Madam Speaker, I am pleased to stand and speak to the budget bill, Bill C-69, here in the House today.
I think budgets are an opportunity for us to examine the values that we have as a nation. To many people in this House, government can be a force for good, but others, and I am thinking of my Conservative colleagues, view government as something to be feared, something to be shrunk and something to be incapacitated. We, on the New Democrat side, believe that government plays a vital role in Canadian society to deliver services that Canadians individually cannot and that the market is also unable to provide. Others in this House, and again, I think of my Conservative colleagues, believe that individuals ought to be left to fend largely for themselves, to sink or swim as they may.
On this side of the House, in the New Democrat caucus, we believe that government can be a force to build a fairer, more equal society. Others in this House do not share that value. They believe that politics is a dynamic that exacerbates division or that aggrandizes differences. In the New Democratic Party, we believe that good politics focuses on what is working well in society, and we look for ways in which we can harness optimism and collective strength to make things better. Others in this House, and again I look across the way to my Conservative colleagues, sell a line to Canadians that everything is broken, exploiting fear and insecurity.
I am reminded of President Joe Biden's famous dictum, which he actually stated well before he was ever president, where he said, “Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.” I think this budget provides a great opportunity to show Canadians what the various values are of the various parties in this House.
New Democrats know that millions of Canadians are really struggling right now from coast to coast to coast. The cost of living is up dramatically. It is getting much harder to pay the rent or the mortgage, if one is lucky enough to own a house, to buy food and to pay one's bills. At the same time, we know that large corporations and the well-off in this country are doing better than ever in some cases. There are certain sectors, like the oil and gas sector and the grocery sector, that are making record profits, profits higher than they have ever made in the history of their operating in this country, while at the same time often gouging Canadians with sky-high prices, either at the pumps or in the grocery aisles. Even with corporate profits soaring, the investment of the business community in this country in Canadian workers, in machinery and equipment, in technology, and in the Canadian economy is declining. Major shareholders and top executives are often reaping enormous benefits without the promised trickle-down to workers, communities and consumers that right-wing economists promised us some 30 to 40 years ago.
The New Democrat caucus has used our power in this minority Parliament to deliver results for people. In this budget alone, we have compelled our partners in the Liberal government to build more homes, to preserve existing affordable housing and to protect renters. We used our power to bring in universal single-payer pharmacare, setting the stage for the biggest expansion of our health care system in a generation, starting with contraception and diabetes medication and devices. We pushed to establish a groundbreaking national school food program. We are the only country in the G7, and one of only a handful of countries in the industrialized world, that does not have some form of universal access to school nutrition, something that hurts our kids and puts an added cost on families that are struggling to pay their bills. This budget reverses damaging cuts to indigenous services. It invests in accessible, high-quality, non-profit child care. It establishes a dedicated youth mental health fund.
This is the work of New Democrats, who used our values to try to bring in policies and programs and to allocate resources to Canadians in need in this country. We did not sit and just tell Canadians that we think everything is broken. We rolled up our sleeves and came up with policies that would make things better for Canadians. My colleagues on the Conservative side of the House have done none of this, but instead just preach a narrative that everything is broken and that nothing can be done about it. That is not a value that we share.
While these achievements illustrate in part what a New Democrat government could accomplish, the 2024 budget does not fully reflect our party's vision. This is not an NDP budget, but it is a budget that was influenced by the NDP. Likewise, Bill C-69, the budget implementation act, includes many positive measures that the NDP was able to compel the Liberals to implement. However, we want to underscore that this legislation does have several shortcomings. There is much, much more, in our view, that the federal government can do to make life easier for people and to provide opportunities for generations to come. New Democrats will not stop working to deliver results for people.
I just want to talk briefly about some of these positive aspects. The national school food program would be in place as early as this fall and would help some 400,000 children access food that they need to grow up healthy. This is an important first step toward establishing a national program that we hope and envision will provide universal access to nutritious food for all elementary students, some 2.8 million kids in this country in grades 1 to 8.
