Debates of June 17th, 2024

Budget Implementation Act, 2024, No. 1

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Madam Speaker, I do not think the member asked one question related to my speech. I was talking about firearms and how the government is wasting billions of dollars to take firearms away from law-abiding Canadians while spending money on things that are not fixing problems.

I met a Kevin up in Iqaluit. He is living in absolute squalor in a house there. He has three grandsons he is taking care of. Every window in the house does not work. If the window by the kitchen gets opened, where a lot of kids would, they could fall 15 feet and get badly hurt.

This is after nine years of the NDP-Liberal government. Outcomes are not getting measured. Therefore, houses are not getting built. A lot of money seems to be getting spent, but we are not sure where it is all going. The fact of the matter, to the member across the way, is the government is not getting it done.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Uqaqtittiji, I have the same concern as the Liberal MP when it comes to the Conservatives caring for people. When Nunavut had a Conservative MP, that MP was part of the party that made cuts to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which was leading the way to ensure that indigenous people could get the healing they deserve.

How can anyone trust the Conservatives that they will lead in such a way that helps indigenous peoples?

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Madam Speaker, interestingly, this is from the member who said to me with her own mouth that if she could, she would shut down every natural resource job in the territory, every single one. She would not develop any natural resources in Nunavut.

Where are the jobs going to come from with this particular member in Nunavut? I am not sure. If the member wants to talk about what is cruel to local folks, it is not providing jobs and opportunities to prosper in that territory.

We saw projects done by the previous Conservative government with the previous member of Parliament. We just saw the Iqaluit port finished.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Please allow the hon. member to answer the question.

The hon. member for Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Madam Speaker, I was there. We got to see the brand new port of Iqaluit open up, which provides great opportunities for the people of Iqaluit and Nunavut. That is from a previous Conservative government, and it has finally been realized. I hope the member supports jobs in her community, and I hope she changes her current position.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, I really appreciated my colleague's speech because he really broke down to nuts and bolts what the government is trying to do to hunters and sport shooters.

One thing the Liberals quite often say is that they are going to buy back firearms, but the government never owned the firearms in the first place. I wonder if my friend could just explain to the Liberals that when they do not own firearms in the first place, they cannot buy them back.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Madam Speaker, that is the best question I have had all night. That is why when I speak about this particular gun buyback program, which is the Liberal terminology for it, I call it the gun confiscation program. That is what it is. It is about the confiscation of law-abiding firearms owners' firearms. Ironically, guess who does not turn in their firearms. It is criminals and gang members. We have all the law-abiding folks turning in their legally obtained firearms, and all the illegal firearms, which are causing all the problems in the first place in our inner cities, are still out there. It is wrong-headed.

We have the right plan on this side to get things done and to spend the money where it is going to make a difference. We are going to bring it home.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I want to speak this evening about the concept of the government's assertion about tax fairness in this budget. I would like to read into the record some facts that push back on the government's assertion that a fairly significant tax increase it has included in this budget is only going to affect a very small number of Canadians.

I am reading from an article in the National Post. When I was putting my notes together for this speech, I thought that it actually summarized it very well, so why reinvent the wheel? This is an article written by Matthew Lau last week, which reads:

In its latest announcement on the capital gains tax increase, the Liberal government presents as a “quick fact” that it’s “increasing capital gains taxes on 0.13 per cent of Canadians, in any given year.” There are three problems with the 0.13 per cent figure. First, it is misleading; second, it is incomplete; and third, it ignores tax incidence, which is the concept that the economic burden of a tax falls on different people—in fact, on very many more people—than simply those who face a higher tax bill.

That concept of tax incidence is something that I encourage colleagues to understand, prior to continuing to vote in favour of this budget, because it will detrimentally impact the Canadian economy. The article goes on:

Let’s take the three problems in order. First, the 0.13 per cent figure is misleading because of the phrase that follows: “in any given year.” The taxpayers who are part of this 0.13 per cent in one year are different than the taxpayers captured in this group in another year. For many Canadians, reporting an annual capital gain in excess of $250,000 is a once-in-a-lifetime event—or an immediately-after-lifetime event if the capital gain threshold is triggered when a deceased person’s assets are liquidated.

