intervention in federal-municipal relations.

A bit further on, it reads, and I quote:

In view of the Department's lack of credibility and the government's desire to cut expenditures, the MSUA was abolished on 31 March 1979.

Is that what awaits us with the creation of the new department announced in this economic update? As my colleagues have said, that is definitely what we can expect.

Let us talk about some other aspects of the economic statement. Over the past few weeks, we have been seeing a squabble play out between the Liberal government and the Conservatives in the House. The Conservative Party is all about slogans and is always pointing out problems. The Conservatives made a suggestion on housing. What is it? It involves punishing the municipalities and the provinces. The Conservatives are saying that, if the municipalities do not build 15% more housing units, then the federal government should hold back infrastructure funding. For example, this year, housing starts in Quebec decreased by half. That means that, were the Conservative Party in power, it would have cut the province's infrastructure funding by half. They are real winners, as my colleague said.

The Liberal government's response to this proposal is to use it themselves. In the statement, it is clear that they are using the same approach. In other words, they are threatening the provinces and, indirectly, the municipalities. The statement says that if they do not build enough housing, transfers will be cut off. My goodness, does the Liberal government want to go back to the Stone Age, too? I wonder.

There is one good measure involving Airbnb. The government wants to bring it in line with municipal regulations. It is going to be difficult to enforce, but there is hope. I am not simply criticizing everything. That is a good measure. As I was saying about the $15 billion in budget cuts, it was supposed to happen in October. However, the plan hatched by the government and the President of the Treasury Board is not even mentioned in the November statement. As I was also saying, we brought up a number of urgent matters, but none of them have been resolved here. There is no plan for dealing with the emergencies. Clearly, the Liberals do not understand what an emergency is.

I will say it again: Each and every one of the Bloc's demands and the urgent needs expressed by Quebeckers has been ignored. Clearly, this government, this Prime Minister and the finance minister are confusing fiscal restraint with inaction when it comes to emergencies. It is all going to cost us more in the end.

Again, the purpose of an economic update is to take stock of the economic situation since the presentation of the budget and announce solutions for the emergencies we know about. This statement does not address the many changes and does not fix anything. This is such a missed opportunity that we wonder why the government even bothered.

Thanks to the Liberals, things will get worse before they hopefully get better.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:25 p.m.

Winnipeg North Manitoba

Liberal

Kevin Lamoureux LiberalParliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons

Mr. Speaker, there are things definitely worthy of note in the fall economic statement.

For me, personally, I look at the issue of inflation. Canadians have been concerned about inflation. Even though inflation around the world is significantly higher than here in Canada, the Liberal government has been focused on that. From a high of just over 8% back in June 2022, today it was announced that it is at 3.1%. This shows the government is serious about dealing with the issue of inflation.

The member spent a great deal of time talking about housing. The fall statement reaffirms a solid commitment and new monies towards housing co-ops. We all talk about the importance of non-profit housing. Housing co-ops are an excellent way to support growing demands on housing. It is affordable housing that is different than apartments. In a housing co-op, people are residents and co-owners, compared to an apartment.

Apartments are also being beefed up with purpose-built rentals—

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:25 p.m.

The Deputy Speaker Chris d'Entremont

The hon. member for Joliette.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:25 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

Mr. Speaker, inflation is affecting everyone, particularly the most vulnerable members of our society. It is really worrisome.

There is nothing in the fall economic statement to counter inflation. There is nothing to deal with it. The Liberals are just whistling past the graveyard.

The hon. member spoke about housing. Yes, the government should do more about housing. However, this year, it is making $37 million in cuts to housing. We see that on page 31 of the English version of the economic statement. It shows $37 million being subtracted. The member is talking about funding for co-operative housing. He does not need to explain to me or any member of the Bloc Québécois what co-operative housing is. There is plenty of it in Quebec. We believe in the co-op model. We are always telling the government to do more in the way of social housing, including co-operatives.

How much money is the government putting into housing co-operatives this year, in 2023-24? Zero dollars. However, the situation is urgent. How much money is the government putting into housing co-operatives next year, in 2024-25? Again, zero dollars. The situation is urgent. The situation was urgent this summer and last spring. We need to act now. Today, the government should not be making statements and commitments in principle about what it is going to do two, three, four, five or six years down the road. The situation is urgent now.

This government is truly out of touch with people's urgent needs.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:30 p.m.

NDP

Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB

Mr. Speaker, the NDP shares my colleague's disappointment about the Canada emergency business account. That was our position, and in letters and in conversations with the government, we repeatedly asked it to extend the deadline for repayment of the emergency account.

