Phil McColeman

[Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 1, May 4th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, let us make no mistake about the way the Liberals govern. This is something that Canadians have recognized over and over again. The Liberals say one thing and do another.

It reminds me of operators in my world of small business who present a smoke-and-mirror image. They present an image of “this is what we profess to be” and then they turn out to be something absolutely different.

When it comes to transparency, putting the brakes on, putting in more barriers, and in fact muzzling the PBO and other objective observers of the process by bringing in legislation, the Liberals have accused other governments of doing this. The tone of this started with the government House leader bringing in Motion No. 6 and taking away the rights of the opposition to open things up for discussion. We cannot do that anymore. It is being limited.

The Liberals are doing it now with the Standing Orders. This is all a smoke-and-mirrors game to put more control in the PMO, more control for the government to have the rules that facilitate it. The Liberals do not care about this particular sacred spot we are standing in, the Parliament of Canada, which should be open and transparent in all things.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2017, No. 1, May 4th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, the member for St. Albert—Edmonton, for his impromptu speech, which really hit the nub of the issue, the fact that this is a tax-and-spend budget and has nothing to do with innovation. Those are the themes I am going to carry on with.

Like all members, I have had the opportunity to speak with many of my constituents and I must say that the government side will not be happy with what my constituents had to say.

The Liberals are fond of calling this the innovation budget. There is really nothing innovative about this budget. It is just good old-fashioned Liberal tax-and-spend. There continues to be no plan for job creation and there continues to be no plan to balance the budget. In fact, the innovation budget, just as my colleague said and as I will underscore, nickels-and-dimes Canadians by recklessly spending billions that the government does not have and saddles future generations, my grandchildren, with that debt.

This budget hikes taxes on the working poor using public transit. It hikes taxes young entrepreneurs when they want to use ride sharing. It hikes taxes on hard-working construction workers simply because they want to enjoy a cold beer at the end of the day. It hikes taxes on struggling parents using child care. It hikes taxes on small business owners, such as farmers, real estate agents, and hairdressers, and the list goes on.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. After all, the Prime Minister's first budget took the exact same approach. First he blew up his election promise to run only a modest deficit, a small deficit, and to balance the budget by 2019. Those were election promises. Next he hiked taxes on gasoline and home heating fuel, on savings accounts, on paycheques. He even hiked taxes on kids' soccer and piano lessons.

It is another year, another Liberal tax hike, and another lost opportunity to deliver for Canadian families.

This budget fails to be innovative and it fails to deliver for families. Families need a job plan. Instead they got higher taxes and more debt, which, as I said, will have to be paid off by future generations.

The Liberals are not growing the middle class; they are growing government, and Canadian families are going to foot this bill.

By his own admission, the Prime Minister tells us that $195 million of the funding for child care will actually go toward hiring bureaucrats in Ottawa. What the Prime Minister cannot tell us is how many child care spaces the Liberals are actually going to create. They hope it is 40,000, but they do not have an actual plan. They hope to balance the budget, but they do not have an actual plan. The pattern has developed and continues to develop.

I can tell members that our previous Conservative government took a much different approach. We focused on supporting families, and we had a plan. That is why we implemented initiatives such as the universal child care benefit, the children's fitness tax credit, the children's art tax credit, tax credits for post-secondary education and textbooks, and income splitting for families.

Unfortunately, since taking office, the Liberals have eliminated these initiatives one by one, with the public transit tax credit being the latest to get the axe.

When in government, the Conservative Party understood that in order to keep up in this global economy and create jobs, we needed to push a real innovation agenda. That is why we created a more efficient and effective national digital research infrastructure system by investing in CANARIE, Canada's world-class, high-speed research and education network. We extended Canada's participation in the international space station mission to 2024 to build on Canada's strong legacy of supporting space exploration. We developed the next generation of innovation leaders by supporting graduate-level research and development internships through Mitacs. We made a landmark investment in post-secondary education by creating the Canada first research excellence fund, with $1.5 billion over the next decade. This investment helped to secure Canada's international leadership in science and innovation.

