Joe Comartin

[Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 11th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, when members rise and speak to this bill, the immediate thing that has to come to mind is the missed opportunity, the missed opportunity for us as a country to invest in our country, to make our economy stronger, and to create greater benefits for all citizens of our country. This mini-budget fails on all counts. It lacks vision; it lacks a plan.

It is like listening to the Conservatives over and over again say their mantra that tax breaks are going to solve all the problems of the world. We know that just does not work. We look in particular at what happened with the corporate tax breaks and the vast majority of the dollars which will go to the large corporations.

Let us do a quick history. In February-March of this year the government brought forth the budget. In that budget there were substantial tax cuts for the corporate sector. That would have had the effect over the period of 2007 through to 2011 of reducing the effective corporate tax rate in this country, which is at this point actually lower than the corporate tax rate United States, which is a point the Conservatives constantly forget, but the Conservatives were going to reduce it from 22% down to 18.5% by 2011.

That budget passed with the assistance of the Bloc Québécois at that time. We then come forward through the summer and the Liberal Party is collapsing around itself and its new leader. We see the government, because it really did not have a plan, finally decide to prorogue Parliament and come back with a new throne speech.

In the new throne speech there are a number of provisions of an economic nature, but there is no particular mention of any further substantial reductions in the corporate tax rate.

As we just heard from my colleague from Outremont, lo and behold, shortly after the throne speech, the leader of the official opposition is up proclaiming that not only do the Liberals support the corporate tax breaks that have already been granted but that if they were in power they would give even greater tax breaks.

Within a day, if not the same day, the Minister of Finance is publicly proclaiming that in fact we are going to get greater corporate tax breaks. Within a month an economic statement came down which is encompassed to some significant degree in Bill C-28 in this mini-budget, and now what have the Conservatives done?

They are going to take that 22%, which is dropping already because of the earlier budget of 2007 and they are going to further reduce it. Now by 2012, the corporate tax rate in this country is going to fall to 15%; 22% this year. In five years or less it is going to be 15%, a full third of the corporate tax is no longer going to be required.

Inevitably, what do Canadians say about this? We have two political parties which have no substantial difference in how they deal with the revenue coming into the coffers of the government. We have to say, let us take a look at where these corporate tax breaks are going to go. We have done the analysis and this has not been contested by the government.

A full one-third of those two corporate tax breaks is going to go to the big banks in this country, the same big banks that in 2006 made $19 billion in pre-tax profit and are on line so far in 2007 to at least make that and probably break over the $20 billion mark. These are companies that we can see are poverty stricken, that are in absolute need of assistance from a government that feels compelled out of a sense of deep compassion to give them a tax break.

Where else is the money going? The next big chunk goes to the oil and gas industry. Natural resources is a bit broader, but primarily to the oil and gas industry. It pays because of its huge pre-tax profits due to all the oil and gas Canada is exporting to the world and contributes quite dramatically to environmental consequences in the form of global warming and climate change.

Those companies are making huge amounts of profit. One-sixth, in fact, of all the pre-tax corporate profits will be in the oil and gas sector, as it was in 2006. Chances are that those profits will be somewhat higher in 2007. Those companies will be picking up a huge chunk. In total, between those two sectors of the economy, they will be getting almost half of all these tax breaks, billions and billions of dollars.

If the government had not given this tax break, where could average, hard-working Canadians and their families have benefited? We have heard over and over again about the ongoing problems with waiting lists in our hospitals and in our medical system. More money could have been put there to deal directly with those waiting lists so that people do not have to wait six months, a year or 18 months just to be diagnosed and then many more months, if not years, beyond that to have surgery.

It could have built a national housing program. We heard from our colleague in question period today of some of the deaths that have occurred across the country as a result of homelessness.

We could have begun to create some child care spaces, one of the promises in the last election that the government likes to conveniently forget about. We are still waiting for the 125,000 or 150,000 new spaces. The government has abandoned that completely. Rather than use some of this revenue to assist in creating child care spaces for young families that need that assistance, what do we see? We see corporate tax breaks, revenue not coming in because the big banks and oil and gas companies need assistance.

Given the problems we are confronted with on the environment, we could have dramatically expanded the funds in many retrofit programs, both in the private sector and the government sector. However, we did not do any of that. We have the mantra that corporate tax breaks and tax breaks generally will solve all the problems. It is obvious, because of the problems we are faced with, whether it is waiting lists, lack of a housing program, homelessness or problems with the environment, that tax breaks are not the be all and the end all.

I want to step back, and this is really hard, and pretend for a minute that I am a Conservative. This is probably more creative than I usually am able to be, but let me pretend to do that for a minute and say that I do not really care about housing, the environment, unemployment and health services. All I really care about is helping big corporations, and that is where my--

[Budget Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 10th, 2007]

Absolutely, Mr. Speaker. In my community, we realize the impact that cut is going to have, particularly on the smaller museums, which are barely making it now. With a further reduction in government assistance, a number of them are probably going to go out of business.

