Daniel Blaikie

[Budget Implementation Act, 2022, No. 1, June 8th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak during third reading of Bill C-19, which of course is the budget implementation act. I thought I might treat it as a bit of a case study, because in the debate about our electoral system we often hear that Canada needs strong majority governments in order to have decisive decision-making and action and to not end up with a hung Parliament. This is one of the main motivations for some to oppose electoral reform, and particularly forms of proportional representation, which tend to lead to more instances of minority Parliaments and minority governments.

My view is that the process around this budget bill, without being a perfect process and without the bill being a perfect bill, was actually a decent process, so I want to talk a bit about some of the improvements that were made to the bill during the course of it and some of the ways that it suggests we can make progress on other issues in this Parliament through members of various parties working together, and not only members of the same party working together. I think this process, in fact, showed that members can be nimble in terms of whom they are working with on particular issues and still get outcomes that make sense for Canadians and that benefit a lot of Canadians. We do not need one party having 100% of the power here in Parliament in order to make substantial progress for Canadians.

The first example I would point to is related to changes to the disability tax credit. We heard a fair bit of testimony at committee on this point. A Conservative colleague of mine on the committee brought forward an amendment, and the way this happens, as I am sure members will know but folks listening at home may not, is that parties will typically submit their amendments independently. Sometimes there are pleasant surprises when we receive the package. In this case, it was an identical amendment.

I was happy to work with Conservative colleagues and my Bloc colleague on the committee to pass an amendment that would change the disability tax credit requirements. A person has to show that they spend 14 hours a week tending to their condition, as somebody with type 1 diabetes does, whether that is injecting themselves with insulin, going to the pharmacy to get insulin, monitoring their blood sugar or doing other things that folks living with type 1 diabetes have to do. Then they often have to prove this every year, despite the fact that type 1 diabetes is not a condition that simply goes away and despite the fact that the requirements of the condition do not simply go away. Nevertheless, people have had to constantly show they have it, again and again.

This is reminiscent of some of the stories we have heard over the years out of Veterans Affairs Canada about veteran amputees who have to demonstrate every so often that, in fact, their leg is still missing and they are still an amputee and continue to require the same help. Folks with type 1 diabetes were having to continually show this.

We were able to bring forward an amendment, pass it at committee and even overcome some procedural wrangling, after the amendment was initially ruled out of order. We were happy to overrule the chair at committee on that point and very pleased that the Speaker saw fit to uphold the will of the committee in respect of that amendment when it came back to the House.

What that means concretely for people who are living with type 1 diabetes is that they will no longer have to do all of the paperwork, with the bother and expense that comes with it, in order to qualify for the disability tax credit. Once they have qualified as having type 1 diabetes, that will be sufficient to qualify them in the future.

I think that was a really hopeful exercise, and not just hopeful for Parliament in general, but also hopeful because we know that when it comes to Canadians living with disabilities, there has not been enough meaningful action on the part of the current government to serve that community. We saw that last June, when the government presented a bill for a Canada disability benefit that had absolutely no details about what the benefit would be, how much it would be, what the eligibility criteria would be and how it might impact other benefits that people living with a disability already receive. There was a lot more work to do, and since the new Parliament was elected in the fall, an ongoing priority of the NDP has been to call on the government to present new legislation and better legislation that would actually tell Canadians living with disabilities what the government has in mind and would provide far better ongoing income support for people living with disabilities.

Why is that important? It is because under the current federal programs and under provincial programs across the country, people living with disabilities have been consistently legislated into poverty to the extent that someone with a disability has to rely on existing disability pensions of various kinds across the country, none of which provide an income that brings them to the poverty line. This means that as soon as they have to rely on those things, people know they are going to be living a life of poverty with all of the challenges that come with that. Those are challenges of poverty over and above the challenges people living with disabilities already face.

With the great work from my colleague, the NDP disability critic in this Parliament, to press the government to bring legislation forward, we finally got wind on the Notice Paper that legislation was coming. It was an exciting moment. We had hoped to get more detail, just as we had hoped that certain changes to the disability tax credit in this legislation might have meant that finally the government would act on the long-standing call by people living with type 1 diabetes to make their lives easier and make their access to the disability tax credit available.

