John McCallum

[Business of Supply, January 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the point I am making is that the discussion involved a discussion on the price of carbon.

As I said in my speech, given the total absence of leadership on the part of the federal government, the provinces have already moved in their various different ways on this issue and have filled the void left by the total inaction on the part of the federal government.

The leader of the Liberal Party said that he would work with the provinces and provide leadership within their own actions without rescinding the actions that have been taken already by various provinces in this area.

[Business of Supply, January 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is not the same thing. There are various different ways of achieving a price on carbon. I am not sure I need to give Environment 101—

[Business of Supply, January 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, one cannot give a yes or a no answer to a question that is formulated in a completely inaccurate way. I think what the member had in mind was a price on carbon, and I think—

[Business of Supply, January 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Beauséjour for his supportive words.

The first thing I would like to say is that it is almost unbelievable that, since 2006, this Prime Minister has not attended an official meeting of premiers. That is contrary to what previous prime ministers of Canada have done. They all wanted to hold such meetings in order to run the federation. It is very simple. Canada is a very decentralized country and we must work together in order to run it.

If we look at the jurisdictions, we see there are very few areas, apart from monetary policy and to some extent foreign affairs and defence, that are purely federal. Virtually everything else is a joint jurisdiction in one way or another, or else provincial, so if one wants to achieve things that are important to the people of Canada, there is no choice but for the levels of government to work together.

In this regard I would like to give a quote from Kathleen Wynne, the premier of my province of Ontario. Just a few days ago she said:

Fifty years ago, Lester Pearson, John Robarts and Jean Lesage and their contemporaries helped build a Social Union that strengthened our federation and bound us closer together. Today, our generation needs to take inspiration from that as we work in co-operation to build a better Economic Union for all Canadians. We know that when we are investing in infrastructure we are building, and when we are building roads and transit, or hospitals and schools, or energy networks and ports, we are growing.

That is the vision from the Premier of Ontario, and I agree with it. I would not expect the current Prime Minister to go that far, as he seems to have a history of not totally agreeing with Kathleen Wynne, but at least he should have meetings to effectively run the federation.

Let me begin by thinking of two reasons that he perhaps does not want to do that and then go on to think of some areas that are particularly important for my province and for my premier.

I think the first reason he is averse to such meetings is that he has a very strong ideology, which could be called a constitution in watertight departments. He sees things in black and white. Health care belongs to provinces, so why meet provinces? It is their area.

If we go through the list, everything is in watertight compartments. He somehow thinks that he can run his jurisdictions independently from provinces, and vice versa. However, in the complex world in which we live, that is an unrealistic proposition, because in virtually all areas we have overlapping jurisdictions and overlapping interests.

The second reason is that for our Prime Minister, the concept of partners is somewhat alien. He likes to decide things himself, but in order to run the federation one has to be collaborative. There has to be an atmosphere of give and take. There have to be negotiations, sometimes messy, and this is not an environment that our Prime Minister relishes. As a consequence, the country is losing a great deal.

Let me just illustrate a few areas. I will begin with infrastructure and pensions, which have been of critical importance to Premier Kathleen Wynne and to the people of Ontario.

Kathleen Wynne, somewhat unexpectedly, won a majority government after going to the people with two major propositions. One was an expanded role for infrastructure and the other was a made-in-Ontario version of an expanded Canada pension plan.

On the first point, I live in the greater Toronto area, where traffic gridlock has become worse and worse. A major part of the Ontario platform was the idea of focusing a lot of resources in this area of infrastructure. As we heard in question period today from the member for Trinity Spadina, cities like Sydney, Nova Scotia—and I think he mentioned Regina, and others—are waiting, with nothing happening from the federal government.

The federal government has back-end-loaded its funding to such an extent that we have a 90% drop in actual funding in upcoming years, so the infrastructure program, which is so critical to Ontario, so critical to Canada, so critical to jobs and growth, is floundering. This is one area where I think a partnership is needed, involving not just the federal and provincial governments but also municipal governments, which, while they have just 8% of total revenues, have approximately half of all the country's infrastructure. Here is one area that calling out and pleading for co-operation across governments to get a program befitting the needs of our country to deal with the massive infrastructure deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars, and it is an area in which the government has not acted.

A second area crying out for federal-provincial co-operation—not just meetings for the sake of meetings, but active co-operation—is pensions.