[Budget Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 10th, 2007]

It is really simple. I would think that even the Conservatives could understand this. If a company does not make any profit, it does not get a tax break because it is not paying any taxes to get a tax break on. It is really very simple. That is the reality in the auto sector and it is the reality in the manufacturing sector.

The member speaks of job creation, but let us look at both the previous Liberal government and the Conservative government and we will see that the policies of the previous Liberal government are almost identical to the Conservative government's policies. In the last two to two and a half years, we have lost almost 300,000 jobs in this country's manufacturing sector.

It is not a question of getting a rise in wages, as he suggests. The reality is that there are no jobs. We are losing them. That pattern is continuing. Practically every day another plant announces indefinite layoffs or plants close.

These policies are absolutely useless in terms of dealing with this. The province of Ontario has recognized it and the province of Quebec has recognized it: they need more direct assistance.

[Budget Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 10th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, obviously the member for Peterborough was not paying much attention to my speech because there are no savings to be passed on in the manufacturing sector by the current policy or by the tax benefit that we are granting to large corporations. If we are not making--

[Budget Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 10th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, what is before us today is not just Bill C-28, but specifically, a motion to amend Bill C-28 and to delete clause 181, the enormous tax giveaways to large corporations in this country. We are attempting to put some rationality into our budgetary process.

This year, as last year and so many years before, because of poor planning and because of the abandonment of our responsibility to a number of sectors of our society, there are substantial surpluses in the budget. If people are on the right wing ideological bent, they would think that Canadians are being over-taxed because of all the money left over at the end of the year. That was a constant complaint from the Conservatives when they were the official opposition.

In spite of their rhetoric, when they became government, they showed substantial surpluses for two years in a row. They have also done the same things as the Liberals and over-taxed Canadians. From our perspective, it is a question of not properly allocating the revenues that are derived from taxpayers across this country and from other revenue in the form of fees and services.

We are looking this year again at a very substantial surplus primarily because of how well the resource industry is doing and even more specifically, how well the oil and gas industry is doing in exporting its product, mainly to the United States but generally around the globe.

We have a very large surplus which reflects, on a smaller scale, very large profit levels in a number of sectors of the economy, primarily in the financial services sector and the oil and gas sector, and to a lesser degree in the mining and natural resources sector as well.

Clause 181 in the present legislation substantially lowers the corporate tax rate. In fact, a double lowering because in the budget earlier in 2007, the corporate tax rate would be lowered from 22% to 18% by 2011. In clause 181 of this piece of legislation, the corporate tax rate would be lowered even more to 15% by 2012. In both cases, these tax breaks would provide a substantial benefit to large corporations, particularly the banking sector, the finance sector in general, and the oil and gas sector.

These sectors were given a substantial break earlier this year with the budget and now that break is coupling with an even more substantial tax break. Something in the range of 50% or 60% of these tax breaks will end up in the pockets of large banks, large financial corporations, and the oil and gas industry.

Does this make sense? Is this a good budgeting process? Is this good public policy? The NDP says it is not. What would the alternative be if we did not have this? The surplus would be larger if this tax break were not given. That surplus could be used to simply pay down our national debt. The tax breaks in clause 181, if Bill C-28 is passed in the House, could be used in this year's budget for any number of social programs. I would argue today that in fact it should be used in the sector of the economy that is in crisis and that is the manufacturing sector.

I come from Windsor, Ontario. The unemployment rates came out on Friday. In spite of the fact that the unemployment rate went down marginally in Windsor, we continue to lead the country with the highest unemployment rate of any substantial city of our size, which is over 50,000 people. That is because my community, both the city and the county that surrounds it, is primarily based on the automotive sector as the engine that drives our share of the economy and to a great extent drives the economy across the country, particularly in Ontario and Quebec.

Therefore, we continue to have the highest unemployment rate. As an aside, because I did a lot of work on this over my career in trying to help deal with unemployment circumstances during the major recessions we had back in the early eighties and again a minor one in the early nineties. On each occasion, and it has happened again now, the unemployment rate calculation substantially underestimates the real unemployment rate.

Because of the methodology that StatsCan uses to calculate the unemployment rate, the real unemployment rate in Windsor is probably approaching 15% at this point. The trauma that families and individuals are going through reflects that reality.

We have heard that these corporate tax rates are going to benefit the economy. As I have said earlier, that is true only to the extent of parts of the economy, in particular the financial sector, the oil and gas sector and natural resources sector.