That was a disappointment, initially. However, by working together across party lines, we were able to remedy that, similar to the tabling of the Canada disability legislation. I almost said the “new” legislation, but I think I would have misspoken because it is pretty much the same legislation and has the same problems, therefore. It does not spell out what the program is supposed to look like. It does not let Canadians living with disabilities know what kind of financial help there is and the extent of financial support they could hope to receive from the federal government.

I would go further and say that part of the problem with legislation like this, and there are a couple, is it essentially just empowers cabinet to design a program and fund that program by statute, without having to return to Parliament. There is a procedural question, which I think may be less interesting to a lot of Canadians, but that procedural question is important to the extent that Parliament is a place that is meant to provide oversight on government spending. This bill would empower the government to create a program without having any idea what the price tag is, when it should be quite clear with Parliament on how the program is going to be designed. Parliamentarians should be able to authorize a new program like that knowing those things. That is a problem.

The other problem with setting up that program in legislation without actually legislating it is that a future government and a future cabinet that does not agree with the program or that wants to change it would not have to come back to this place. There would be no legislative process. This would also mean that the time it normally takes for a bill to go through the House of Commons and through the Senate would not be there. That is the time civil society often uses to mobilize in order to influence the content of legislation and government policy. It is an opportunity lost. It would make it very easy for a future government to undo whatever the current government does. If it finally gets around to creating a program for the Canada disability benefit, it would be far too easy for it to be undone.

Our experience at committee with the initial disappointment around the disability tax credit shows that a minority Parliament can come together and can have a positive influence on government policy and legislation. It can get things done for people that a majority government clearly would not have done because it was not in the Liberals' proposal.

I would also point to the example of employment insurance reform, something the government promised in its election campaign in 2015. We have had two elections since. The government has been in power now for coming on seven years, yet we have not seen any meaningful EI reform. We have to bracket a lot of what happened in the pandemic, because there were substantial changes to the EI program during the pandemic, but the speed with which those reforms occurred shows that it is possible to make meaningful reform quickly. Also, the nature of many of those reforms shows that what workers have been asking for in their EI program is in fact possible. This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. Most of what they have been asking for are things the government did through the EI program during the pandemic.

As the pandemic recedes somewhat, at least for the moment, certainly the Liberals are of that view when they are talking about their financial support programs, less so when they are talking about public health restrictions. As the pandemic recedes somewhat, the government is going back to its regular inaction on the employment insurance file.

The Liberals finally did try to do something important but relatively minor in the grand scheme of systemic employment insurance reform: They presented a proposal to change the EI appeal board and undo some of the damage that was done by the Harper government to the EI appeal board. They fell flat on their face. It was not well received, even by the very people the Liberals sought to please with those reforms. They were lambasted for it, and they themselves sought to remove that part of the budget bill.

New Democrats were pleased to support that removal, for two reasons. One was that we agreed that those reforms were misguided and did not represent what I would dare to call a consensus among EI stakeholders about how the system, and particularly the appeal board, has to change. However, we were glad to support the reforms on a condition, which was satisfied, which was that the minister declare publicly that they would bring legislation back in the fall in order to make better changes to the EI appeal board system that people would actually welcome. Having secured that commitment, we were happy to support the removal of those appeal board changes that were quite ill-conceived.

However, it does raise a question of trust in the government. After being in government for well over six and a half years and having not really made any major reforms to EI except those that were forced by pandemic circumstances, when they finally came out of the gate to do something, how could they get it so terribly wrong? I take some solace in the fact that we have a minority Parliament, that Canadians did not entrust the Liberals with a majority of seats here in the House of Commons, that they do not have 100% of the power in this place and that negotiation is possible, because I think it is leading to better outcomes.

