Michael Chong

[Government Business No. 26—Amendments to the Standing Orders, June 15th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for the question and for sharing his perspective with us. This is a very important point.

To this point, generally speaking, permanent changes to the Standing Orders of this chamber have been done on a consensual basis, involving support among all the parties of the House. There have been exceptions to that rule, but they were rare.

I think the government is setting a dangerous precedent here in proposing this change without the consent of the second-largest party in this place, the official opposition. I think it is a very dangerous precedent that does not bode well for future changes to this place.

For that reason, I do not think the change should be made permanent. I think that there would be a consensus among all recognized parties in the House to have hybrid Parliament go on but to have a sunset clause, where it would expire at the end of this Parliament.

[Government Business No. 26—Amendments to the Standing Orders, June 15th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, the voting app is actually driving people out of this place.

If there are two votes to take place in this chamber, they take at least 20 to 24 minutes. If one is using the voting app, one can literally take about 30 seconds of those 24 minutes to vote. If one sits in the chamber, one actually cannot do certain things while the voting takes place, across those two votes. One cannot, for example, be on a phone call with somebody else. One cannot be doing something other than what one is permitted to do in the House.

The voting app, perversely, is actually driving members out of the chamber. This is why these sorts of measures need to be ended and sunsetted, as has been done in other western democracies.

[Government Business No. 26—Amendments to the Standing Orders, June 15th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Barrie—Innisfil.

This House is struggling to fulfill its constitutional role. It is struggling to hold the government accountable. Over the last several years, the House has tried to hold the government accountable on various matters where it has clearly failed in the discharge of its responsibilities. I would like to give a couple of examples to illustrate my point.

Four years ago, on July 5, 2019, two government scientists were escorted out of the government's microbiology lab in Winnipeg by the RCMP. They were reportedly walked out of the lab because of national security breaches, but what exact breaches occurred were not known. When that story broke, this House tried to do its job and find out exactly what happened.

A committee of this House began to investigate, asked for documents from the government and put in place measures to ensure that those documents would be held under lock and key to prevent anything injurious to national security from being released. However, instead of giving documents to this House, the government thumbed its nose at the committee. It refused to hand over the documents, so the committee escalated its request and issued an order to the government for the documents. The government defied the order of the committee for the documents.

Ultimately, this House and its committee issued four orders ordering the government to hand over the documents concerning the national security breaches at the Winnipeg lab. Not only did the government defy those four orders, it took the Speaker to court. The Speaker stood up to defend the rights of members in this House and indicated that the Speaker was going to fight the government in court, but before any of that could take place, the Prime Minister advised the dissolution of this place and, along with that, the four orders of this House were dissolved.

Now we have an extra-parliamentary committee, a committee that sits outside of this place, which is reviewing these documents. Members like me have no access to that process or those documents. Having initiated an inquiry in this House, this House has been unable to get to the bottom of what happened at the Winnipeg lab and, therefore, has been unable to hold the government accountable.

More recently, a similar situation occurred. When the story broke last November 7 that the government knew for years that Beijing was conducting foreign interference operations targeting our elections and involving this democratic institution, this House and its committees began to uphold their constitutional role. They began to ask questions in this House and to conduct studies in committees to find out exactly what happened.

Despite the passage of eight months, we have found out little. All we have received are heavily redacted documents, scraps of information here and there and nothing that will lead us to a definitive conclusion. Most of the information we have received has come from outside Parliament, from media reports. Most of what we have gotten from the government is a mountain of process outside Parliament; NSICOP, NSIRA and the special rapporteur, all of which are appointed by and accountable to the Prime Minister.

We have gotten so desperate that we are willing to support the establishment of an independent public inquiry outside of Parliament so that we can get answers as to what happened. While this inquiry would stand outside of Parliament, at least it would be independent and would have all the powers that this House supposedly has to call for witnesses, to order the production of documents and to get to the bottom of who knew what and when. At least a public inquiry would hold the government accountable. We should aspire to a Parliament that can do the work we are punting to a public inquiry, and that leads me to the motion in front of the House today.