What this is saying is that this affects families. It continues:

This means that even if only 0.13 per cent of Canadians pay this higher tax rate every year, a much greater percentage of Canadians will be hit with this tax hike over the course of their lives. [An] Economist...concluded that, “As a share of Canada’s tax filer population, those impacted by the new capital gains proposal on a lifetime basis is 1.26 million or 4.3 per cent of tax filers compared to the budget estimate of 0.13 per cent.”

Second, the 0.13 per cent figure is incomplete because it excludes corporations. As the Liberals estimated in budget 2024, approximately 307,000 corporations (again, in a given year) will be subject to the tax. About 6,000 of these are likely to be publicly traded...so many Canadians will effectively be subject to the higher capital gains tax through their investments, [and through their] pension...assets.

The government does not talk about how this tax increase is going to affect people's investments and particularly their pensions. The government has not adequately costed that or talked about it in its presentation of this tax to Parliament and to the general public.

Then there’s the approximately 301,000 private corporations, many of which have multiple owners, such as partners or family members, so even excluding exposure to publicly traded corporations, many Canadians will be hit by the capital gains tax...through their investments. “Overall,” [an economist] estimates, “4.74 million...investors in Canadian companies will be affected, representing 15.8 per cent of all filers.” Or more than 100 times the Liberals’ stated figure of 0.13 per cent.

Again, I want to emphasize what I said in the earlier part of that statement, which is that a lot of these are family members. These are family-owned corporations of tradespeople. That is why the Leader of the Opposition asked the Liberals to provide an amendment saying that if it is only going to affect 0.13%, then accept an amendment to keep it to that, but we know that they cannot. That is why they will not accept this amendment, because they know these facts, and they are just not telling the Canadian public. They are not being honest. That is not fair.

The article states:

This brings us, thirdly, to the concept of tax incidence, of which students will learn in a good economics class but which the Liberal government would like us all to ignore. A well-known example: on paper, corporate income taxes are paid by shareholders, but in reality the economic burden of the tax falls largely on workers in the form of lower wages. Corporate income taxes discourage investment, thus reducing labour productivity and the number of businesses bidding for labour.

The article continues:

No differently, the Liberal government’s capital gains tax discourages business investment and will have negative effects on workers...beyond those who earn high amounts of capital gains in [any] given year. Business investment has already fallen in alarming fashion since the Liberals took office: from 2015-Q3 to 2024-Q1, real per capita investment is down 13.9 per cent. A capital gains tax hike that distorts investors’ decisions to favour present-day consumption over long-term investment will make this trend even worse.

The incidence of the Liberals’ capital gains tax hike will fall on all of us, not just the 15.8 per cent...who are directly affected, or the “0.13 per cent of Canadians, in any given year” that the Liberals claim. For ordinary Canadians, learning about tax incidence for two hours could be a profitable and amusing activity; being whacked by a capital gains tax that the Liberals say will only affect the super-rich [but affects all of us], not so much.

The other point that has been made by economists and by any business person is that the brisk implementation of the hike guarantees that it will enforce Canadian investors to shed assets in a hurry to take advantage of the existing lower rate, but revenue will decline over time. While we know the Liberals are facing potential credit downgrades because of the incredible amount of debt they have incurred on the Canadian people and because of the incredible deficit they once again racked up this year, they are looking for a way to prevent that credit downgrade. They are looking for an easy cash grab.

One never wants to be in a position as a person where one is looking for a quick way to make money. That is where poor decisions are made. There are all sorts of crass examples I could give of that. Why would I not do that? This is like the equivalent of selling feet pictures for the Liberals. That is what the capital gains tax is. It is a quick cash grab to try to prevent Canada from having its credit downgraded.

This would all be bad enough if it was not for the finance minister, who I honestly do not know how she has her job. I am sure she is liked in the caucus. I do not have anything personally against her, but she is clearly incompetent. How the Liberal backbench allowed her to present a budget that was this unbalanced, with this in it, and to keep her job is beyond me. This is so irresponsible. What the finance minister said in announcing this should give all colleagues in this place pause for thought. Her comments were described in a major Canadian newspaper as, “[the finance minister's] remarks seem like naked class warfare in a miserably thin guise of technical fairness.”

The government has spent billions and billions of dollars. Are we in trillions now? It has spent so much money, and I do not think there is a single Canadian who can look at their life in terms of being able to buy groceries, to afford rent, to look at buying a house, to take a vacation or to look that long-term prosperity, and certainly not young Canadians, and who can say that they are better off now than they were nine years ago.