What I do not understand is how the federal government can expect to receive more money by forcing companies to repay their loans when they are not currently in a position to do so. We know this will cause bankruptcies.

Would my colleague care to comment on that?

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:30 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Standing Committee on Finance. We just spent the last week touring western Canada. We visited every region to hear from people. All the organizations, the chambers of commerce, the organizations representing SMEs are asking for the deadline to be extended by one year. It is the same in Quebec. We hear it everywhere.

When we speak with the ministers individually, most of them agree with this call. Most of them do not understand the Minister of Finance's reaction. That is what is throwing a wrench in the works. The Minister of Finance and senior civil servants are saying that it is going to be expensive.

We have been leading the charge for quite some time. We just want to be the voice of the SMEs we represent. We were ready to negotiate with the government. For example, if the government wants Bill C‑56 to pass, in exchange, we would like the government to extend the deadline by a year. With all due respect, we wish the NDP had followed our lead. I hope they keep this example in mind so that, in future negotiations, they can ask for this in exchange. It would be a big win for SMEs. It would mean 20% fewer bankruptcies, according to figures from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. It would make a big difference.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:30 p.m.

Green

Mike Morrice Green Kitchener Centre, ON

Mr. Speaker, let me start by thanking my Bloc colleagues for their work on behalf of small and medium-sized businesses. It is so important for all MPs to stand up for SMEs, so, again, I thank them.

My question is about the fact that Parliament passed the Canada disability benefit almost six months ago. Yet again, there is nothing in this economic statement for people with disabilities across the country, including in Quebec, who continue to live in legislated poverty. Are the member for Joliette and the rest of the Bloc caucus as disappointed as I am about this omission?

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:30 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for that excellent question and his kind words. It is always a pleasure to see that we can collaborate in the House. The purpose of an economic statement is to respond to emergencies. The hon. member, whom I congratulate on his excellent French, just raised an urgent matter.

This measure was adopted six months ago and needs to be implemented. People living with a disability, especially in the inflationary context we are experiencing, need to receive the help that was promised. This has to be done and the economic statement was the place to implement this measure. The statement is there to respond to emergencies and this is another emergency that has been raised. The government had the opportunity to do this, but it did not take it. The government is disconnected from the public and does not respond to any emergency. The hon. member just raised another good example.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:35 p.m.

Bloc

Alain Therrien Bloc La Prairie, QC

Mr. Speaker, approximately 220,000 businesses are having cash flow problems that are preventing them from repaying the emergency loan. What I understood was that the government was unable to put a figure on the additional amount this would add to the budget. Personally, like many of my colleagues here, I believe that money paid to businesses that are struggling to survive is an investment.

I would like my colleague to comment on the calculations that seem to have been done, or not done, regarding the fact that if people are given extra time to repay their loans, there will be fewer bankruptcies and therefore more repayments. It may not even be an expense. I would like my colleague to comment on that.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:35 p.m.

Bloc

Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC

Mr. Speaker, I thank my House leader for making this point again. This is basic economics. Are there any economists in the Liberal Party? Do they understand these notions? The government often gives the impression of nickel-and-diming, but by trying to save the grant part of the loan, it could cause so many bankruptcies and have such a wide-ranging impact that it could end up being more detrimental to society and the government's finances.

When we discuss this informally with ministers, most of them agree with us. The problem is with the Minister of Finance. In that regard, I want to highlight the great work by my colleague from Terrebonne, who wrote the finance minister to make her aware of this. She also reminded her that the Quebec National Assembly unanimously demanded a one-year extension of the loan repayment deadline on September 26, well before this November economic statement that the minister just presented.

Why are elected officials of all stripes in Quebec City asking for this? It is because they are just that little bit more connected to their community. They talk to their SMEs, they meet with them and they are worried about them. Like us, they are able to do the math and come to the conclusion that, even if the aim is to save a little money, there is a risk of losing a lot more in the end. Moreover, it will destabilize the economy. Really, the economic statement was the place for this kind of announcement. This is another missed opportunity, another disappointment. It is more proof that this government has grown out of touch, very out of touch, with the people and with SMEs.

Fall Economic StatementRoutine Proceedings

5:35 p.m.

NDP

Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and address the fall economic statement.

We have certainly heard a lot of things in the chamber today, including some rhetorical flights of partisan fancy, the kind we have come to expect from the Conservative leader, with some very well-rehearsed chanting by the Conservatives at the end. However, I would like to be a little more serious than that in my remarks, because I recognize that Canadians are going through a very difficult time.