These corporate tax breaks will do absolutely nothing to assist the manufacturing sector. There are all sorts of manufacturers, not just in the auto sector but in any number of other sectors, that have no profit. In fact, they are in a situation where they are suffering losses. They are suffering deficits on their balance sheets this year and in a number of cases for several years before that.

To give them a corporate tax break is absolutely useless in terms of it having any impact on helping them deal with the crisis that we are faced with in the manufacturing sector.

If the government were really serious about aiding that sector of the economy, it would be looking at other programs. In particular, we have seen both the provincial governments of Ontario and Quebec step forward to provide direct assistance to not just the auto but the manufacturing sector generally.

They both established large fairly substantial funds, pools of money, to provide a methodology where the manufacturers who need to update their equipment, update technological endeavours within their sector, would have the ability to tap into these pools of funds from the governments and make them more competitive. Hopefully, as they are doing that, we would see unemployment rates begin to drop and people get back to work in that sector. Both of those two provinces have provide those pools of funds.

They have also called on the federal government to play its part, to get involved, and to establish a similar pool. If we were to actually do the calculations on the tax break for just those two sectors, finance and natural resources, oil and gas in particular, if the government were to not grant that tax break in this bill and made enough funds available to establish that pool of money, it would cost anywhere from $.5 billion to $1 billion which is what is needed for our manufacturing sector to get back on its feet.

[Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 3rd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I will not downplay the significance of the role the Ontario government played in this but the role the federal government played under Liberal administrations and now under the Conservative administration has been to consistently undermine.

We can talk about these subsidies. We need them from time to time to carry ourselves over in order to be competitive with the other sectors, but as long as the present government is, as the previous Liberal government was, wedded to the auto trade arrangements and treaties that were signed, our auto sector will disappear.

For all those Liberals who continue to stand in the House and whine about losing the election because we cut the ground out from under them, I will repeat, I hope for the last time, that it was not the NDP that did that. It was the Canadian people who threw that government out.

[Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 3rd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-28, referred to as the budget bill, that is shocking in many respects in terms of its consequence.

We need to put this in the proper context and I will spend most of my time addressing the corporate tax cuts.

It is important to look back as recently as the budget of 2007 when the government came forward with a series of substantial corporate tax cuts over the next four years. In that period of time, the corporate tax rate would have dropped from 22%, which is where it was at the time, down to 18.5% by the 2011 budgetary period.

We then jump forward to the October-November period with the throne speech and to, what in the common parlance is being referred to as the mini-budget, the economic update statement.

What do we see? First we see in the throne speech that the Conservative government will reduce the corporate tax rate. However, when we jump forward to the mini-budget, all of a sudden that drop has become accentuated. It has become accentuated because in between the throne speech and the finance minister standing in the House, although I am not sure he actually stood in the House or did it some place else, he told the country that he would introduce even greater corporate tax cuts. Now we have the corporate tax rate by 2012 going to 15% as opposed to just six or eight months ago the proposal that by 2011 would have been fixed at 18%.

What happened in that couple of weeks, maybe a month, between the throne speech by the government and the mini-budget? We heard the opposition leader and a number of other members of the Liberal Party saying that we needed bigger corporate tax breaks. What we had was the government of the day and the official opposition taking the same position.

What I find it most shocking is when I look at where the bulk of those corporate tax breaks will go. They will go to sectors of the economy that, quite frankly, do not need them: the oil and gas sector and the banking sector. A full 50% of every one of those tax dollar breaks will go to those two sectors.

In the figures that came out showing the profit levels of those two corporate sectors, banks were the highest. They made over $19 billion in profit last year and they will break $20 billion at the rate they are going this year, perhaps up to $21 billion or $22 billion. They will be getting a huge tax break because of the size of their profits.

We see similar figures, because of the international demand for oil and gas and the export rates at which we are selling it, that the oil and gas sector will get huge corporate tax breaks from this change that was very rapid. It was in less than nine months.

I come from a region of the country that has as its primary economic base the auto sector. In that same period of time, we saw thousands and thousands of jobs disappear from that sector and a substantial number of closings. We saw it again in some of the news reports this weekend, going through regions in southern Ontario, seeing auto parts supplier companies shutting down in large numbers.

It is estimated that over the last two and a half years--and this took place not just during the 22 months of the Conservative regime but a good number of the months when the Liberals were still in power, 250,000 to 300,000 jobs have disappeared in that sector and it is not finished.

When we look at these corporate tax breaks, 50¢ on the dollar will go to the banks and the oil and gas sector. What is happening in the auto sector? Actually, nothing is happening because there is very little profit. Even for the large manufacturers, the full-blown, primary manufacturers, particularly in the auto parts sector, there is very low profit, if any at all, because so many of them are going bankrupt or at least going out of business before they go bankrupt.

Those corporate tax breaks will do nothing for the auto manufacturing sector, whether in the parts sector or in the primary manufacturers.

