Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to lend my voice in support of Bill C-15, the budget 2025 implementation act.
Our new government has been focused on bringing down costs and creating new opportunities for Canadians. We have cut taxes for 22 million middle-class Canadians, saving two-income families up to $840 per year. Through budget 2025, we are creating opportunities for young Canadians to transition into the workforce and launch successful careers by launching a youth climate corps and providing 175,000 placements through Canada summer jobs, the horizontal youth employment and skills strategy, and the student work placement program in 2026-27.
Bill C-15 is another important milestone in delivering measures to make life more affordable for Canadians. The bill recognizes that Canadians are concerned about affordability. Paying for essentials depends on having the funds to pay the bills, but also on the timing of when we receive those funds. We know, for example, that digitalization in the financial sector has brought many benefits for consumers, including the immediate transfer of funds. However, at the same time, we know that consumers who remain reliant on legacy financial products and services, including cheques, may be missing out on these benefits and getting left behind.
Access to cheque fund rules are now over a decade old and have not kept pace with cost of living increases or technological advances. That is why budget 2025 proposes to amend the Bank Act to raise the first amount of immediately available deposited funds from $100 to $150; remove the timing distinction between funds deposited in person or via other means; make regulations to reduce the number of days banks may hold deposited cheque funds; raise the current value threshold of $1,500, below which shorter cheque hold periods apply; and apply the changes to trust and loan companies. Once again, Bill C-15 would make this change a reality.
However, that is not the only way the bill would help improve financial services to help Canadians manage their money. Consumer-driven banking, also known as open banking, refers to a secure framework that lets Canadian individuals and businesses share their financial data with the approved service providers of their choice. This framework would give consumers greater control over their data while promoting a competitive and innovative financial sector that strengthens Canada's position in the global digital economy.
In short, the goal of Canada's consumer-driven banking framework is to promote competition and innovation in the financial sector, improve financial outcomes for Canadians and ensure that consumers can share their data securely. In other countries, regulated frameworks have proven effective at achieving these policy goals by empowering consumers, enhancing data accessibility and supporting new financial service providers and business models.
At the same time, we know that the absence of such a secure framework means that about nine million Canadians currently share their financial data by providing their confidential banking credentials in a process known as screen scraping. These consumers face increased security, liability and privacy risks that may be left without recourse if something goes wrong. Our consumer-driven banking framework would address these risks by using application programming interfaces, or APIs, to provide more secure communications between entities.
Giving Canadians greater control over their financial data opens the door to financial products and greater choice between providers, fostering a more dynamic financial sector and productive economy. Unlocking these new opportunities would lead to improved financial decision-making, lower costs and more tailored products and services for consumers. Bill C-15 would be fundamental in achieving this, as it proposes legislative changes that would complete the consumer-driven banking framework by transferring its governance to the Bank of Canada and by making a legislative amendment to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act that would grant Canadians a right to data mobility, supporting an economy-wide approach to data sharing.
All Canadians would be expected to benefit from the consumer-driven banking framework as it would promote competition and reduce risks in the financial services industry by regulating financial data sharing. For consumers, this could mean greater financial inclusion, more informed financial decisions and better management and mitigation of financial stressors. For businesses, it could mean improved access to new forms of financing and reduced administrative burden from better integration and automation of key functions, but lower-income and financially stressed households are expected to benefit the most through access to lower-cost products, clearer choices, and tools to manage debt and reduce financial stress.
What is more is that this is not the only way that Bill C-15 would help Canadian financial consumers save and manage their money. We know, for example, that all Canadians would benefit from improvements to the federal credit union framework, since allowing more financial institutions like credit unions to grow would create more competition in the financial sector. Competition drives down fees, improves interest rates on deposits and leads to better customer services, bringing benefits to the diverse regions across Canada that credit unions currently serve. Competition in the sector could also drive efficiency and support economic development and productivity as financial institutions are driven to allocate capital to their most productive uses.
That is why budget 2025 proposes to amend the Bank Act, the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation Act and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada Act to support federal credit unions' growth via amalgamation or asset acquisitions, and to make it easier for credit unions to enter the federal framework, including by providing the flexibility for them to continue their existing auto-leasing business on a permanent basis. With these changes included in Bill C-15, we have yet another way it would bring down costs for Canadians and yet another reason to support the bill.
The bill also includes provisions that would exempt the Canada disability benefit from being treated as income under the Income Tax Act, helping ensure that Canada disability benefit recipients would keep the full value of their benefits, including other federal income-tested benefits and programs, such as the Canada child benefit. Helping to reduce poverty and increase the financial well-being of low-income persons with disabilities is a key priority in our government's work to build a fairer Canada, and it is yet another reason for parliamentarians to lend their support to Bill C-15.
However, it does not stop there. The bill even includes new financial support for those who provide help to those who need help. Personal support workers help Canadians live and age with dignity, and they helped us to get through the COVID-19 pandemic. We as a country owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude. That is why we would introduce a temporary personal support workers tax credit, under which eligible personal support workers employed in the provinces and territories that are not already covered by a bilateral agreement with the federal government, to increase wages for personal support workers. They could claim a refundable tax credit equal to 5% of their eligible earnings, providing support of up to $1,100 per year.
This measure to support frontline health care workers would be available for the 2026 to 2030 taxation years and is estimated to cost $1.48 billion over six years, starting in 2025-26. Of this amount, $1.17 billion would be sourced from funding previously committed, but unutilized, to support wage increases for personal support workers. The bottom line is that this tax credit would empower the personal support workers who care for us by putting more of their hard-earned money back in their pockets.
That is what this bill is all about. Our government remains focused on empowering Canadians by lowering costs, increasing competition and expanding opportunities—