We have heard about it a lot. We have talked a lot about it in this chamber, and today was an opportunity for the government to show that it is not out of touch, to show that it is prepared to address the serious issues of our time with the sense of urgency that they deserve. I do not want to spoil anything for anyone, but I have to say it is a real disappointment. I am going to talk about some of the ways in which I think this is a very disappointing document. I will also have occasion to mention some of the things that I think the government has talked about here that are not bad things, but I think the overriding theme has to be one of disappointment.

What are the crises that we are facing?

Well, we are certainly facing a global climate crisis. That much is very clear for anyone who has been paying attention to the news. Unfortunately, one does not have to pay attention to the news if one's house is on fire to know how severe climate change is getting and the important personal and economic consequences that it is having for Canadians in addition to what it is doing to the environment.

We are facing a housing crisis. Again, we do not have to watch the news; we just have to walk out into our neighbourhood and odds are, no matter what neighbourhood one lives in, more and more neighbourhoods are finding that they have people, friends, neighbours and family members who have lived in those neighbourhoods their whole life who can no longer afford to live there. They do not know where to go. They are setting up camp in the park across the street, because they do not know where else to go, and they cannot afford to put a roof over their head.

These are the kinds of challenges we are facing as a country. It took a long time to get here. It took a long time to get here with respect to the climate crisis. My father mentioned the climate crisis in the parlance of the time in the early 1980s in this place and said that we needed to do things now. Members can imagine how cheap it would have been to address the climate crisis in the 1980s instead of waiting until now.

I also know that in the 1990s, when the Liberals cancelled the national housing strategy, the federal NDP caucus was talking about the crisis it would create in housing.

I cannot, from where I sit, pretend in this place that these are new problems or that it was the Conservative leader who, two years ago, foresaw the housing crisis. The NDP saw this coming in the 1990s. It is why we said that we needed to continue to invest in co-op housing. It is why we said that the federal government had to show up and continue building social housing.

We have been sounding the alarm for over 30 years that Canada was going to find itself in this situation. Why were we doing that? We did that because we knew we could not fix a housing crisis overnight. It is the kind of thing that needs continued, predictable investment year over year to continue to meet demand. Now we have found ourselves here in part because of the government that the Conservative leader was a part of, but not just that. It was the Liberal government in the 1990s and then the Harper government and now this government, which has had eight years to address this problem, but it has only gotten worse under the Liberals. These problems have been a long time in the making, and Canadians are beginning to really feel the hurt.

What did we hear today from the finance minister? We heard from the finance minister that Canada has the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7. We heard from the finance minister that rating agencies are renewing Canada's AAA credit rating. We heard from the finance minister that Canada has the lowest deficit in the G7. What did we hear about the Liberals' trumpeted new investment in housing? It is not coming until 2025.

How is it that Canada could be in the best fiscal position in the G7 and not afford to begin investing right now in the housing that we need for Canadians, for vulnerable Canadians for sure, who do not have the means to pay rent in this economy, for working Canadians who do not have the means to pay rent or afford a mortgage in this economy? Also, businesses are telling us that the major barrier they face to growing their business is that they cannot find a place to house their workers, that the people they would like to have come work for them do not have a place to live and so they cannot come to the community where their business is.

How can Canada have a Deputy Prime Minister and finance minister with the gall to get up and brag about Canada's fiscal position in comparison to everyone else in the world, but then say the cupboard is bare when it comes to addressing some of the most important crises of our time?

I am quite familiar with the announcements she made in respect of housing, like the replenishment of the co-investment fund, because I have stood in this very place and called for them. I have sat across the table from Liberals and demanded that they make investments in social housing. I did not demand that they make those investments in 2025. We demanded that they make them right now.

It is the same with the replenishment of the RCFI, the rental construction financing initiative, which is a mouthful. It just means low-interest loans for people who want to build housing, whether they are building market housing or non-profit housing. What we expect in the future and have been advocating for is for post-secondary institutions, such as universities and colleges, to have access to that funding. The folks who want to build housing for seniors should be able to access that funding too.

This low-interest financing should be made far more widely available so that it is not just a honeypot for developers but a place for proven organizations across Canada, including non-profit organizations building housing for the vulnerable, to access funding to ensure there will be more housing and housing on more accessible terms. It is a huge disappointment that it did not come now.

These are not my words, but I talked about what the finance minister and the Deputy Prime Minister herself had to say, which was about Canada's strong fiscal position. The question still is, how do we pay for it? How would we find the money? We already have a deficit, albeit the lowest deficit in the G7. Well, a one-point increase in the corporate tax rate in Canada, which I would remind members was 28% in the year 2000 and is only 15% today, would generate over $3 billion a year. The Liberals want to recapitalize the co-investment fund to the tune of $1 billion and not start it for two years, but we could triple the recapitalization and do it every year in perpetuity with a 1% increase.