There is another example that is a little outside the scope of this bill, but it is an important one when we are talking about the pandemic. Early on in this Parliament, one of the first things that the finance committee did was to deal with Bill C-2, which established the new pandemic benefit regime that has now expired. It was instituted in December and was effectively the pandemic support regime that saw us through the omicron wave, with some notable changes by order in council right after the legislation passed, because as New Democrats said at the time, the reason we voted against that legislation was that we thought it would be inadequate to the task. I want to zero in on an important change that was made to those programs, particularly the wage subsidy program that was conceived in that bill.

Working with members of the Bloc and the Conservative Party, we were able to pass an amendment that said that companies that were receiving wage subsidy money under the authority of Bill C-2 would not be allowed to pay dividends to shareholders while accepting money from the government that presumably they needed because they did not have enough revenue to stay afloat. Clearly, if they were making big dividend payments to their shareholders, they did have the money, so that was an appropriate reform. It was the kind of thing that New Democrats had called for at the inception of the wage subsidy program that the government would not agree to initially, but we finally found a way, again working across party lines. That is not always an easy thing to do, but it is always a worthwhile thing to try to do. This was again an example of Parliament being able to correct course for a government that had got off on the wrong foot.

It really matters and it serves Canadians well that we are in a Parliament that does not have a majority government. I do hope that is something Canadians will consider in the next election. I also hope that they will consider electoral reform when organizations like Fair Vote approach them to talk about it. I will remind some of my Conservative colleagues—and we have gone into it a little over the budget debate—that reform is the want of folks around here, and it is not a bad thing. Conservatives will know that they had more share of the popular vote than the Liberals, who are in power, but they got far fewer seats.

We just saw, in the Ontario election, the New Democrats get about 30 seats to the Liberals' eight, approximately, despite having roughly an equal share of the popular vote. We saw the Ford government form a majority with a very small amount of support when we consider how low turnout was and how the way we vote under the first-past-the-post system can generate very distorted electoral outcomes.

I raise all these things to contribute to the debate on this bill, but I also hope to contribute to a larger debate about how we elect Parliaments that select governments here in Canada and show that we have been doing good work in this Parliament. We have been correcting course for the government when it got it wrong on the first go, and that has been made possible by virtue of having a minority Parliament. It is exactly because we do not have a majority government that these corrections and some of the good things that came out of the committee process have been possible.

One of the things I hope we may yet make progress on, which I will be looking to colleagues in other parties for support on, is the call for a low-income CERB repayment amnesty. This is something that has come up at the finance committee. It heard compelling testimony, and there is an important moral dimension to this issue. We are talking about people whose incomes are already below the poverty line. CTV did a piece on this last week, but it is not new. It has been a running story and has had various permutations through the pandemic, with the CRA sending letters to Canadians already in very difficult financial straits even before the current round of inflation hit us. It is all the more so now that people are struggling with the cost of groceries. The cost of housing has been an issue—let us not kid ourselves—for a long time. The rate of acceleration of the problem got worse during the pandemic, but the problem was getting worse even before the pandemic.

People who applied in good faith for help and were told to apply, in some cases, by their very own Liberal MP are now getting letters saying that they have to pay the money back, that they did not qualify and were not eligible. In some cases, they are people who applied for employment insurance and would have preferred just to get EI, but were told no, they could only get CERB. Then they got the CERB cheque and figured that was what they were entitled to. They applied for EI, were told no, and got the CERB. CERB sent them the cheque; they did not ask for it, so they thought it must be okay. They spent the money because they had lost their jobs and were trying to get through a global pandemic, which I think we can all agree was not an easy thing to do no matter what people's incomes were, let alone if they had just lost their jobs, and now the government is asking them for that money back. They do not have the money, and the efforts to collect that money, particularly from people who are already below the poverty line, are not going to bear fruit.

There is the moral dimension in terms of the anxiety and the financial harm that it is causing, but there is also a very real financial dimension. We heard a bit about that at committee. The government is planning to spend around $260 million chasing after a CERB debt that is a function of how it publicized its own program and encouraged people, and in some cases forced people, into the CERB system as opposed to the employment insurance system. For the $260 million that the government is going to spend over the next three or four years chasing that debt, how much is it actually going to get back? I think it is unlikely that it is going to get back $260 million.