We have spent all of this money, essentially in peacetime, and the last few years are not pandemic time. There is no reason for this deficit this year. If the government has spent all this money in this short period of time and Canadians have nothing to show for it, then why are we still allowing the government to use spending as a metric?

Government members say that they are creating tax fairness, but they are just increasing taxes to make life more unaffordable and to create less investment for our country. As parliamentarians, we cannot allow them to do this. We have to hold them to account on this. I understand that there are different schools of political thought in this place about what the government should spend on and what it should not, but none of us, regardless of political stripe, should allow a government to spend without outcome, which is exactly what the government has done.

When we think about all of the waste, we have only scratched the tip of the iceberg on the scandal of the government's waste. We should never be listening to the government about trying to take more of Canadians' hard-earned money to let it go into the abyss. We have to stop it. I implore colleagues of all political stripes to vote against this budget. It is bad. The government needs to go back to the drawing board. Certainly, this measure it has put in there is not tax fairness; it is decimation for the Canadian people.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member's comments give rise to that old saying that we can put all the accountants end to end, and they will never reach a conclusion. I wanted to quote a few things from the International Monetary Fund and get the hon member's reaction to that. It says, “Canada's fiscal track record continues to compare favourably to many other advanced economies.... Debt remains low in international comparison”. It also says, “The increase in the capital gains inclusion rate improves the tax system's neutrality with respect to different forms of capital income and is likely to have no significant impact on investment or productivity growth.”

That does not suggest that things are going to go to hell in a handbasket. I am just wondering, with what the hon. member has read and with what I have just mentioned, if there is some kind of disconnect that she could explain.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I would argue humbly that the member is disconnected. If he goes and knocks on the doors in his riding, there is nobody who is going to accept what he just said because the lived reality of Canadians is not one of prosperity; it is one of hardship right now, and it is one of lack of hope for the future. That is what disconnect looks like.

Also, there are so many other metrics where the member is just flat out wrong. Canada is on a track for its worst decline in living standards in 40 years. Before the current Prime Minister, Canada's GDP grew at a rate similar to that of the United States, but since 2015, the economy has weakened significantly. Canada's GDP per capita is down 2%, while the United States' has increased by 8%.

I could go on and on, but I do not need to quote this plethora of economic statistics that validate my point. I just have to go door knock in my riding. That is all I have to do, and I encourage the member to do the same because I think he is going to find that he is in for a reckoning come the next election.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, since I was elected, I have noticed the Conservatives punching down, on seniors for example. They are talking about cutting CPP. In fact, I was a long-time schoolteacher, and one issue under the Harper government was that kids were going to school hungry, so I, as a teacher, paid out of my own pocket for food. What do the Conservatives do? They vote against the school food meal program and then make a whole bunch of excuses about why they do not support it, even though it is supported by advocates across the country. The Conservatives built no affordable housing during the time they were in. They come up with these slogans that totally axe the facts on a constant basis, which are certainly not based on the facts. They put down academic institutions. They have something against research. I am wondering what the member thinks about her party's record of axing the facts.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, the fact on food bank usage and people not being able to eat is that under the current government, food bank usage has skyrocketed. Not as many children needed to use food banks in 2015 as they do today. In fact, that number is astronomically higher. With regard to homes and affordable housing, everybody's rent has doubled. Nobody can afford a home anymore, and that has happened under the current government. With regard to seniors, the opposition leader cited an example of a low-income senior who wanted to hive off a part of her property for her children. She now has to pay this tax that she cannot afford. I do not understand why the New Democrats, if they are proponents of helping people who are disadvantaged, would continue to support a government that is corrupt and that has never delivered on anything. I think voters will remember that in the next election.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Madam Speaker, I would like to say to my hon. colleague that another example might be that we have seen young professionals, as I have read in news stories, are leaving the country in significant numbers because they cannot deal with this taxing regime any longer. Would the member like to comment on another example of the outcome of the government's policy?

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I want a country where people do not feel like they have to leave it to get ahead, yet that is exactly what the government has done. Regarding this tax, primary care doctors, when we are in a primary care doctor shortage, are saying that they cannot stay in this country because of it. This has to end, and I implore my NDP colleagues to stop propping the government up.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Madam Speaker, to my colleague from Calgary Nose Hill, those were great remarks that really reflect what, if people are at the doors talking to individuals, they will recognize as being an issue. It boils down to the fact that Canadians have lost hope and they feel like they are drowning, and there are a number of factors that contribute to that.

