Ed Fast

[Proceedings on the Bill Entitled an Act Relating to Certain Measures in Response to COVID-19, September 28th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, I believe we are entitled to have speaking notes in the House, and I read directly from The Hill Times, which says, “Lapse in early pandemic warning system 'a colossal failure,' says former federal Liberal health minister.” Surely that cannot be against the rules of the House, that we actually use this to make our speech not unlike any other notes we would have before us.

[Proceedings on the Bill Entitled an Act Relating to Certain Measures in Response to COVID-19, September 28th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to engage in this debate. What we are really debating is a bill that will rush through between 50 billion and 60 billion dollars' worth of spending, with virtually no oversight and no accountability.

The bill that this addresses is actually one that creates three benefits that we, as Conservatives, support. One is a benefit for workers who are unable to resume work or whose income has been reduced by 50% or more due to the COVID-19 crisis and are self-employed or otherwise ineligible for EI. That is one benefit.

There is a second benefit for workers who are ill or who must self-isolate due to COVID-19 and do not have paid leave or paid sickness benefits.

Then there is a third benefit for people who are unable to work because they are caring for a family member due to a school or day care closure resulting from COVID-19.

These are things that we can support, but when we are talking about the spending of close to $60 billion, and we have a government that only wants to debate this for four hours, without any committee investigation or oversight, that is a failure in respect for this Parliament.

We cannot begin to understand it and evaluate the performance of the government on COVID unless we understand the context in which this is all taking place. Members know that Canada was already overloaded with debt before the pandemic hit us, largely thanks to four years of reckless spending by the Liberal government. Members may recall back in 2015 when the Prime Minister won an election promising to balance the federal budget. Members may remember Stephen Harper warning us about the Prime Minister's promise to run tiny deficits. Do members remember that?

Four years later, all the Prime Minister has to show for his broken promise is a string of massive deficits, which are piling more and more onto our national debt. Who is going to pay for that? The millennials are going to have to pay. I hope millennials are watching this. They are the ones who will be paying for the $400 billion of new debt that has been piled on just this year alone. They and other future generations will have to pay this back.

Canada entered the pandemic with our budgetary and fiscal situation severely weakened. Now we are facing an even graver crisis, a global pandemic for which our country was not prepared, financially or otherwise, and which has seen our national debt increase by a whopping 50% over the last six months. It is going to get worse before it gets better.

How did it come to this? Sadly, with a global pandemic looming, a situation where timing would be of utmost importance and leadership would be called for, the Liberals failed us on both counts. Over the last five years, the Prime Minister and his health minister allowed Canada's global public health intelligence network, which is our early pandemic warning system, to lapse. In fact, I was just reviewing the Globe and Mail article on it and it says that the government actually diverted resources away from global pandemic warning, analysis and intelligence to other functions. It is no surprise, then, that the Minister of Health did not act in a timely manner.

This morning I woke up to a screaming headline in The Hill Times: “Lapse in early pandemic warning system ‘a colossal failure,’ says former federal Liberal health minister Dosanjh”. A former Liberal health minister, the predecessor to the current one, claims this is a “a colossal failure” to plan and to warn Canadians. He says that it made him “angry” and it was “a near fatal mistake”. Those are his words.

What was the current health minister's response? She proceeded to throw Canada's Public Health Agency under the bus.

By the way, this is the Public Health Agency that the health minister is responsible for. Its website talks about the health minister's responsibility and accountability for the Public Health Agency. All she can do, if the members can imagine it, is throw the agency under the bus.

If one wants an assessment of the government's performance during the COVID pandemic, it is a “colossal failure”. It should come as no surprise that, as the health minister sat idly by, the virus spread around the world and across Canada. Day after day, week after week, the minister would stand in this House, and there is the seat she occupied at the time, and scold us for fearmongering. She repeatedly assured us that the risk to Canadians was low, day after day after day.

Those of us who were challenging her were saying that there were reports coming in from other parts of the world saying that this was serious. Her reply was that we were fearmongering. Flights from infection hot spots, such as China and Europe, Italy for example, continued to land at our Canadian airports and no one was checking passengers for infection. Our land borders remained wide open.