We provided $49 million to the Canadian Youth Business Foundation to help young entrepreneurs grow their firms. We fostered world-leading research by investing $220 million in the TRIUMF physics laboratory to support leading research and launch cutting-edge spinoff companies. We provided $1.5 billion to support the private sector in research and development to strengthen the competitiveness of Canada's aerospace sector through the strategic aerospace and defence initiative. We launched the venture capital action plan to increase private sector investments in early-stage risk capital and to support the creation of large-scale venture capital funds. We supported technology innovation by investing $15 million in support of the Institute for Quantum Computing for research and commercialization of quantum technologies, and $3 million to support the creation of the Open Data Institute.

We stood up for the automotive industry by investing $500 million in the automotive innovation fund to support significant new projects in Canada. We also provided over $800 million to support cutting-edge post-secondary research infrastructure through the Canada Foundation for Innovation. These are real, tangible supports for ideas and for entrepreneurs that make innovation happen, as well as real, tangible supports for Canadian families.

That is what is missing from this budget. There are no plans. There are platitudes. There are promises after promises that continue to get broken from the previous budget through this budget. There is nothing innovative about it. It is just good old-fashioned Liberal tax-and-spend.

It reminds me of the area of the country I come from, which is Ontario. I have watched the deterioration of my province, sadly, to the status of a have-not province through years of Liberal budget mismanagement. In the last budget, the current Kathleen Wynne government presented to our province more of the same: tax, spend money they do not have, and take us further into debt. We are already the deepest in debt of any sub-sovereign government across North America.

Here we go again, with the federal Liberals taking a page from the Kathleen Wynne playbook, with the individuals who were the architects now being the architects of what happens in the Prime Minister's Office in terms of budget and policy creation. It is absolutely disastrous, and will be disastrous, if we do not have a plan to balance our budget, because as Canadians know, we cannot continue to spend money we do not have and continue to pile on the debt for future generations to have to deal with.

The government should know that well. Previous Liberal governments had to deal with it in the 1990s. They had to cut health care by some 30% in trying to get us back to a reasonable fiscal balance in the country. That is exactly where the Liberals are taking us again. It has been done before. It has been experimented with before.

We are watching the results in Ontario. We are watching company after company in my constituency considering the question of moving to a lesser-priced jurisdiction. I can think of two specific meetings I have had with companies that employ well over 400 people that are actually, right now, entertaining the idea of moving to somewhere in the upper U.S. They are considering the New York, Michigan, or Ohio areas to relocate their businesses. It is because the taxes and the ongoing expenses of operating their businesses are making them uncompetitive. These are international companies in the sense that they have international customers. They must compete on a global basis, and they are having a hard time now finding the resources within their operations to cut their costs to be competitive.

In fact, their costs are skyrocketing as a result of mismanagement and policy at the provincial level. That is what we are seeing here. We are seeing more of the same, tax and spend. Canadians know that all too well.

There is no plan for job creation, no plan for balancing the budget for Canadians, no hope that we will see a light at the end of the tunnel, fiscally, in this country. My constituents and many other Canadians have been underwhelmed and uninspired by this budget. That is why I will be voting against it.

[World Ovarian Cancer Day, May 2nd, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, May 8 will mark World Ovarian Cancer Day.

Each year, 2,800 Canadian women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Without a screening test, ovarian cancer is usually detected at the advanced stage after the cancer has spread. It can be devastating. While most ovarian cancer patients initially respond well to treatment, relapse is common, and there are few effective treatment options when the cancer returns.

Research teams across Canada have been at the forefront of designing new treatment strategies. With proper investment, more options will enter the pipeline, leading to more effective treatments for women. It is important that approved treatments be publicly funded and available. Lives depend on it.

