House of Commons photoWon his last election, in 2015, with 56% of the vote.
Questions Passed as Orders for Returns June 12th, 2015
With regard to contracts under $10 000 granted by Citizenship and Immigration Canada since February 5, 2015: what are the (a) vendors' names; (b) contracts' reference numbers; (c) dates of the contracts; (d) descriptions of the services provided; (e) delivery dates; (f) original contracts' values; and (g) final contracts' values, if different from the original contracts' values?
Citizenship and Immigration June 12th, 2015
Mr. Speaker, despite what the minister just said, he was asked about niqabs and immediately answered about terrorists. There is incontrovertible video evidence of this that cannot be denied.
Why does the minister keep playing to his party's old immigration Reform Party base by attacking refugees and Muslims? Why does he do that? Why will he not do the right thing, reflecting that background that he just described, and apologize to Canadian Muslims?
Citizenship and Immigration June 12th, 2015
Mr. Speaker, yesterday in Maclean's magazine, Paul Wells wrote that the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration was “delusional and culpably misleading capsule history of Canadian immigration policy” and concluded that “He’s one of the least impressive ministers in an increasingly weak government bench”.
The minister's goose may be cooked, but will he at least do the right thing and offer a sincere apology to Canadian Muslims?
Citizenship and Immigration June 11th, 2015
Mr. Speaker, it is obvious from the minister's previous statement that he equates terrorism with niqabs. When only Muslims face a rise in hate crimes, it is obvious that the government's toxic anti-Muslim rhetoric is a part of the problem. As when he talks about terrorists plots in mosques, this is the only Prime Minister in my lifetime who sinks to attack a whole community for political gain. Will he at least apologize to Muslim Canadians?
Citizenship and Immigration June 11th, 2015
Mr. Speaker, it is the most predictable thing in Canadian politics. Someone says “Muslim” and a Conservative minister says “terrorist”. Yesterday, when asked about rising hate crimes against Muslims, the Minister of Public Safety felt obliged to talk about terrorists.
We also saw yesterday that the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration assumes all Muslim women who wear the veil are terrorists, unless proven otherwise. This is simply unacceptable, so will he apologize to all Muslim Canadians?
Live-in Caregiver Access, Respect and Employment Act June 11th, 2015
moved for leave to introduce Bill C-690, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (live-in caregiver).
Mr. Speaker, this bill would set up a system of regulated entities whose job it would be to recruit caregivers on behalf of families.
This would benefit the families who would be spared the bureaucracy and financial risk they currently endure, and it would benefit caregivers because, in the case of a misfit or abuse, the employer would be able to find an alternative family for the caregiver.
(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)
Citizenship and Immigration June 9th, 2015
Mr. Speaker, throughout their decade of Conservative failure, processing times for families have moved steadily up, with a sharp jump after the budget cuts of 2011. We see family members who cannot get into the country for important events such as marriages, funerals or the birth of a loved one. Families are left separated by the Conservative government's gross incompetence.
Will the Conservatives finally take responsibility for this mess that they, and only they, have created?
Business of Supply June 8th, 2015
Mr. Speaker, maybe the Liberals cannot tell the difference between net jobs and gross jobs, but I would say that the NDP cannot tell the difference between any two things to do with economics.
They are out to lunch on the economy in general. They do not have a clue how to manage the economy. They do not know what it means to balance a budget.
To criticize the Liberals for economic incompetence is like the pot calling the kettle black. I would remind the member that it is we in the Liberal Party, having inherited a $43-billion Conservative deficit, who eliminated that quickly, paid down debt for 10 long years, and moved Canada from being the basket case of the G7 to being the star of the G7 in terms of fiscal probity. That star position was there for a while, but it was removed by the Conservatives who run nothing but deficits.
Obviously, we need Liberals in charge of the economy.
Business of Supply June 8th, 2015
Mr. Speaker, if I accept the member's false premise for a moment, I could turn the question on him and ask, why this fantastic amount of job-killing payroll tax hikes by the Conservatives when, as he just said, they froze the EI premiums, but all the experts are saying that circumstances call for a reduction?
It is the member's government that has imposed artificially high payroll taxes in the form of EI premiums that are too high. The member is the one who should be apologizing for these job-destroying payroll taxes.