There is only one word that can adequately describe the minister's delay in acting, and that word is “reckless”. Now the government is compelled to borrow and print hundreds of billions of dollars to support Canadians during this incredibly difficult time. We want to be supportive of that, and we are, but what has led to this is a series of spectacular flip-flops on the part of the Liberal government.

As I noted, the Liberals originally told Canadians that the risk of human-to-human transmission was low. In fact, as late as March 10, the minister said that the risk of spreading COVID was low and that she was “well-equipped to contain cases coming from abroad”. One day later, she inexplicably proclaimed that COVID-19 could infect up to 70% of Canadians and that it was now a “national emergency and crisis”. How can one move from it being a low risk one day and suddenly it is an emergency and a national crisis?

There was more flip-flopping. Our Liberal friends implied that anyone who dared suggest that the borders should be closed was somehow racist. I guess that is what Liberals do when they are caught up in a colossal failure. They do what comes naturally and call those who are asking important questions racist.

Liberals also flip-flopped on mask wearing. They originally said that wearing a mask was ineffective. That was certainly convenient, because we now know there were not enough masks to go around. This was because the government had thrown out millions of masks and hundreds of thousands of gloves from Canada's national emergency stockpile. They even sent 16 tonnes of PPE to the Chinese communist regime in Beijing, of all places.

As we all know, when the pandemic really hit, Canada had depleted its PPE. Ill-prepared and facing a critical shortage, Liberals did what they do well. They misled Canadians by downplaying the risk and pretending masks did not help. Fast forward to today, and suddenly Liberals are the great proponents of wearing masks, as if they had always been in favour of wearing them. Again, it is convenient.

It was also the Prime Minister who had the idea, of course, to partner with China on a COVID-19 vaccine development. How did that work out? The moment China had our research, it said that it was not interested and that it was blocking Canada from being part of the rollout of the very vaccine.

The reality is that when Canadians needed leadership, our government failed us. It shut down our pandemic warning system, failed to shut down our borders and flights, misled us on the seriousness of the pandemic, discarded and sent our stockpiles to hostile countries, flipped and flopped on masks, was thoroughly hoodwinked by the Chinese, and then, to add insult to injury, shut down Parliament over the summer to escape the fallout from the WE Charity scandal.

I will not get into it, because I know I am running out of time, but this motion and bill are about spending $50 billion to $60 billion of taxpayer money and the Liberals want to avoid debating it. They want to avoid scrutiny. They want to avoid accountability.

I, for one, am not going to take this lying down. I am going to speak out about it. I am going to demand that the Prime Minister get out of the way and let us as MPs do our job.

[Petitions, September 28th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to introduce in the House a petition by 44 Canadians who raise the issue of the campaign against the Uighur population in communist China. Among other things, the Chinese government is implicated in things such as political and anti-religious indoctrination, arbitrary detention, separation of children from families, compulsory abortion, organ harvesting and all those ugly things.

The petitioners call upon the House to formally recognize that the Uighurs in China have been and are being subjected to genocide, and secondly, that the government use the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, commonly known as the Magnitsky act, to sanction those who are responsible for the heinous crimes being committed against the Uighur people.

[COVID-19 Pandemic and Other Matters, July 22nd, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, that was no answer. After everything we have seen with this scandal, the government will not tell us to what degree the Prime Minister's family holds a financial interest in a tangled web of for-profit activities of the Kielburgers' WE Charity.

I will ask the question a little differently. Has anyone in the Prime Minister's extended family ever held a financial interest in or been a shareholder or partner in a for-profit venture or corporation involving Marc Kielburger, Craig Kielburger, or both, yes or no?

[COVID-19 Pandemic and Other Matters, July 22nd, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians want to know how deeply the Prime Minister was in bed with the WE organization. We know that the Prime Minister's family received hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees, and, of course, he returned the favour by giving one of the charity's shell companies almost $1 billion to run a volunteer program.