In roughly that same period of time, when we jumped from giving the substantial corporate tax breaks to, in the latter part of the year, even more substantial corporate tax breaks, we see in just six months a 7% drop in the auto parts sectors in terms of its productivity. Those are the exports going out of the country.

In the same period of time we wonder what the government has done. We constantly hear the Finance Minister say that he is giving a tax break. It has already been shown that those are useless. He says that he has accelerated the ability to take write-offs on machinery. If we are not making any money and have no profit to write these off against, those write-offs are useless also.

This is not anything new being heard by the government. Both the manufacturers and the auto parts sector have told it repeatedly what is happening.

What do we need? We need those corporate tax cuts reduced dramatically and that revenue, which would have come in, used to help the auto parts sector get through this. We are hearing that it needs $400 million immediately in the form of loans. It would be in that form, not a tax break because that would not do any good, and not with write-offs because that would not do any good. The sector needs loan guarantees and outright loans to allow the auto parts sector to purchase equipment that will allow it to be more productive, more competitive and be able to put people back to work.

Are we seeing that? Absolutely not. The Conservative government has refused to do anything in that regard. We have seen the province of Ontario step in and the province of Quebec step in with direct assistance because manufacturers are in a crisis. This is not something where we can talk long term policy. For example, if we do this, that will happen eventually. We are away beyond that. By the time that happens we may have lost the auto sector in this country.

I say that advisedly. I have lived in the community of Windsor all my life and, for the first time in the last two and a half to three years, I have become convinced that at the rate we are going with our trade policies and with the kind of economic policies we have seen, both from the Liberals when they were in power and now from the Conservatives, which have policies that are almost identical, we are at serious risk of completely losing, by eyesight 20:20, our entire auto sector.

That is a shock because the auto sector, and nobody can debate this, is the sector that drives the entire economy in this country. By and large, in comparison with any other sector, it is the major driver, and both those political parties are prepared to sacrifice that because of their belief in free trade agreements, which do not work in that sector, and by economic policies that have no benefit to the auto sector whatsoever.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the minister's comment but the facts do not back him up. I appreciate the position he has taken. My house has been broken into three times. The last time, my daughter, who was in university at the time, was at home.

People do want their government to protect them. It is always an issue as to whether this does it. I have problems with some of the approaches the Conservatives have taken as to whether they would be effective. I would have been much happier, quite frankly, if the government had spent more time on making sure those 2,500 police officers that were promised in the last election were out on the street. Not one of them has been delivered up to this point.

The government says that it wants to go ahead with the bill but when it prorogued Parliament that legislation died in the Senate. We had to start all over again. Rather than bringing it back at the stage it was, the government brought it back and started all over again in this House. I think, to some degree, that puts into doubt the credibility of how serious the government is in wanting to get these bills passed and the laws into place soon.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, at some point the Conservatives will run out of sections of the Criminal Code to amend. Maybe they thought they were getting close to that and in order to slow the process down they thought they would bundle these all together. They probably thought there would be an election before the bill would pass and then they could go out and tell Canadians that they needed more seats because they need to get a majority government in order to get the bill through. Obviously, if it had gotten through before that, they would not have that argument.

I think there is some logic behind that. However, it is quite cynical logic and it does not bode well for the moral compass of the Conservative Party. Unfortunately, I think it is very close to reality.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am, quite frankly, embarrassed about that award, in part because I think I am now expected to live up to it for the rest of the year until we have another one next year and someone else will take over responsibility for that.

I have two answers for my colleague from Hamilton. I practised law for 27 years and I practised a fair amount of criminal law at the start of my career, a lot of matrimonial law in the middle part and then personal injury law. Throughout my career I had clients who were charged and convicted so they were criminals. I had a lot of clients as well who were victims of crime, many clients who were victims of spousal and parental abuse. In my personal injury practice I had a number of clients who were assaulted or in other ways and suffered as victims of criminal conduct.

Throughout my entire career I can honestly say that I never had anyone say to me, “I am really happy this person is going to get 10 or 20 years in jail, if the alternative was that I wasn't a victim at all”. I never had a victim say to me, “I'm really more concerned about the penalty this person is going to suffer than I am about the impact it's had on me and my desire never to have been victimized”.

That thinking by victims of crime should give us some guidance.

With regard to the specific provisions of the reverse onus, there is another part of the bill that has a very good part. It is actually about 95% of the bill that we support. There are provisions for recognizance changes. We have needed those since I was practising criminal law back in the mid-seventies. We finally got around to doing it. It gives judges greater authority to control people when they are not incarcerated in an institution and it provides for significant additional protection to society. Therefore, that part of it is good and I think the member should feel comfortable in supporting the bill for that.

Ultimately, yes, on the reverse onus we will need to rely on the courts to strike it down.