One of the things I have noticed about the government over the last number of years since the Liberals have been in power is that it loves to talk a great game. It is amazing the number of promises the Liberals continue to promise to deliver on that they do not actually deliver on. It is all summed up in an article that was in the paper in April 2016. It was titled “'Deliverology' guru schools Trudeau government for 2nd time at cabinet retreat”. I am guessing that he or she was there for a second time because they were having a hard time delivering the results, although it is pretty easy to make promises.

One of the things that concerns me about the government is not just the spending. The member for Calgary Nose Hill laid that out very well in terms of the constant spending, and there have been other members in the House who have talked about the spending. However, one of the challenges is that the government continues to make promises that it has no intention of keeping, no intention of delivering or no idea how they are going to begin. I can give hundreds of examples, and I am going to give a couple of examples tonight during my speech.

One of the members of the Liberal Party spoke earlier. We are in a housing crisis, so the Liberals talk quite a bit about their commitment to build 3.9 million homes over the next seven years. We can hear this number, and they talk about it all the time. They talk about all this money that they are contributing to the cause, yet we are not seeing any results. I know that we have had colleagues ask the question, and I want to break down the numbers for people at home, just to realize how absurd this number is.

On building 3.9 million homes by 2031, that is seven years away. That is almost 560,000 homes a year, which works out to over 46,000 homes a month, over 10,000 homes a week, over 1,500 homes per day and over 63 homes per hour. Therefore, we are looking at pretty much a home needing to be built every minute in this country.

When we look at what the current building situation is in this country, we see that this past year, we only built 240,000 homes, and part of the reason for that is the whole issue of red tape and regulations, and the fact remains that there is really no plan. Once again, there is a promise for what we would like to see happen. That is what the Liberal government does often times. The Liberals talk about what they promise or what they would like to do or what they would love to see happen. I am going to make my point tonight that the government is completely incompetent and does not have any idea how it is going to deliver any of the things that it actually promises individuals.

To help them try to deliver this stuff, the Liberals do spend a lot of money on consultants. That has been a theme here in the House over the last little while. We see that there was over $15 billion spent in 2021-2022. We see the McKinsey situation. Originally, we thought that the company had been given $100 million in contracts. It turns out that number is actually $200 million in contracts. We have seen the size of the bureaucracy increase by almost 40% since the time we were in government.

It was interesting that, right after COVID, people were going to get their passports renewed, and we remember the challenges they were having. They were waiting for hours and hours. We thought, okay, the government is hiring more people to help make this happen. In talking to my constituents, I have to say that the service is actually as bad as it was back then. I talked to someone the other day who went in for a passport and they waited for over three hours. Let us think about that. We are not in post-COVID times. We have a bureaucracy that is 40% larger than when we were in government, yet the government has no ability or competence whatsoever to deliver those things. We have not seen services improve at all.

As a matter of fact, government regulations is the other side of that coin. The reason we cannot build homes is that government regulations are pretty tough at all levels. I am not going to say that is just at the federal level, as they are certainly tough provincially and municipally as well. Some people are not so lucky as I am. I come from an area in Niagara where we actually have four levels of government. We have a regional level of government that adds a layer of complexity to that. CFIB said that it costs small business owners nearly $40 billion a year for them to deal with regulations. CFIB representatives also said that probably 30% of that $40 billion a year is unnecessary, redundant and overly burdensome regulation.

That leads me into talking about small business. I think that the government's record has been horrendous on small businesses. As a matter of fact, I think small businesses are being crushed under the government. I think that if we go back to COVID and see some of the unfair restrictions that happened with restaurants and the hospitality industry, those hangovers remain. We look at it right now in terms of large multinationals, global consulting firms and billion-dollar companies, which have never had it so good under the government. I mean, they are laughing. Their pockets are stuffed with cash, but small businesses continue to get crushed.

I had a chance to talk to an individual restauranteur in my riding. I was at an event in Grimsby, Ontario, on Friday, and I had a chance to talk to Mark. Mark owns a couple of restaurants. I asked him how he has been doing since COVID. I asked him if he has been able to rebound since COVID. He said, “As a matter of fact, I am still killed. I am still crushed. I am struggling to make the bills. I am struggling to be able to maintain what is happening. I had to try to sell one of my other restaurants because of the issues there.”