To the Prime Minister, has any member of his extended family ever been a principal or a shareholder of, or held any financial interest in, ME to WE Social Enterprises Inc., ME to WE Asset Holdings Inc., Global Impact Fund Inc., ME to WE foundation or any other related corporations, yes or no?

[Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act, March 10th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, the only report the government came up with on the value of this trade agreement was a bogus report. I am glad he asked the question. What the Liberal government did on the last day that the committee was reviewing this agreement, two weeks ago, was table-drop this economic impact assessment. The members of the committee had no ability to review the impact assessment. The committee had officials of the government there, but had no ability to ask them questions about the impact assessment. Then, once we reviewed the impact assessment, we realized that it was bogus anyway because it was comparing the new NAFTA to a world where Canada did not have a NAFTA at all.

That should be an embarrassment to the government. Liberals talk about transparency. The member for Elmwood—Transcona raised that issue of transparency. There was none here. They certainly did not consult with us.

As Conservatives, we take great pride in being the great champions of trade. Do they think they walked across the floor to ask if they should do this or that? No, they just went their merry way and conceded everything. They were snookered by Donald Trump.

[Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act, March 10th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, that is the best question I have heard in the House today. Our former Conservative government negotiated free trade agreements with 46 different countries. We had five to start with and we ended up with 51. That is a record I am very proud of and I know the member is very proud of. Can I imagine being a Liberal? Never, never in my life.

However, can I imagine a future Conservative government doing much better than the Liberal government especially on the trade file? Absolutely. In fact, I can guarantee it.

[Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act, March 10th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, what I can assure the member of is that a future Conservative government would never sell out the industry the way the Liberals did under this agreement.

[Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act, March 10th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, it is amusing. Every time the member stands I have a good chuckle at the way he is able to stretch the truth. I want to remind him it was the Liberal government of the day that voted against the original Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. The Liberal government members of the day said they would vote against the original NAFTA and when they were elected, they suddenly changed their minds. They had a conversion on the road to Damascus. These are wannabe trade-meisters.

What the Liberal government has left this Parliament with is no options at all, except for one. We are supporting the agreement, but by any stretch or measure, this is a worse agreement than we had before. The C.D. Howe put an exclamation mark on that assessment.

[Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement Implementation Act, March 10th, 2020]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to engage in this debate again. What I am going to speak to is a story of betrayal, incompetence, weakness on the part of the Prime Minister, hubris and recklessness. It is a story of opportunity lost because we did not even have to engage in this negotiation the way the Prime Minister engaged in it.

Our Prime Minister assumed that because President Trump said that he was going to tear up NAFTA, somehow he needed to reach out to him and say that he gladly would renegotiate this agreement. Anyone who knows anything about the American trade system knows that the President cannot unilaterally tear up a trade agreement. He needs to have the consent and the approval of Congress.

Think about this: 35 of the American states have Canada as their number one export market. Show me the representatives, senators and governors from those states. Do colleagues think they will ever agree to tear up the old NAFTA? Of course not, but our Prime Minister marched into this negotiation and said, “President Trump, what do you want from us?” That is how it all started, and then President Trump said, “Well, I've got this huge trade deficit with Canada.” That is fake news.

The truth is that our trade with the United States is virtually perfectly balanced. One month it will be one way, a couple of billion dollars, another month the other way. The reality is that our trade is as perfectly balanced as any two countries could expect. The President's target was Mexico, but somehow our Prime Minister did not figure that out.

The Prime Minister said that he was going to bring back a win-win-win. It was three wins, one for Mexico, one for the U.S. and one for Canada. Did we get a win out of this deal? By any reasonable measure and standard, we lost, and we lost big time. Let me explain why.

What are the wins? We did get a digital economy chapter out of it, because back when NAFTA was first negotiated we did not have a digital economy. Today it is ubiquitous, so it makes sense to have a chapter for that.

We did synchronize some of our intellectual property rules with the United States. That is okay.

We raised our de minimis amounts so that people can come across the border with a higher duty-free limit, but there were no real market access gains for Canada in this agreement, except for maybe a little bit of sugar. That is about it, honestly.