I would love to know. I would love to have the government tell us how much it thinks it is actually going to get back. I have asked the question. I asked it at committee and I asked in a number of different fora and I cannot get an answer. It is shocking to me that the government would decide to invest $260 million to collect a debt that it does not know the value of, let alone the likelihood of succeeding. When we talk about investing over a quarter of a billion dollars in collecting a debt, we would want to be darn sure we are actually going to get that money back. Even if it makes its money back and calls it a wash—spend $260 million and get $260 million, which I think is very unlikely—it would not be worth it. It would not be worth it because the time and expense that it is spending chasing after low-income Canadians who are already in dire straits, particularly in this context of inflation, is time and expense that it could spend chasing tax evaders who are hiding their money out of the country and using other means to not pay their fair share. It would get a better return.

There is a good financial argument for a low-income CERB repayment amnesty, and I hope that in the context of this Parliament that I have been talking about, we will find support among enough other parties to convince the government to do the right thing, which is to not chase that debt and try to wring it out of low-income Canadians but instead divert the CRA's resources to chasing the people who are really getting away with something, people who are not paying their fair share and who have the resources to pay it back.

[Employment Insurance, June 8th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, when people lose their jobs, they count on employment insurance to keep their homes and feed their families while they look for new work.

However, the EI system has been broken for far too long. There are more people who pay into EI that do not qualify for benefits when they need them than who do. After almost seven years in government, the Liberals finally tried to fix something about the EI system in the latest budget bill, and they fell flat on their face.

When are the Liberals finally going to fix the EI system and do right by Canadian workers?

[Main Estimates, 2022-23, June 7th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, I am happy to clarify that I was not labelling the member's previous intervention as a tantrum. I was referring more to the totality of question period interventions we see from his party, with perhaps the odd exception. There is my charitable moment in respect of Conservative performance in question period.

There are a lot of things I would love to have seen in that agreement, sure, but we can get in only what we can agree to move forward on with another party. I share his frustration that the government has not made this a priority. I am happy to criticize the government for that. I would like to replace the government with a majority NDP government that will do those things.

In the meantime, we were able to get agreement on what I think is a very significant step forward, which is providing dental care to Canadians who have a household income of $90,000 or less, among other things.

[Main Estimates, 2022-23, June 7th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, I was really fortunate to do my electrical apprenticeship at a time when the Province of Manitoba, under an NDP government as it happens, was investing a lot in public infrastructure. I never missed a beat between working, going to school to finish my levels, and then coming back out to the job site.

I never worked on a fossil fuel project. There are a lot of different ways the government can invest in public infrastructure that is going to create jobs and prosperity for Canadians. This dichotomy between investing in fossil fuel and having jobs and not doing that and losing all the jobs is simply a false one, because that is not the real choice. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of things we can invest in that are going to create good employment for Canadians.

I am from western Canada, and the Canada West Foundation, which is not usually a place New Democrats look to for inspiration, has done a great report on the idea of a western power grid that would connect B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and allow the hydro power of B.C. and Manitoba to act effectively as a battery for Alberta and Saskatchewan, which have the most potential for wind and solar power generation in the country by far. However, because that does not give us a baseload, we need another kind of baseload power that can be released into the system when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing.

We could create a really effective system of generation, transmission and distribution in western Canada that would help lower our emissions, create tons of employment and have the same nation-building capability as a pipeline. It would actually cross more provinces than a typical pipeline does.

That is the way we can be creating employment and moving our economy in the right direction, not only for here in Canada but developing expertise with Canadian workers and Canadian companies that they can then go and sell globally, as other economies make similar investments in renewable energy. That is how we can develop a plan for prosperity here in Canada that is actually equal to the climate crisis. It is not the vision we are getting out of the government.