The House of Commons is the only national democratic institution there is in Canada. The introduction of this motion will diminish a place that is already struggling to fulfill its constitutional role: to hold the government accountable. Hybrid Parliament has made this House and its committees less efficient. Our output has declined. Here is one example. Votes in this place before hybrid Parliament used to take eight minutes. They now take at least 10 minutes and, in many cases, 12 minutes. At 12 minutes, votes take fully 50% more time than they did before hybrid Parliament.

I have counted and last year we had 227 votes. If we multiply that by four minutes per vote, it is 15 hours of lost time, almost two days of sittings. In 2019, the first full day before the pandemic, we had 403 votes. If we multiply that by four minutes lost per vote, it is 26 hours of lost time. That is three or four sitting days of this House.

This is but one example of the inefficiencies a hybrid Parliament is creating. Others are time lost because of microphone checks, technology failures and the cancellation of committee meetings due to a lack of technology resources.

All of these things have led to a less efficient Parliament and a reduction in the work we do here.

The Canada-China committee has been cancelled three times in the past four weeks because of the technology limitations of a hybrid Parliament. It is one of the most important committees of this House, which is doing work on the relationship between Canada and the People's Republic of China.

More important than all of that is the loss of the magnificence of this place and its committees when we meet in person, when all eyes are on the other, watching the cut and thrust of debate, watching government officials testifying in person at committee and watching how Canadians' representatives are standing up for the things they believe in. That is why we are investing $5 billion in the buildings of this place. That is why the fathers of Confederation spent vast sums of money they did not have building Parliament Hill; they understood the importance of meeting in person. They could have built much more modest buildings than they did, out of wood or fieldstone, but they did not. They understood the importance of interacting with others in person.

The tyranny of technology is to turn us all virtual. We must resist. We are the only major western democracy that still has a hybrid Parliament and now the government is proposing to make it permanent. The U.K. House of Commons ended hybrid sittings on July 22, 2021, two years ago. The U.S. House of Representatives ended hybrid sittings on January 9 of this year. The Australian Parliament ended hybrid sittings on July 25 of last year. Only the current government is proposing to make hybrid sittings permanent.

The French National Assembly never had hybrid sittings. In fact, in April of 2021, the French Constitutional Council declared a proposal from the assembly unconstitutional because the measures were not precise enough. That proposal would have modified the assembly's rules of procedure in order to allow for remote participation in plenary and committee meetings under exceptional circumstances.

In our Constitution, the Constitution Act, 1867, section 48 requires the presence of a certain number of members in this place for this House to meet. The framers of our Constitution thought it so important that a certain number of members be present in person for this House to meet that they put it into the Constitution. They did not allow members to “mail it in”, as one could do in those days, to allow this House to meet.

I will finish by saying this. We already sit far less than national legislatures in other western democracies. The U.S. House of Representatives typically sits between 164 and 192 days a year. The U.K. House of Commons typically sits between 146 and 162 days a year. We only sit 129 days a year.

We also sit far less than we used to. We used to sit 160 to 170 days a year during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. During the Pearson era, when Parliament was so effective in dealing with framework legislation on major initiatives like the Canada pension plan, our public health care system and the national flag, the House sat 160 to 170 days a year, eight weeks longer than the 26 weeks we sit today.

The motion in front of us today will further weaken and diminish this place. Therefore, I urge all members to vote against this motion.

[Public Safety, June 15th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, that same indictment also revealed that in New York City last summer, PRC agents tried to coerce someone in New York City to come to Toronto for more intensive interrogations. The implication is that Beijing is comfortable using Canada as its foreign interference playground. Maybe that is because two months ago those same PRC agents were arrested, yet here north of the border there is nothing: no arrests, no new legislation.

When will the Prime Minister replace the minister with someone who will get the job done?

[Public Safety, June 15th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, an unsealed justice department indictment in U.S. court revealed that a Canadian in Vancouver was coerced back to the PRC. It has been eight months since the first reports about Beijing's illegal police service stations. Beijing brazenly admitted to five of these stations, and another two have been identified. These stations are being used to coerce people back to the PRC.