Some months ago the provincial governments and the federal government were having a series of meetings, and they appeared to be heading towards a consensus on a moderate expansion of the Canada pension plan on the grounds that Canadians today are not saving enough to live comfortably in their retirement years. That, whether the government likes it or not, is inherently federal-provincial, because any change in the CPP requires the agreement of both the federal government and a majority of the provinces.

However, the government simply vetoed any change in the Canada pension plan, abandoned the meetings, and left the provinces to their own devices. I think this was an extraordinarily short-sighted move that was detrimental to the well-being of future Canadians in their retirement years, but that issue was one of the election platforms of Kathleen Wynne. She won the election apparently on the basis of developing a made-in-Ontario version of an expanded CPP, which her government is now working on. I think she has given up on the current government on this issue and is hoping that our party might win the election, in which case we have committed to move forward with an expanded Canada pension plan.

Those are two main areas on which the Ontario party of Kathleen Wynne just recently won a majority government. Infrastructure and pensions are two areas that have suffered not from benign neglect but from malignant neglect, if you will, by the federal government, which is not helping out in either of these areas.

Another area is environment. Where there is a void, other governments will occupy that void. For many years the federal government has done very, very little on the environment and greenhouse gas emissions, with the result that we continue to get these fossil prizes at international conferences. The provinces have stepped into the void, setting up their own systems of cap and trade or carbon taxes to fill the void that the federal government has vacated.

Here is an example of a total lack of leadership, co-operation, or federal-provincial meetings on the environment. The provinces have stepped up to the plate and acted when no action was coming from the federal government, so at least that is better than nothing.

Another example is pipelines. This should be the forte, the strong point, of this federal government, because it has always thought of Canada as a super energy power and put all its eggs in the energy basket. If there is one thing we would think the government would be able to deliver on, it is pipelines to get all of that oil to market. However, the Conservatives have failed so far on pipelines in all three directions. On pipelines to the south, they have failed to get the agreement of the United States. On pipelines to the west, the northern gateway remains bogged down, partly through a lack of federal leadership on environmental and aboriginal issues. Now the pipeline to the east is also running into problems.

We have seen the premiers of Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec get together to discuss a national energy approach, and the federal government has again been notable in its absence. Again the provinces are working together without any significant involvement by the federal government to devise a national energy strategy. Clearly that initiative is floundering today, not just because of the price of oil but primarily because of the inability of the federal government to work with provincial governments to find a solution to the pipeline issue and to resolve those questions of environmental and aboriginal concern.

I could go on with other issues, but there is the list of flagrant derelictions of duty on the part of the federal government in failing to work with its provincial and municipal counterparts.

[Business of Supply, January 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague very much for his question. For those who may have forgotten, he is the newly elected member for Trinity—Spadina and has a passion for housing. Therefore, let me answer that question in terms of how to address the concerns of middle-class families by talking about the member's own field of interest, which is housing.

I have conducted round tables across the country, and I have spoken to mayors across the country, and all of them are passionately concerned about the lack of affordable housing. Let us take the income-splitting tax cut, which does nothing for ordinary families and is particularly limited to those at the top end, and compare that with the member's proposals on affordable housing, which would do great good for middle-class Canadian families and seniors across the country. Yes, we have to live within our means. We in the Liberal Party have learned that and we have taught the Conservatives that. The NDP will never learn that, but we have done it. While we have to live within our means, the kinds of things we want to do to support middle-class families are the kinds of things my colleague from Trinity—Spadina has proposed in the area of affordable housing.

[Business of Supply, January 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I think that if the member has to go all the way back to 1992, he is feeling desperate. I can tell him that I am very proud of the Liberal Party's performance at that time. The member is forgetting that the Liberals inherited a $43 billion deficit from the Conservatives and that something had to be done.

We eliminated that deficit in just a few years, and we reduced the debt for 10 years. The Canadian government's fiscal position was a thousand times better under the Liberals than under the Conservatives. As a result, we were able to reduce taxes and increase health care spending by 6% per year for 10 years. I am therefore very proud of what the Liberals did in the past. I am also proud of what we will do in the future.

[Business of Supply, January 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak on this NDP motion, which as my colleague indicated, the Liberal Party will support.

The basic point is that it is the responsibility of a government to lead, and it is especially the responsibility of a government to lead when economic times become tough and uncertain. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason to delay the budget in the way the government has. Indeed, the tougher the economic times, the sooner Canadians want to see resolute action and a concrete plan from the government.