[Main Estimates, 2022-23, June 7th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, I think the member knows full well that we do not have an NDP government. Things would be very different if we did. Things have not gone the way they did because we cut an agreement. The reason that the government is able to spend what it going to spend is because Canadians elected a Parliament, like it or not. I do not. I do not even like the voting system that helped them get the most amount of seats.

The member will know I believe the Conservatives actually got more of the popular vote than the Liberals, but the Liberals have more seats because of a system the Conservatives endorse and defend. Canadians elected a Parliament and, unless we are going to be in a perpetual election cycle, some of us have to act like grownups and try to work together here instead of throwing tantrums all the time. That is what happened.

What is in the agreement reflects what we could get the Liberals to agree on in the agreement. The main thing for us was dental care, and it is a shame that they are not living up to their commitment on mental health. The member will hear us continue to press them on those things, as we would have if we were not in a supply and confidence agreement. What we got in the agreement were the things that we could move forward on, and we secured our right to continue to go after them on the things that are not in the agreement.

[Main Estimates, 2022-23, June 7th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, I would say two things in response to that. The first is that the new $2.6 billion that was just announced in the budget for carbon capture and sequestration, I consider to be a fossil fuel subsidy. That is a major increase in fossil fuel subsidies that has nothing to do with orphan wells.

I do think that it is a good idea to clean up orphan wells. I think that the industry should be made responsible to do it. One of the proposals we have to do that indirectly is to take the surtax on banks and insurance companies, which the government has agreed to in our supply and confidence agreement, and do what we have been calling on the government to do, and it has not agreed to, and apply that surtax to oil and gas companies so they can pay the bill for the orphan well cleanup.

There is more than one way to do this, but for government to just assume that responsibility and have Canadians pay the costs of cleanup that the industry should have been paying all the way along is not right.

[Main Estimates, 2022-23, June 7th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise this evening to speak to the main estimates for 2022-23.

I want to start by talking a bit about climate change and the importance of the government taking a leadership role in charting an economic path from where we are today to where we need to be, both in order to lower emissions and to try to avert the worst of what is coming with climate change in the climate crisis. That continues to be, or must be, the priority. I am not always convinced that it is the priority that it needs to be around here, but it must be a priority.

That economic course is important, not only to mitigate the economic and the very real human effects that climate change will bring, but also because it is about securing a prosperous future for Canadians in an economy that is changing. If we look around the world, we see a lot of countries that are accepting the reality of climate change and trying to transition their economies away from such a heavy reliance on fossil fuels. We have seen the importance of that from a climate change point of view, but recently we have seen the importance of trying to transition away from fossil fuels from a defence and security point of view too. Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine has shown just how fragile the world economy is in the face of its reliance on fossil fuels. Therefore, we are trying to develop energy alternatives that are closer to home, and we are fortunate in Canada to have many ways that we can do that and many resources that can enable a transition away from such heavy reliance on fossil fuels. There is certainly more than one reason, and I do not even pretend to have captured them all.

With regard to the government's spending plan, what we saw in the budget was a commitment, first of all, of about $2.6 billion for carbon capture and sequestration. That is a bad bet, not only in terms of the success of the technology at scale, which many experts have called into question, but also in terms of emissions reductions as well. It is just not where we should be spending the lion's share of public funds that are meant to transition the economy away from reliance on carbon. In fact, it is designed to not be transitioning away from reliance on carbon; it is meant to find ways to perpetuate that reliance, which is still a form of climate change denial, and it is going to do a fair bit of harm.

We saw already in the budget that the government has not understood the severity of the crisis. I do not think the government is at a place where it is going to invest in the right options. It was very disappointing to see that, particularly in the context of a government that had committed to reduce fossil fuel subsidies and not increase them. That is one area of government spending in respect to climate that is important to highlight, and I want Canadians to know that the government is making a serious mistake in that respect.

With respect to the budget still, the Liberals want to land investment in renewable energy in the Infrastructure Bank, which means they want to capitalize the bank for a lot of renewable energy projects. That is what they say. However, part of the issue is that in so doing, they are handing it off to an organization that has a very bad track record so far on delivering projects. It does not give us a lot of hope to know that the Infrastructure Bank is on the case. It has not delivered a lot of projects.