The minister has indicated these stations were shut down, but they have not been. When will they be?

[Committees of the House, June 13th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, we support all sorts of housing, whether it be co-op, not-for-profit, for profit or affordable housing. To be clear, the source of our problem with the lack of apartment supply in Canada is not solely capital gains taxes. There is a range of problems.

One other problem, which I did not mention in my remarks, is property taxes. I was talking to Jack Mintz, an economist who has done some research on this, and he told me something astounding. In most Canadian cities and provinces, property taxes on apartment buildings are way higher than property taxes on single detached homes in the suburbs. That is because over decades, municipal councils have decided they can increase the mill rate, the tax rate, per hundred thousand dollars of assessment on apartment owners in a way they cannot on homeowners of single detached homes. That is a problem that needs to be addressed, because many people who rent are of much lower income than those who own a home.

[Committees of the House, June 13th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her question about the report's 14th recommendation.

I agree that more affordable housing is needed across the country, including in my riding of Wellington—Halton Hills. At the same time, Canada is in a crisis situation.

We cannot rely on only building affordable housing units. The only apartment units being built in Canada are being built with public subsidies. The private sector should be building much more than just affordable housing units that have been subsidized with public subsidies. They should be building apartment units for people to rent, but they are not because of some of the macroeconomic policies that I just highlighted as a problem at the federal level.

While I support the construction of new affordable rental units, more than that, we need many more rental units to help drive down the cost of renting an apartment. That would be a far more powerful way to make housing more affordable for low-income Canadians than any single government program.

[Committees of the House, June 13th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, what I believe in are macroeconomic policies of the Government of Canada that are going to ensure that, in the long run, housing returns to 3.5 times a typical family's income. Today in this country, in many communities, it is more than triple that, and as a result, Canadians are struggling under record high levels of household indebtedness. The House can pass all the motions it wants about housing as a right, but the reality is that, in practice today in Canada, affordable housing has become a distant reality for many Canadians because of these ill-founded macroeconomic policies.

[Committees of the House, June 13th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, I want to speak to the concurrence debate on this report on the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities because housing is an important topic to my constituents and also an important topic to all Canadians.

I think it is safe to say that we have a housing crisis in Canada. The government, over the last eight years, has presided over this crisis. While provinces have a role to play, and so do municipalities, what I hope to make clear to the House in my short remarks is that the primary responsibility for this mess is with the Government of Canada. The Government of Canada has huge macroeconomic levers not available to the provinces. It regulates our banking system through the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. It regulates the mortgage market through CMHC's mortgage insurance programs, and Finance Canada plays a big role in regulating our financial services sector. These are, far and away, the cause of the housing crisis in Canada. None of the initiatives that the government has announced as part of the plethora of programs on housing is going to offset the macroeconomic mistakes it has made over the last eight years.

We truly have a crisis in two forms. It is a crisis in terms of housing prices. Let us be frank and candid here; Canada has a housing bubble. It is a bubble of epic proportions, which has gone on for so long that we do not even see it for what it is. How did we get this housing bubble? Quite simply, the government mismanaged a number of macroeconomic policies through Finance Canada, through CMHC and through OSFI. For example, it allowed mortgage credit to grow at an unbelievable annual compounded rate over the last eight years, far in excess of inflation, population growth and other measures like productivity growth. As a result, household debt in Canada has grown from 80% of GDP, some 15 years ago, to 107% of GDP today. That is a 27% jump in household debt in Canada. That is almost a 30% jump, in household debt in real terms, per household, in the country over the last 15 years. Most of it is under the government's watch, and all because the government failed to regulate the growth and mortgage credit through OSFI, through Finance Canada and through CMHC.

