Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola.
I am delighted to participate in the election year distraction budget debate, misleadingly, inappropriately labelled, when it was tabled, “Investing in the Middle Class”. This budget was everything we in the official opposition and most Canadians feared it would be. Instead of the balanced budget promised by the Prime Minister in his 2015 campaign, the deficit will hit $19.8 billion this year.
Instead of balance, the finance department estimates that the budget will not return to balance until 2040, and by then an additional $271 billion of debt will have been generated. According to the finance department, Canada's net debt this year reached an all-time high of $705 billion, or more than $50,000 for each Canadian family.
This budget was so sloppily assembled that the Department of Finance had to correct dozens of pages of tables and dozens of pages of sloppy math. Did the finance minister catch the mistakes, or did the President of the Treasury Board or even the Parliamentary Budget Officer? No, it was caught by the diligent Conservative member for Edmonton West, a private sector professional who came to the office after 30 years of experience responsibly reading spreadsheets and balancing budgets in the hospitality sector.
The original budget document tabled by the finance minister detailed $186 million in spending initiatives, but after a correction made quietly on the department's website after the MP's intervention, we see that spending will actually come to $311 million. With some $28 million more in underestimated costs, the mistake totalled almost as much as the original mistake, fully $153 million. The member for Edmonton West characterized it all, with very gentle understatement, as “pure carelessness”.
I will shift from the careless, the sloppy and the clumsy to a deliberate mistake in the Liberal budget 2019. I direct members to page 373 of the cover-up budget, a page with the main title “Business Income Tax Measures”, and the misleading subtitle “Support for Canadian Journalism”.
It is true that there are hundreds of millions of dollars, more than half a billion dollars, but they are, for the most part, allocated to yesterday's journalism, not tomorrow's, to print, big city and small community print, not to digital. These hundreds of millions of dollars, almost $600 million, will go only to Canadian journalistic organizations, which will have to apply to register for financial assistance and might be accepted by a Liberal-connected body as QCJOs, qualified Canadian journalism organizations.
The Liberal government is going to decide, through a commissioning body, which has not as yet been created, which struggling newspapers get money and which ones do not. I would remind the House that there has been, since this misguided adventure was previewed by the finance minister in the 2018 fall update, stark disagreement between owners, publishers and shareholders of struggling newspapers, large and small, and those journalists who actually generate news content.
As a former practitioner of the craft, I agree with journalists of all stripes who have vigorously rejected this Liberal election year bailout for some Canadian news organizations as an unacceptable, not to mention wasteful, intervention that will compromise, I believe, the independence of the craft. I share their opposition to the Liberal proposal of a panel of news experts who would distribute the hundreds of millions of dollars in election year beneficence by deciding which newsrooms are acceptable and which newsrooms are not.
Members may have read the columnist Andrew Coyne, who said, in noting that this misguided policy excludes anyone outside the existing Canadian newspaper industry, that it is designed for “not the future of news but the past; not the scrappy startups who might save the business, but the lumbering dinosaurs who are taking it down.”
The founder and editor of The Logic, one of those scrappy start-ups, David Skok, complains that the mandatory full-time status of journalists required for funding ignores the vital role freelance journalists play in the news ecosystem. Mr. Skok notes, in an editorial:
According to Statistics Canada, as of 2016, there are about 12,000 people who identify “journalist” as their profession. Of those, it’s safe to assume that the number of people not employed full-time with a newsroom is in the thousands.
Chantal Hébert, whose primary employer, the Toronto Star, will very likely be designated a qualified recipient of Liberal beneficence, said, “The government's half-a-billion package will not resolve the crisis that newsrooms face. It may end up doing little more than delaying the inevitable.”
Ms. Hébert further stated that “...among the ranks of the political columnists, many fear it is a poison pill that will eventually do the news industry more harm than good.”
I fully agree.
The finance minister cannot justify his $600-million election-year bailout because he has no idea of what will happen after his subsidized transition period. That is unacceptable and it is wasteful, because intervention should have a goal of not only long-term survival of print but long-term sustainability of the evolving craft of journalism. The transformation and survival of robust, independent journalism platforms in Canada will require bold adjustments and political leadership, but how can any news organization be truly independent if it becomes dependent on government subsidies, temporary slush-fund tax relief or direct cash bailouts?
I will close my remarks as I began, with disappointment in an election year debate on a budget that promises much in desperation but delivers many more dire costs to the Canadian economy than meaningful benefits.
This budget, as I said, was everything that Canadians feared it would be. Instead of the balanced budget promised by the Prime Minister four years ago, the deficit will this year hit $19.8 billion, and instead of balance, the finance department estimates the budget will not return to balance until 2040.
This budget will not distract from the broken promises, the fiscal incompetence, the legislative clumsiness, the empty virtue-signalling, the imposed narrow ideological values from a Liberal government that as its alpha and omega has bookended ethical lapses and moral corruption from day one until now.
Only two first-term majority governments in all of Canadian history have been defeated and denied a second term. I believe this budget and the ever-deepening scandal that has overshadowed it have set the stage for the current sorry Liberal government to join those historic losers.