To the extent that its successful projects list has increased—and I am sure somebody will want to quote some high numbers at me later—it has largely been around bus purchasing. That is great and is an important part of it, but we do not need an Infrastructure Bank and we do not need to pay former Liberals high salaries in order to figure out how to source electric buses. This is something that we already know how to do. It is something municipalities were doing before the Infrastructure Bank, thanks very much, and it is something that they could continue to do without the Infrastructure Bank. As well, perhaps we could do it more effectively if we did not have to go through another layer of administration and pay the salaries of government cronies over at the Infrastructure Bank, if I am being honest about what I think about it.

There is another intentional or unintentional consequence of running that funding through the Infrastructure Bank, although I would impress upon colleagues again that there is not a lot of evidence that it is worth it, because the Infrastructure Bank is not so great at delivering projects on time and on budget. The other consequence is that those projects that may have appeared in an estimate—projects that might have appeared somewhere here on the floor of the House of Commons to give parliamentarians and, through their representatives, Canadians, an opportunity to weigh in on the key nation-building projects that ought to be a part of our response to climate change and drive our transition to a low-carbon economy—will not grace the floor of the House.

Instead, that money will be set aside at some point, perhaps in estimates one time, and then those debates will be happening internally at the Infrastructure Bank. Municipal governments will be talking to the Infrastructure Bank, not our duly elected government—or parliamentarians, for that matter. I think there is a real loss of democratic involvement in the way that the government is projecting the delivery of those funds, and it is a mistake.

I think of my colleague from Manitoba, who represents the riding of Churchill—Keewatinook Aski and has done some great work and presented a private member's bill to try to change the nature of the Infrastructure Bank, which is a good thing. However, that work is not done. That bill has not passed. The Infrastructure Bank remains largely as it was originally set up by the Liberals and is not doing the job that I think was advertised in the 2015 election when the government initially ran on the idea of having an infrastructure bank.

If we are going to successfully transition the economy to a lower-carbon economy, that is also an opportunity to engage Canadians who are wondering a lot about their future right now, wondering a lot about how they are going to afford a home, how they are going to get the education they need to get a job that is actually out there in the market. We hear a lot from employers right now, who are saying they cannot find qualified people to do the jobs that they need done in order for their businesses to succeed, in order for their customers here in Canada and abroad to get the products and the services that they want.

As we think about serious public investment in the economy to respond to climate change, I think we should also have a process that brings more Canadians into that conversation and helps them get some direction over the kinds of employment that we are going to see and the pathways to that employment as well. Running the lion's share of the funding for new renewable infrastructure projects through the Infrastructure Bank is a real missed opportunity to foster that kind of engagement and participation on the part of Canadians.

There is another major spend by government that is not in the estimates, and that is the recent loan guarantee of $10 billion for the TMX pipeline, in addition to what had already been committed. I do not think anyone should kid themselves: It is an expenditure. It is a commitment of public funds above and beyond what had already been budgeted, which was around $15 billion or maybe a little bit more. This is another $10 billion. We are getting close to the $30-billion mark, for those who are keeping track, and because that happened through the Canada Account of Export Development Canada, it does not appear on the books here. That is a decision that cabinet got to make off in the corner, as it did when it initially purchased the Trans Mountain pipeline.

When we think about the Mackenzie pipeline debates of the 1950s and what a watershed moment that was for the country and for Parliament, this is a real disappointment. I think that is an understatement. I am feeling very parliamentary at the moment.

It is disappointing that the government chose to fund that project in that way for all sorts of reasons. It is disappointing because it is the wrong project at the wrong time and it does not take us in the right direction in terms of the economy for the future, but it is also disappointing because it circumvented this place.

We do talk a lot about pipelines in this place. I have my own views on that and I have been pretty open about that. People can search the record in terms of what I think about pipelines. I have probably given enough that people can probably read the tea leaves here already.