I will have to take him through the subject once again. What I said and what is true is that when an individual Canadian pays more premiums on the Canada pension plan, that is not a tax, because every penny of that money is invested on behalf of that person, and every penny plus a substantial return goes back to that individual as a pension in his or her retirement years. That is not, I repeat, a tax. I will repeat what I said earlier, which the member seems to ignore, that it is his party that has imposed an unnecessarily high level of employment insurance premiums.
Business of Supply June 8th, 2015
Mr. Speaker, the major problem is that the Conservatives froze employment insurance premiums at an artificially high rate in 2015. Due to the government's decision, workers and employers paid $2.7 billion, and that is more than what they should have paid. According to the Chief Actuary of Canada, the government should have lowered these rates.
The amount of $2.7 billion is important because the government estimated that the surplus for 2015 would be less than $2 billion. Therefore, it is solely because of this artificial freeze on employment insurance rates that the Conservatives were able to post a surplus. Had they done what the Chief Actuary of Canada suggested, they would have lowered the EI premium rates and Canada would definitely have had a deficit this year.
These figures were not provided by the Liberals, but by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. The Chief Actuary of Canada recommended lowering the rates. These are the statements of competent people.
Canadians need to know that this artificial surplus is the direct result of the government's political and arbitrary decision to freeze EI rates when it should have lowered them. That is the main point that I want to make.
The Liberals do not have a problem with balancing the EI account over the economic cycle. In principle, the government is saying something similar, but it is nothing more than a theory. The reality is completely different.
The government set up a body whose only role was to set the EI premium rates. However, the government then ignored the recommendations of the office that it itself set up and eliminated that role, leaving it up to politicians to make those decisions for political purposes.
The government set these EI contribution rates for purely political reasons so that it could tell Canadians in an election year that it had balanced the budget and that the Conservatives are excellent economic managers. In reality, without that arbitrary decision, the budget would not be balanced.
Many economists are saying that, even with that decision regarding the EI rates, we are still heading toward a deficit because we are currently in an economic slump. However, the Conservatives do not seem to care, since that deficit will not be announced until after the election. Once the votes have been counted, it will be too late for Canadians to find out what is really happening.
I would also say it really is amazing that the Conservatives, of all people, are maintaining artificially high employment insurance premiums, or what they would call payroll taxes. Who is it who day after day rants and raves about the job-destroying properties of payroll taxes? It is the Conservatives. In many respects, they are wrong on that. Under Paul Martin in the late 1990s, there were significant increases in premiums to reform the CPP, and employment growth chugged along at a nice pace, so I think the Conservatives are out to lunch anyway.
The point I am making now is that when a party goes berserk about payroll taxes saying that they're the most evil thing to confront a country, it is the height of hypocrisy for that same party to artificially keep those payroll taxes at a high level just to claim that they have balanced the budget. It is the height of hypocrisy for the payroll-hating party over there to itself artificially raise or keep payroll taxes high, which all of the experts tell us should be brought down. According to the Conservatives' own logic, had they reduced employment insurance premiums, as the experts all say they ought to have done, imagine all the jobs that would have been created because of the reduction of this job-destroying payroll tax, which the Conservatives are keeping artificially high.
That is the height of hypocrisy and it is unacceptable.
The other thing I would say is that the Conservatives do not even know what a tax is. They keep talking about higher premiums paid by individual Canadians for the CPP as a tax hike. They seem blissfully unaware of the fact that this is not money that goes into general revenues as does a tax increase. Each and every penny of any additional contribution to the CPP by an individual Canadian is invested on behalf of that Canadian and paid back to him or her at the time of his or her retirement in the full amount, plus interest.
Let me say also that it is high interest, because the CPP has had an excellent rate of return over the years. This last year, I think it was 16% or some huge level. In the last decade or so, the return after inflation was 6.2%, which in a period of record low interest rates is a hugely successful return on investment. I read today that they might be acquiring the private equity component of GE, which would be another vehicle for good returns.
It is not as if this money would be put into a sinkhole and wasted. The track record is that the rate of return on such funds is high, and that is a direct benefit to Canadians, because all of that money is returned to those Canadians in the form of pensions, based on their own contributions and based on the very substantial rate of return earned by the CPP.
I will conclude with this central point: the only reason we have a surplus this year is because the government artificially maintained employment insurance premiums at a level that all experts deem is far too high.