On behalf of the many affected Canadian women, their families and their friends, I ask all members of Parliament to join me in helping Ovarian Cancer Canada raise awareness of this worthy cause.

[May 1st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, the agenda has been set, in case anyone cannot see through the smoke and mirrors of all of this. The discussion paper was tabled by the House leader. She said they were going to have a discussion on it and that Liberals wanted to accept other members' points of view. They said they wanted to have a discussion on estimates reform.

The government's presentations have been that this is the way it is going to be and if opposition parties do not like it, then tough luck. That is what the Liberal government is all about. It is all about doing what it did with Motion No. 6, as the member mentioned, and ramming it down our throats. It is trying to do it in a little softer, more pleasing way today, but we should make no mistake that this is the modus operandi of the government. It feels that it is entitled to do this. It says it is going to do it unilaterally, and that is wrong.

[May 1st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from the NDP and I are totally aligned on that issue, and that is the issue of the day. Liberals use the word “modernization”, which can mean different things to a lot of people. Their concept of modernization, or what they believe it to be, may not be the will of the majority of people in this country who have lived with a balanced system, the rules of this House, and who elect members to both government and opposition. We are called upon, as my colleague said, to represent those views and to strike a balance. The balance has served this country well. We need to maintain it and defend it, not only in this Parliament but in future ones, to ensure it does not deteriorate due to the will of a partisan government.

[May 1st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I alluded to my colleague's comments in my speech.

Can one imagine what the howl and the outrage and the outright alarm would have been in this country if this had been proposed by our previous prime minister? It boggles my mind to think about it, and yet we have this entitled, arrogant approach by the Liberal government. The Liberals tried to take powers away from the opposition with Motion No. 6. They tried to shove it down our throats. They are trying it again, and they say they will do it unilaterally. This is the House of the people, as my colleague just said. It represents all of the people, all with diverse views.

The member for Winnipeg North may have well been honoured with 68% of the vote, but 39% of Canadians voted for the Liberal government. The Liberals are not entitled to do this. We should be standing up for all of the people of Canada, not just the governing party and those who supported it.

[May 1st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I want to be respectful of the member's question, which was more of a comment than a question.

The Prime Minister did stand up in a couple of sessions prior to the constituency break. Whether he answered the questions is a matter of perspective. We do not believe that he answered the questions. It is talking points 101 over and over again. Does that help Parliament? No.

Did the member across the floor listen to my speech? Did he listen to the fact that it was about estimates reform, about less scrutiny of how the government spends money? It was about the government's own purpose, not Parliament's purpose, to streamline its own initiatives, so we would have less scrutiny votes, less votes on money issues, and eight weeks less of debate.

Did the member hear those elements, or is this all about the Prime Minister being able to waltz in here and avoid questions? I think that is what he just said it is about.

[May 1st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand today to speak to a number of issues surrounding the question of privilege and also the proposal the government brought forward. In recent hours there has been discussion regarding some accommodation, or what government members think is accommodation, to see whether or not we can move forward.

There is one premise that overrides all of this based on what I have heard from constituents this week. I had a very serious conversation yesterday over coffee with someone who is heavily involved in provincial government. The conversation revolved around how it is unprecedented in our country's history that a government would make changes unilaterally to the Standing Orders without the consent of the other parties. We boil it down to the fact that the government feels so empowered and so entitled that it wants to force its will upon the institution of Parliament. This is unprecedented in our country.

We are watching the Liberals go down a different avenue today from what we saw leading up to the constituency weeks from which we have just returned. We see them manoeuvring in a way to try to soften the approach, but the bottom line is it is still the same approach. They will force their will on Parliament on issues of the Standing Orders which, up to this point in the history of our country, have been primarily decided by unanimous consent. Unanimous consent means the will of the people, the will of all the people, not just the ones who voted for the government in the last election, but the ones I represent on the opposition side and the ones who voted for other opposition members on all of the opposition benches today.