A 1% increase in the corporate tax rate is not a bad deal for corporations that say they cannot find enough workers to keep making money because there is no housing. Let us ask them to help build the housing that will help them grow their businesses while we employ Canadians and make sure they have roofs over their heads. That is a fair deal. What is not a fair deal is to cut the corporate tax rate from 28% in the year 2000 to 15% today and not allow Canadians to find a home. That is not fair. That is not good policy.

Let us not pretend that Canada cannot afford to move and move with urgency this year on significantly increasing the number of social and affordable housing builds the federal government is going to directly finance in whole or in part. It is simply not true, and it is irresponsible of the Liberals to cave to the demands of the Conservative Party and multinational corporations that do not care what happens to Canadian housing as long as they are able to pay bigger dividends to their shareholders and larger salaries to their CEOs. That is the real coalition in Parliament, and it has been in power for far too long.

How else could we pay for housing? We have heard reports this year about tens of billions of dollars being paid to consulting firms like KPMG and others. Why are we paying through the nose for high-priced consultants when we have some of the best civil servants in the world who can do the work we need them to do, instead of paying high-class consultants big profits to tell us how to cut taxes and put more people out of a home? That does not make a lot of sense.

We saw that the Liberals are quite prepared to spend money on scandals like ArriveCAN. Why can they not spend it on housing instead? It is because their friends are already housed and they are looking to make a buck. However, that is not a good excuse for Canadians who are living on the street and wondering not when Canada is going to do something unprecedented or when Canada is going to do something new, but when Canada is going to start doing what it did for decades following the Second World War. We must simply do it again. If Canadians in the 1950s could figure out how to build a home for everybody, surely in the 21st century, with all the wealth and prosperity that Canada has enjoyed over the last 70 years, we can figure out how to do it now.

That is just the deficiencies of what they have announced. Never mind the fact that when we look to B.C., there is an NDP government that has taken it upon itself to start a non-profit acquisition fund. Why do we need a non-profit acquisition fund? We need it because, in Canada today, for every one unit of affordable housing we are building, we are losing 15. Why are we losing those units?

This comes back to the question that I had for the leader of the Conservative Party, which was why, when he was in cabinet, and in the time that he says he was minister of housing, the Harper government cut the operating grants to co-op housing and other non-profit organizations that run housing that made rents affordable. Why did they do that? The reason that we have lost hundreds of thousands of affordable units over the last number of years is that the operators could no longer afford to operate with the subsidized rent that they used to operate with. It is because the leader of the Conservative Party, when he sat at the cabinet table and was minister of housing, refused to renew the federal operating grants. Now what we have are companies that come in and buy those buildings because the current operators cannot afford to operate them anymore with the tenants who are there. The corporate landlords do not mind; they kick out the tenants, renovate the suites, jack up the rent and invite Canadians with higher salaries to come in to rent those spaces.

Therefore, who has the backs of the people who cannot afford to rent a luxury apartment in today's market? The NDP has their backs; that is for sure. What is becoming more and more apparent is that the current government, after eight years of trying, simply does not. Even if the Liberals had the good intentions, which one could reasonably call into question, the competence clearly is not there to deliver on a national housing strategy that could build enough units to ensure that the housing crisis does not stretch into my grandchildren's lifetime.

Part of that is just a fascination and a fixation with only market solutions, which is another thing that is shared between the Liberals and Conservatives in their coalition. As I said, there was a time when the Canadian government built a lot of units. It did not build all the units; Canada has always had mostly a market for housing. However, we used to build enough non-market housing that the people who could not afford to pay in the market could still get a home, and they were not sacrificing their food or their prescription drugs to try to get into a housing market that they could not really afford while paying for all the necessities of life. The issue is that we are not doing that anymore and we have to be doing it.

If only it were not for the actions of the leader of the Conservative Party and his government, or if the current government had made good on its promise to renew the operating grants. This is what I mean when I talk about the real coalition in the House of Commons. It is Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The one party says, when it is not in power, that what the other is doing is so bad, really terrible, and that it is going to fix it when it gets in. Then it gets in and, lo and behold, it carries on the policies of the previous government, so Canadians never know how to get a break. Tommy Douglas used to tell the story of Mouseland, which puts this point very well. I encourage anyone watching, when they are done listening to this speech, to look that up on YouTube or elsewhere, and it will pain them to see how very relevant that very old story truly is.

We also think that it is high time the real estate investment trusts stopped getting the sweetheart tax deal they have had since the 1990s, because they have been part of the renoviction problem as well.