It is not at all clear from an economic point of view what the government will gain from delay. Members can correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think anybody on the planet predicted that oil prices would suddenly collapse from over $100 a barrel to less than $50. This was not foreseen by anyone, to my knowledge. Therefore, if that collapse in oil prices was not foreseen by anyone, why should we believe anyone who claims to know the pace at which oil prices will recover, if indeed they will recover? For all we know, oil prices could drop even lower.

Simply to wait to buy time, because in waiting a month or two one thinks one will have a better idea of what oil prices will do in the future, I think is a fool's game. It is just an excuse for the government not having a plan. The Conservatives did not know what to do, and so rather than present a concrete plan based on the most defensible assumptions they could make in an uncertain world, they just decided to delay. In so doing, they increased the uncertainty felt by Canadians in this time of uncertainty.

I think that is indeed an irresponsible move. Whether the Conservatives present the budget in February, March, April, or May, the world is and will remain a place of uncertainty. Nobody will know, whatever the month of the budget presentation, exactly or even approximately what oil prices or other things will be in a year, two years, or three years from now.

However, the function of the government, the function of a budget, is to present a credible plan. It is to make assumptions as required on these things that cannot be known and to forge ahead with a plan. I think the Conservative government's inaction in presenting its budget shows a lack of a plan, a lack of an idea of where it thinks the economy will go.

I think the Conservatives only had one plan, and that plan was based on oil at $100 a barrel. Their plan was based on Canada being an energy superpower. However, when that plan collapsed with the price of oil around the world, the government did not have a plan B. It has no alternative plan, and so the Conservatives are delaying and figuring out what to do.

In the meantime, the Conservatives operate on the fly. One of their most senior ministers—if not the most senior minister and certainly the one who is talked about most to become the next leader of the party over there—has said that they would have to make cuts in the near future in order to balance the books, and then he was promptly contradicted. I think that dissension at the highest levels about the budget, which is the most important document for the government in the whole year, is another sign of disarray and disorganization on the part of the government.

The budget is important and there is no reason to delay it. The fact that the government has not presented it and has said it plans to wait a few months is not good for Canadians. This shows a lack of leadership, because in two or three months' time, we will not know any more than we do now about what will become of our economy or the price of oil on world markets. Furthermore, the government already announced its tax measures without even knowing what the budget will be. That was also a mistake.

The fact that the government announced this income-splitting measure some time ago and all of a sudden maybe does not have the money to do it is another sign of incompetence and irresponsibility on its part.

We on this side do not object to the income-splitting plan just because it was incompetently announced before the facts were on the table, but we also object to it because we think substantively it is a bad move. Yes, middle-class families are struggling and they do require measures to support them going forward, and that is the cornerstone of the policy of the Liberal Party. However, the solution to the woes and the challenges and the difficulties of middle-class Canadians is not to present a tax cut that would benefit only 15% of Canadian households.

The C.D. Howe Institute, which is hardly a socialist, left-leaning institute, has come down strongly against this policy, pointing out that only 15% of Canadian households would receive anything at all and those that would receive the lion's share of the benefits are high-income households with children, such as the families of the Prime Minister and the leader of the third party, the Liberal Party. Their families would receive the $2,000 maximum benefit, and yet they are not the ones evidently in greatest need. This is a wrong-headed policy. It would be a wrong-headed policy even in the best of economic times, but it is doubly a wrong-headed policy when it is presented at these times of great economic uncertainty.

We support the NDP motion in the sense that it is a by-product. Our primary concern is not the NDP motion but the lack of responsibility, the lack of leadership, displayed by the Conservative government in deferring the budget in uncertain times. It is precisely when times are uncertain that Canadians need their government to step up to the plate and present a clear plan to go forward under these difficult circumstances in which we live.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 26th, 2015]

With regard to materials prepared for ministers or their staff from September 19, 2014, to the present: for every briefing document prepared, what is (i) the date on the document, (ii) the title or the subject matter of the document, (iii) the department's internal tracking number?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 26th, 2015]

With regard to materials prepared for Assistant Deputy Ministers from September 19, 2014, to the present: for every briefing document prepared, what is (i) the date on the document, (ii) the title or the subject matter of the document, (iii) the department's internal tracking number?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 26th, 2015]

With regard to materials prepared for deputy heads or their staff from September 19, 2014, to the present: for every briefing document prepared, what is (i) the date on the document, (ii) the title or the subject matter of the document, (iii) the department's internal tracking number?