I will give one example of its mismanagement. In the early days of the pandemic, OSFI relaxed the domestic stability buffer, allowing banks to loan out hundreds of billions in new money. OSFI put no restrictions on the money being loaned out. What happened? Almost all of it was loaned out for residential real estate. It poured fuel on the fire of housing, which is why housing prices during the pandemic skyrocketed. The government should have said, look, we are going to inject some liquidity into the system but we are not going to allow the financial sector to put all of its eggs in one basket, into residential mortgages, and to pour fuel on the fire of housing prices. That is one big reason why housing has skyrocketed over the last several years.

There are so many other things the government did. It argued against the B-20 rule and it forced financial regulators to weaken the B-20 rule. What situation do we have today? We have a situation where one-fifth of all of CIBC mortgages are ones where the borrowers are not even paying the interest on their loan balances, and their principal is getting bigger. As a result, we are looking down the barrel of a financial crisis.

In about two short years, many of the mortgages that were given out during the pandemic will come up for renewal. Most of these are five-year-term mortgages. Most of these mortgages are fixed monthly payment, variable rate. When those mortgage holders renew about a quarter of outstanding mortgages, they are going to be faced with a crisis, because renewal mandates that the mortgage renew at the original amortization track that the mortgage was supposed to be on when the term was originally negotiated. As a result, people are looking at a 20% to 40% jump in their mortgage payments in about two short years. Those figures come from Desjardins's research analysts. Those figures come from the Bank of Canada itself, and that is the best case scenario.

That is if rates start to drop early next year, and it is not clear they will, because the bank continued to hike them this past month alone, and it may hike them further. It is predicated on our having a mild recession that we get out of fairly quickly, and it is predicated on rates dropping to two and a half per cent pretty quickly. This is all a Goldilocks scenario that may not come to pass, and even in that Goldilocks scenario, payments for these mortgages are still expected to jump 20% to 40%. If a worst-case scenario comes to pass, the payment jumps could be much higher. We are talking about a fifth to a quarter of all outstanding mortgages being in this situation, and that is a direct result of the government's mismanagement of the banking system.

We have a second crisis in our system that the government is not addressing at all, and that is a lack of housing supply. What has happened over many years is that the supply of purpose-built apartment buildings has plummeted. Several decades ago, more than two-thirds of Canadians rented an apartment in a purpose-built apartment building, but I looked up the data for the number of apartment buildings that have been built in the last several decades, and it has plummeted to almost nothing. In fact, in the province of Ontario, 86% of all apartment building stock was built prior to 1980. Almost none of it was built after the 1980s, and as a result, only 60% of renters in Canada today rent an apartment in a purpose-built apartment building. The other 40% of renters are renting a house, a room in a house, a condo or some other non-purpose-built apartment. As a result, we have a government focused entirely on the wrong solution to the problem: building more houses and condos. What we need are more purpose-built apartment buildings, but the government is not thinking about these macroeconomic policies because it is focused on microeconomic policies that are not going to make a difference.

The slowdown in apartment construction coincides with the introduction of capital gains taxes on apartment buildings that do not apply to primary residences. It coincides with negative changes to capital cost allowances that did not allow private developers to write off their investments in a way that made them financially viable. It is a result of GST rules that favour one type of housing over another. It is a result of CMHC introducing restrictions on underwriting of rental housing. It is a result of a range of other issues the government has failed to address, and until the government addresses these macroeconomic policies, whether it is the growth in mortgage credit that has led to a housing bubble, or the lack of rental housing in purpose-built apartment buildings, we are not going to be able to address this crisis.

For all those reasons, I encourage members of the House to think about what the committee has found in this report and to consider the broader picture of how we got into this situation, which is not just a housing crisis but one that could really put the financial stability of our entire Canadian banking system at risk.

[Democratic Institutions, June 12th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, on a related national security matter concerning the Winnipeg lab breaches, it was two and a half years ago that the House of Commons ordered the production of documents. The government refused to comply with the order. Then it hid behind NSICOP. Now, finally, two and a half years later, the committee that is looking at these documents has just been stood up.

We cannot wait two and a half years for more process to unfold to get the answers we need about interference in our democracy that affects all members and all parties of this House. Will the government commit today to a public inquiry so this democracy and Canadians across the country can get the answers they deserve about the PRC interference?