When the Liberals indicate notionally in the fall economic statement that they are excited to get the Canada Infrastructure Bank involved, all we can do is cringe. The Infrastructure Bank has hardly delivered a successful project even where it has tried. Even within its mandate, it has struggled to deliver a project. Telling Canadians that it is good news that the Infrastructure Bank is getting involved is so out of touch that I do not even know where to begin. It raises an important spectre, which is the public infrastructure that is required in order to build more housing. Whether that is bigger sewer pipes, better waste water management or all the things that are needed in order to support a number of units, it raises the spectre that the current government is not interested in seeing municipalities own that infrastructure as they properly should, but is instead interested in using federal public dollars to finance the takeover of municipal infrastructure by private investors who are going to be interested in seeking a profit on that.

We know, from many examples of P3s across the country, that when one gets the private sector involved in what should be public infrastructure, one pays more to get less. That is by no means a hopeful thing for Canadians, who want to see the kind of infrastructure development we need to expand our housing stock. When we talk about municipalities and housing, I think this is important.

I was at breakfast with the Association of Manitoba Municipalities today. What are they talking about? They are talking about their very sincere and real desire to get more housing in their communities because it is a barrier to investment. They have businesses that want to invest, that want to build new facilities, but, as I said earlier, cannot do it because they know that there is not enough housing for the workforce that they want for their business.

Are these municipal politicians celebrating this? Are they shouting for joy and saying, “This is great. We are keeping the investment out by not having enough housing”? They are absolutely not.

It is strange that one should have to say such a thing, but with the leader of the Conservative Party spending so much time in here pretending that municipal politicians do not care about being able to get more housing in their communities or are not interested in attracting that investment to their communities, I think it is high time somebody set the record straight.

I can tell members that, for a community that is already so cash-strapped it cannot build enough housing to bring in the kind of investment that it wants to see their local economy prosper, slashing its resources is not going to help it build more units the next year. It is only going to compound the problem. It has got to be one of the dumbest ideas on offer in Canadian politics today.

We talk about investment and Canadian businesses, and there are a whole bunch of businesses that started up when the Canada greener homes initiative got started because they wanted to become the folks that do the evaluation of how well insulated a house is or they wanted to be the person who came in and installed the heat pump or the person who helped Canadians save on their energy bills and reduce their emissions. We do not see in here a commitment to renew that program.

We do hear outside of this place that there are a lot of businesses that are concerned because they thought the Liberal government had a long-term commitment to reducing emissions. They thought it was not a gimmick. They should be forgiven for thinking that. It is not too late for the Liberals to do the right thing and commit to renewing this program, not only so that Canadians can continue to have access to the funds they need to renovate their homes, reduce our emissions and save money on their heating bill, but also to save the businesses that have invested, in good faith, in the skills and equipment they need to be the people to drive that forward.

What else could we do for businesses that is not done in this fall economic statement? An extension of the Canada emergency business account, the CEBA loans, for the repayable period would make a huge difference not only to those businesses that are in serious distress and are deserving of having that credit extended but also to the government that presumably would like to be paid again. I do not know how a government could think that forcing businesses that they have loans with into bankruptcy is a way to get the money back. Who would benefit?

Workers lose their jobs. Owners lose their business, and the government does not get the money. This is a win situation for nobody, and it is confounding that the government has not put that together. I think it owes us all a much better explanation.

Of course, when those workers are put out of a job, what are they going to need? They will need employment insurance. Where is the government on employment insurance? It is adopting another boutique change to the program that is good for the people that it affects. New Democrats have supported an adoption benefit under the EI program, but we want an adoption benefit under a new modernized EI program, the kind that the Liberals have been promising for over eight years now, so that the whole program serves workers better instead of just adding more things onto a system that the Liberals admit is broken. It does not make sense.

Better than employment insurance is a job. We have supported investments in battery manufacturing plants across the country, but now we hear that those jobs may not be for people already in Canada after all.

That is a serious problem because it speaks to the government not having done its due diligence with these companies in ensuring that they are going to be hiring Canadians who are looking for work to do these jobs.

It also bears mentioning that a lot of those workers are not necessarily coming through the TFW program. They are coming under the auspices of labour mobility sections in trade agreements negotiated by Liberals and Conservatives alike, in this case, the South Korean trade agreement that was negotiated when the Harper government was in power and the Leader of the Opposition was at the cabinet table.

I want to mention the Canada disability benefit, because no folks in Canada are more hard hit by the current economic circumstances than are Canadians living with disabilities. They were promised a new benefit, and the government has not delivered.