Across Canada, nearly one in four children does not get enough food, and more than one-third of food bank users are children. These are shocking statistics in a G7 country. According to Children First Canada, there has been a 29% increase in food insecurity in children in the last year alone. A national school food program would not only give students in Canada access to nutritious food, helping them learn better, but it would also make healthy eating a daily lesson for our kids. Countries with national school food programs have documented better academic performance, improved short- and long-term health for children, help for family budgets and improved efficiency in the health care system. This is something that Conservatives are voting no to.
Bill C-69 includes measures to make housing more affordable. I want to touch on a few of the measures. It would enhance the homebuyers' plan by increasing the withdrawal limit from $35,000 to $60,000 and temporarily adding three years to the grace period before repayments to that RRSP are required. It would crack down on short-term rentals, hopefully to unlock more homes for Canadians to live in, by denying income tax deductions on income earned from short-term rentals that do not comply with provincial or local restrictions. The bill would continue the ban on foreign buyers of Canadian homes for an additional two years to ensure that homes are used for Canadians to live in and not as a speculative asset class for foreign investors.
I am always struck by my colleagues in the Conservative Party, who tell us to just wait until they are in government and then they will fix housing. The New Democrats are not waiting for that day, which we hope will not come. We are working now, because we know that Canadians need help with decent housing now, not a year or two or three from now. We also, by the way, are mindful of the Conservative record. When the Conservatives were in government, they did not build any affordable housing in this country at all. In fact, it was the Mulroney government in 1992 that took the federal government out of social housing for a generation, leading, in large part, to the crisis that we experience today.
Bill C-69 has a myriad of other measures that would make life more affordable for Canadians in important ways. It would make it easier to find better deals on Internet, home phone and cellphone plans by amending the Telecommunications Act to better allow Canadians to renew or switch between plans and to increase consumer choice to help them better find a deal that works for them. We know that Internet use and cellphone use now are consumer staples. They are really essential utilities that every Canadian needs to stay connected and function in their communities, in their homes and at work.
This budget would crack down on predatory lending by strengthening enforcement against criminal rates of interest to help protect vulnerable Canadians from harmful illegal lenders.
It would make it easier to save for children's education by introducing automatic enrolment in the Canada learning bond, to ensure that all low-income families receive the support they need for their children's future.
It would also launch Canada's consumer-driven banking framework to provide Canadians and small businesses with better, secure access to more financial services and products. Again, these are measures that the Conservatives are voting against.
Finally, Bill C-69 includes measures to support workers by protecting gig workers and by strengthening prohibitions against employee misclassifications in federally regulated industries. It would establish an important first historic right to disconnect to help restore work-life balance for workers. It would extend additional weeks of employment insurance for seasonal workers in 13 targeted regions. It would advance employee ownership trusts to enable employees to share in the success of their work by encouraging more business owners to sell to an employee ownership trust.
Before I leave the positives, I just want to comment that there are disappointments in the budget. One of the primary ones, for me, is the Canada disability benefit. The Liberal government promised to bring in a Canada disability benefit for which the New Democrats have been pushing for years. The Liberals said the benefit would lift people living with disabilities out of poverty; that is what they promised.
However, the Liberal government's plan announced in the budget is to provide a maximum of $200 a month. That is based on holding a disability tax credit certificate, which applies to only a fraction of the Canadians who need such assistance. At present, a single adult with a disability will live below the poverty line if they receive funding from any of the provincial programs across Canada, and an additional $200 a month is not enough to bring them above the poverty line. Over 1.5 million people with disabilities currently live in poverty across Canada, yet the plan would be accessible only to an estimated 600,000 people. It will not lift even them out of poverty.
New Democrats are deeply disappointed to see the lack of investment and, frankly, a colossally broken promise to people who need it the most. A $200-a-month maximum benefit going to fewer than half of those who need it is simply unacceptable in this country. We will continue to push the government to significantly increase the benefit to make sure that all Canadians living with disabilities receive the money they need to truly lift them out of poverty.
Now I want to talk a little about tax fairness. In the 1960s, the Carter commission spent four years looking at Canada's tax situation. It came to some very important conclusions, one of them famously summarized by the phrase, “A buck is a buck [is a buck]”. That means that no matter how people receive their income, it should be taxed the same. Now, unfortunately, through successive Liberal and Conservative governments, we have built a tax system where that principle has not been respected at all.