He is not unique. If one goes to Restaurants Canada, it will tell members that almost 42% of businesses went insolvent. The number is around 41% for businesses in general. When one adds in restaurants, that number goes up to literally 44%. The year before, coming out of COVID last year, we saw that only half of restaurants were losing money. That number, currently, this year, is probably up to 62%. When the government says to us that we have never had it so good, I would challenge that, and I would ask members to go to talk to a small business person to see if they actually feel the same way.

One of the challenges is that people are losing hope. They are losing faith. Once again, the member for Calgary Nose Hill did mention the fact, and one of the questions mentioned this, that people are leaving this country in record numbers. We are seeing that all the time because people are trying to go to places where maybe they would have some hope. I think that is the sad part. We have a great country. I just think it is tremendously mismanaged.

When I think about what is going on right now, I could stand here all night and just talk about the mismanagement. I just want to give members a couple highlights. I look at the most recent Auditor General report. It said that there were over 180 conflicts when looking at contracts, 186 times there were conflicts of interest. The Treasury Board said that there were over 160 conflicts when it came to dealing with consultants and contractors. That is for the people that self-disclosed. Imagine the people who did not mention it. It was 163 times.

Blacklock’s Reporter does a great job. I encourage people to have a look at its news organization. It is a subscription, but it has great information. It came up with a story. This was done with some OPQs. We were able to figure this out. There were a couple of sole source contracts during COVID. We do not have to go back too far. We see a sole source contract for StarFish, which had new ventilators and was given $170 million. Some of them were scrapped even while the pandemic was going on. Others were sold for as little as $6. We certainly will never forget the juicy contract that Frank Baylis, a one-term MP here, got for ventilators for $237 million.

These are the things that I think really frustrate people. This is what we are talking about. We are talking about a government that has a spending problem, and I think we have a government that is absolutely incompetent when it comes to being able to deliver the things it talks about.

I would love to talk a bit about the Winnipeg lab story. It is kind of ironic. It is sad that we had a couple of scientists that were actually getting packages from Amazon. They were getting stuff from China, and they were sending stuff back. That is unbelievable. The government then covered it up. That is absolutely insane. It did not want to realize how incompetent it was. We also found out they were working for the Chinese military.

Once again, there are many things I could go on about. One thing I will tell members is that the government is just not worth the cost. When we get a chance, we are going to give people hope, give people faith and give people a chance to have a better life once again.

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

Madam Speaker, the member said that he is going to give people a chance to have hope, yet he is going to cut back on issues that people genuinely care about, such as seniors receiving dental care services and the pharmacare program being rolled out. Imagine the individuals with diabetes. Think of the school food program. The Conservatives are going to cut that away. There are so many things they are going to cut.

My question for the member is this: Why do the Conservatives not recognize the need to be fair? Why are they opposing the capital gains tax? They voted against the 1% tax hike for—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

I have to give the hon. member a few seconds to answer.

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Madam Speaker, do members know who is going to be upset when we form government? It will be Liberal insiders. They are going to be so disappointed because they will not be getting those fat, juicy contracts where there is no value for service and where things do not get delivered. The government had a sole-source contract for a quarter billion dollars, and then it scrapped the machines and did not even use them. What a joke.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

It being 10:36 p.m., pursuant to order made earlier today, it is my duty to interrupt the proceedings and put forthwith every question necessary to dispose of the report stage of the bill now before the House.

The question is on Motion No. 1. A vote on this motion also applies to Motions Nos. 2 to 31.

If a member participating in person wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division, or if a member of a recognized party participating in person wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.

[Adam Chambers, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Madam Speaker, we would like a recorded division.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The recorded division on Motion No. 1 stands deferred.

The next question is on Motion No. 32. A vote on this motion also applies to Motion No. 33.

If a member participating in person wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division, or if a member of a recognized party participating in person wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.

[Adam Chambers, Conservative, Simcoe North, ON]

Madam Speaker, we need another recorded vote.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The recorded division on Motion No. 32 stands deferred.

The next question is on Motion No. 34.

A vote on this motion also applies to Motions Nos. 35 to 37.

If a member participating in person wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division, or if a member of a recognized party participating in person wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, I know the member opposite was about to ask for a recorded vote. If not, I will.