I know others disagree, and that is fine. Parliament is a place where disagreement comes to live. If we are doing our jobs well, hopefully we can tackle some of those real disagreements and we can find some common ground. On the things that we cannot find common ground, we cannot.

At the very least, something like the federal government buying an existing pipeline and committing close to $30 billion, certainly $25 billion, to get the thing built is a major national undertaking, whether I agree with it or not, and whether others like it or not. It would be outrageous for someone to claim that is not a major national expense and that it will not have major national implications down the road.

The government could have tried to fund it through estimates, but it did not. It decided to circumvent Parliament instead and make that decision on its own. I think how it chose to make that decision was wrong, independently of the fact that I think the decision was wrong.

Why was TMX even up for sale? It was not just the existing pipeline, but the projected future pipeline. It was because a large company in the oil and gas sector, which is very good at building pipelines, decided it was a loser. If it thought it was going to make money on that thing, it would have hung onto it.

The company decided it was going to lose a lot of money, so it put the pipeline up for sale. Who came knocking? The federal government. It was the government that ran on getting serious about tackling the climate crisis. A government that has since many times repeated about, but not often actually acted on, reducing fossil fuel subsidies.

Just like everyone else, we are reading in the media about where this project is headed and the massive cost overruns. We know that when the government says it is going to provide loan guarantees, and it is not public funding, then it is a sham because one of two things is going to happen.

The project could be a wild success and it would make a lot of money for the private investors who are kicking in cash, with no risk, because the government has already underwritten those loans. In this case there would not be a public expenditure, but there would be a lot of happy private investors.

However, in the case where it goes wrong, it would be a public expenditure because the government is going to step in and cover the loans. In that case the private investors are going to walk off scot-free without ever having taken a meaningful risk.

To me, that sounds worse than public expenditure. At least if the government had spent the money itself, it would be entitled to the profit and, if it were successful, it would make income off it. However, the government has said the only for sure thing is that it is not going to make a lot of income off that project because, if it is a success, the private investors will walk away with the return. Only if it is a failure, will Canadians have to pay the bill.

It is a completely wrong-headed project, but I am glad to take this opportunity to talk about it in the context of the estimates because it is not there and it really ought to have been a parliamentary conversation. I wish we had a better debate about that before the decision was made. In fact, it was announced as a surprise. I remember reading about it on my phone walking up to the Hill one morning, that the government had decided to do this.

It is quite a disappointment. I say that by way of trying to remind people of the importance and the significance this place can have and sometimes does have. These kinds of circuitous funding routes are ways that government, the executive, minimizes the role of this place and keeps important decision-making and important national conversations away from this place.

We have taken up the question of the TMX pipeline. I do not just mean the NDP. I mean in this place, we have heard about it from all sides of the House in various ways during question period. However, there really ought to have been a time for a better and more focused debate. It should not just be in 35-second snippets during question period that we are trying to make sense of this major decision with import not only for Canada. When we talk about climate change, we have to talk about the global context. That was a decision that actually has import far beyond Canada's own borders.

I wanted to raise that as an example of something that is a government expenditure, but is something not in the estimates that really ought to have been in the estimates.

I want to talk more generally, having addressed some of the features of the estimates, both in terms of its content and absence, about where I believe government spending and government intervention in the economy has to go. We have seen a lot of big numbers announced from the government. Unfortunately, too often this is a government that conflates spending announcements with real action. New Democrats are often accused by others of wanting to spend everybody else's money, and it is always implied that we do this frivolously, which is simply not the case.

We are here to talk about how we could invest in Canadians and how we could invest in the country. I would say that we do not think of a return on investment as being solely a financial question. If we pool our resources as Canadians and we find a more efficient way to pay for prescription drugs, or we pool our resources and we make sure that not just my kids but every kid in the country has access to dental care, to me that is a return on investment. In respect of pharmacare, I think there is a financial return that we could realize as Canadians against what we are already paying for prescription drugs.