Earlier Liberal speakers defined success in this agreement by what Canada did not lose. They said we were able to defend things. We were able to preserve chapter 19. What a great win. We preserved what we had before. That is not my definition of a win. My definition of a win is that we gain something from the United States, not just security or simply a marketplace that will not be disrupted because we do not have an agreement.

Let me now talk about the concessions we made. Can members imagine that after five years of negotiations our Prime Minister agreed to President Trump's demand that there be a six-year sunset clause? In other words, in six years either we decide to carry on, or the deal falls dead. That is the first time Canada has ever done that, by the way.

The aluminum industry in Canada was not provided with the same protection against dumping, primarily from China, that the United States got, so we sold out the aluminum industry.

Then there are export caps on the auto industry for parts and vehicles being exported.

We conceded Canadian sovereignty on milk pricing. Never before have we done that, where we said, “President Trump, if we want to change our milk pricing regime, we will come to you, cap in hand on bended knee, and beg you for permission to do this” to defend our supply management system.

We did the same thing with our sovereignty with regard to negotiating other trade agreements. Can members imagine that? We agreed with Donald Trump that if we ever want to negotiate a trade agreement with a non-market economy like China, we will have to come to him and ask him for permission to do so. Sly fox that he is, he has already negotiated his own deal with China, at least a phase one deal, so he does not have to come to us cap in hand, but we have to go to him that way to try to compete on a level playing field with China. Do members think he will ever approve that? Of course not. We got snookered.

It gets worse. We conceded double the amount of new dairy access that the Americans will have to our market than our Conservative government had negotiated under the TPP. That is a massive failure, and it gets worse. The Liberals actually imposed export caps on our ability to export value-added milk products. For example, in cheesemaking in the milk industry, there are by-products that used to be washed down the drain, but we had some smart Canadian companies there. One of them is in Abbotsford, British Columbia. It is called Vitalus, and we had Phil Vanderpol from Vitalus at committee. We asked him about the export caps.

The U.S. wanted us to limit our exports of these value-added unique products not only to the United States, which might have been fair, but also to other countries all around the world. We said to Donald Trump, “You know what? We are not going to be able to export beyond those cap limits.”

I asked Mr. Vanderpol at committee if he got a chance to talk to the minister and the trade representatives about this. He said that yes, they had a meeting, and they told him in no uncertain terms that export caps were not on the table. When the agreement came out, guess what? Caps had not only been on the table, but had been negotiated away by our Liberal government.

That is the betrayal part of this agreement. That is a betrayal, and Mr. Vanderpol was very upset about how his industry had been sold out by this Liberal government.

I will now talk about the process that the government undertook to apprise Canadians of what this deal really meant in economic terms.

The United States did an economic impact assessment, and I have it here. There are 400 stinking pages of it that explain the impact it will have on the U.S. economy, and it is a positive impact. The assessment says that the U.S. made major gains against Canada. Ours was a 73-pager, and it did not even compare the old NAFTA to the new NAFTA; it compared a universe without NAFTA at all to the new NAFTA.

Fortunately, there is an organization in Canada that did the work that this Liberal government failed to do, and that is the C. D. Howe Institute. It actually compared the impact of the new NAFTA to what the old NAFTA delivered for Canadians in economic terms, and it is a sad story. It is a story of failure on the part of the Liberal government. The C. D. Howe Institute concluded that Canada is going to sacrifice about $14 billion of economic activity every single year going forward. That is a $14-billion GDP hit that we are going to take as a result of this agreement. Is that a responsible agreement?

The Liberals used to say that no NAFTA was better than a bad NAFTA. Now they are saying that it is better to have a new NAFTA than no NAFTA at all. They do know what they are talking about.

They talk about win-win-win. They talk about delivering a better deal for Canadians. At the end of the day, after we look at this agreement, and I do have some experience in trade, we see this is a big fail for Canadians.

I wish we had better news for Canadians, because we can do so much better. The previous Conservative government would have never made the concessions that were made in this agreement. There are things in this deal that Canada has never agreed to before, yet this Liberal government made those concessions. That is a sad story.

It is a story of failure.