We heard today at the finance committee from the Canadian Labour Congress economist who authored a report entitled “Canada’s shift to a more regressive tax system, 2004 to 2022”, which found that overall, Canada's tax system is only moderately progressive through the bottom half of the income distribution and is regressive at the top of the distribution, due to several sources of untaxed or lightly taxed income, such as capital gains, inheritances and bequests and employer-provided benefits, which predominantly go to top earners.
The report found that in 2022, the total tax rate for the lowest household income decile, that is the bottom 10% in Canada, was 35%, whereas the total tax rate for the top 1% in Canada is 24%. In other words, the top 1% pay taxes at a rate 11% lower than the poorest 10% in this country. Moreover, the report found that the top 5% paid a lower rate in 2022 than the bottom 95%, with the top 1% paying an even lower rate.
Canadians should ask themselves why Canada's tax system imposes a higher total rate on the lowest-income households, versus the top 5%. Can anybody in the House go back in their communities this summer and explain why, in Canada's tax system, the top 1% of households pay the lowest total tax rate of any income group? I cannot explain that.
According to the report, a comprehensive tax review in the United Kingdom concluded that a good tax system must be both progressive and neutral. That is to say that it can raise the revenue government needs to achieve its spending and distributional ambitions while minimizing economic and administrative inefficiency, keeping the system as simple and transparent as possible and avoiding arbitrary tax differentiation across people and forms of economic activity. It reads, “A fair tax system should be based on...‘horizontal equity’: the principle that two people with the same amount of income in a given year pay the same rate of tax regardless of the source of that income.”
Bay Street accountant Kenneth Carter, who headed the important Royal Commission on Taxation in the mid-1960s, captured that notion, yet since the 1960s, we have built a tax system in this country, again, through Conservative and Liberal governments, that fails to achieve a tax system based on horizontal equity, despite the recommendations of the Carter commission.
I will turn back to the issue of the capital gains matter, which the Conservatives have raised with such furor in the House. The capital gains tax was first brought into this country in 1972, and it was brought in by a Liberal government at the rate of 50%. However, it was the Conservatives who raised the capital gains inclusion rate, in 1988, to 66.6%. They then raised it again in 1990, to 75%.
Therefore it is really something to hear the Conservatives rail against a measure today that would set the capital gains inclusion rate in this country at 50%, the lowest it has ever been, for the first $250,000 of capital gains, and then to 66.6%, a moderate amount, to which they themselves raised all capital gains in 1988.
I will read from a couple of very important witnesses who appeared at the Finance Committee today. Dr. Jim Stanford from the Centre for Future Work said this: “A capital gain results not from producing and selling a product or service, but rather from acquiring and reselling an asset. It reflects speculation, not production. Other forms of income (like wages) must be fully declared. Granting asset traders this unique preference is morally unfair, and fiscally wasteful.”
I cannot say it any better than Bea Bruske, the president of the Canadian Labour Congress, who asked why we tax a worker who flips burgers for a living at 100% of her income, but someone who flips stocks for a living, who is wealthy, we tax at only 50% of their income.
That is the principle that faces Canadians today, and it is something that I challenge Conservatives to explain to Canadians. Why do they believe that workers like mechanics, teachers, servers and cleaners have to pay tax on 100% of their income because they get it in the form of wages, but wealthy people, or people who are declaring a capital gain of over a quarter of a million dollars, have to pay on only 66.6%? By the way, the measure that is being announced in the budget would still permit one-third of all capital gains that anybody has in this country to be tax-free, and still the Conservatives are apoplectic.
As well, there is zero evidence that the rise of the capital gains inclusion rate through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s had any negative effect on business investments in this country, nor is there evidence that the reduction of it in the year 2000, back to 50%, had any positive influence on investments in this country. There is zero evidence, but of course my Conservative colleagues are more interested in rhetoric than facts. I think Canadians will understand this when we come to talk to them in the summer about fair taxation and why the wealthy should pay their fair share of tax in this country, just like the working people of this country have always done.