We know a number of studies have been out, and the most small-c conservative estimates on how much we could save is in the order of about $4 billion a year, and this is dated information. We are living in a period of great inflation, and I am sure the numbers have gone up but I bet the differential has not. Back when the PBO reported on pharmacare, he said that Canadians were spending about $24 billion a year on prescription drugs, and one national prescription drug insurance plan would cost about $20 billion. That would be a savings of $4 billion. That would be a very concrete financial return on an investment out of the public purse.

We could also measure return on investment in other ways. Government spending to build new housing supply so we could house people who are currently living on the street brings return on investment. It brings return on investment, and that is another one where I would say there is actually a financial component. We know that people who are experiencing homelessness have more frequent interactions with the justice system. They are more likely to end up in jail, and we know that jailing people is expensive. We also know people experiencing homelessness are also more likely to end up in the health system, and not through preventative care, like a typical physical at the doctor's office, but in the emergency room where the issues are more acute and the costs are much higher. That is a return on investment.

When we talk about people who are nervous about taking the bus because there are people who have set up their home in the bus shelter, and they do not know what those folks are like, they do not know what state of mind they are in, so they get nervous about taking the bus and say that we need to get these people out of the way. Well, creating a sense of safety in our communities by housing those folks instead of waiting until something goes sideways and the police show up to arrest them is another way we could realize tangible return on investment. That is something we could do together through our governments that no individual could do on their own.

As we think about what was required in the pandemic as a response, and as we think about the ongoing and mounting challenge of climate, we have to revisit the conventional wisdom of the last 30 or 40 years around public involvement in the economy and recognize that, if we are going to get to where we need to be, then we need some bold public investment. It should be happening in a way that allows it to be discussed in this place with public deliberation, instead of at the boardroom table at the Infrastructure Bank or at the cabinet table in secret, spending out of the Canada account, instead of doing it transparently here in the estimates.

Even if we consider the oil and gas industry, an industry that has had its heyday and now we need to figure how to have a lower carbon economy, that industry in Alberta was built with tons of public investment. That economic engine did not actually happen with the private industry on its own. There were years of publicly funded research and publicly funded infrastructure at the provincial and federal levels that led to that economy being what it became. It is going to take that level of seriousness and public investment to build the economy of the future to provide good-paying jobs and prosperity for Canadians again, which is why it is important that this place get it right when it comes to how we evaluate government spending.

[Events in Elmwood—Transcona, June 7th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, even though the pandemic is not entirely behind us, it is heartening to see more things return to normal. On Saturday, I enjoyed spending time with my family at Transcona's Hi Neighbour Festival after a pancake breakfast at the legion. Baba's Country Kitchen was back in action and as delicious as ever. On Sunday, I was pleased to join with tens of thousands of people for the Winnipeg pride parade.

Next weekend, I look forward to celebrating with people in Elmwood as Happy Days on Henderson makes its return after a two-year hiatus. As usual, there will be live music, children's games and a lot more.

Winnipeg had a long, cold winter, and it has been a difficult year so far. As the little bit of sunshine we are getting now warms our faces, these events are helping to warm our hearts. I thank all the amazing people who have worked hard to put these events back together.

[Business of Supply, June 7th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question, which was asked in the appropriate way.

I think we have been in a race to the bottom for far too long. An agreement that would guarantee a fair minimum tax rate is a very good idea. I think it would be a good thing for companies that want to stay in Canada but are in competition with companies whose operations are located in countries with lower tax rates.

[Business of Supply, June 7th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, the motion simply says “eliminating tariffs on fertilizer”. The member for Winnipeg North is right to point out that tariffs were imposed on fertilizer coming from Russia as part of our effort to punish Vladimir Putin.

The legitimate issue here is that there are farmers who signed contracts to buy fertilizer as part of their pricing for the year before the invasion of Ukraine, so there is a real question of fairness in retroactively imposing a tariff on farmers who had already signed contracts to get that fertilizer and who had built it into their pricing structure for the year.

We are not hearing that kind of conversation from the Conservatives. They are not trying to build a parliamentary consensus. They are trying to build a fundraising list. That comes across very clearly in the motion.