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.