If we really want to distill it to the point where we are today, I would say that is setting a very dangerous precedent not just for the next number of decades, but for our future as a country. This is the House of the people. When we change the rules of the House, we need to have all voices heard. We need to allow all voices to bring reasonable proposals to the table and all voices agree to those reasonable proposals.

On a number of fronts, in my personal portfolio now as the Treasury Board critic I have been dealing with estimates reform. Estimates reform was put on the table early on by the government and by the President of the Treasury Board. I want to speak to some of that today, because this is part of what the government wants to unilaterally impose on Parliament through changing the Standing Orders. It is not something which the government is prepared to step back on or moderate in any way.

We have spoken. Some of these changes are wise. However, that said, unilaterally imposing them on Parliament is wrong, number one. Number two is that these are changes which the government could undertake, and should undertake, and we agree with the President of the Treasury Board, in the current system without changing the Standing Orders. The four pillars of the Liberals' premise of changing and improving the estimates in aligning them with the budget are all items that could be undertaken within government offices, within government bureaucratic structures right now. They could be done, and there is no need to change the Standing Orders.

When we distill this one, it is that forever Standing Orders need to be changed for the convenience of the government and for the convenience of the people who work within the ministries and the bureaucracy of government.

As I said, there are reasonable explanations and discussions that could be had around these things if there were not such a digging in and arrogance of the government that we see over and over again. The Liberals say, “We know best. We are just going to do it. We do not care what the rest of the country thinks. We do not care what the opposition members think in their representation of the people who elected them in this country. Let us find a way to do this unilaterally. We do not have to worry about the opposition.” In our parliamentary system the Liberals have that luxury because they have a majority government.

I am here today to talk, to some extent, about the reasons and the comments that have been presented around estimates reform in terms of what it would mean for our country.

Any change needs to be unanimous. It should not be done by a government. It can be done that way, and I understand the Liberals are going to ram it through in a different government motion, but it would be much better to do it in a unanimous fashion.

The key, paramount element of estimates reform is it would drastically reduce the time Parliament would have to examine how the government plans to spend taxpayers' money. Let me put that in a different way. We should ask this question of Parliament: what is the appropriate amount of scrutiny for the spending of taxpayers' dollars? That is what we are talking about here. What is the appropriate amount of time for parliamentarians in considering what the government is proposing to spend, what it actually spends, and along the way refining those estimates by saying there are things in the estimates that we think should be questioned on behalf of our taxpayers, the people we represent.

When considering this proposal for estimates reform, let us not forget what we are trying to do here. We are trying to streamline the process in such a way that Parliament would have less time for scrutiny. The question then is, what is the appropriate amount of time for Parliament to have scrutiny?

Right now, the proposal is to move estimates up to May 1, to align with budgets. Estimates currently have to be tabled by March 31, so we would be missing the time between March 31 and May 1 for parliamentarians to take those numbers, crunch them, see what they mean, and bring them to the floor of the House, as we typically do, and ask our questions, not only on the floor of the House but also in committee, where it is of utmost importance. In committee we often have the advice and counsel of our parliamentary budget officer.

Let me read some quotes from our parliamentary budget officer with regard to the proposals put forward on estimates reform, which are now in a third or fourth iteration of being rammed through the House of Commons without unanimous consent.

This has been discussed since the start of this Parliament. It was one of the objectives of the President of the Treasury Board. He has said this is on their radar and is what they want to do as part of their mandate letter. It is all well and good for the government to say that, but there is a way to do it without diminishing scrutiny by Parliament.

I would like to address some of what has been said by independent thinking bodies, including the parliamentary budget officer's considerations of reforming what is called the business of supply, which is equivalent to estimates reform. This is a direct quote from the parliamentary budget officer from November 22, 2016, from page 11 of his report. He stated:

PBO acknowledges that the Government's proposal to delay the main estimates seeks to address a problem identified by parliamentarians regarding the absence of budget initiatives in the main estimates.

What the parliamentary budget officer is saying is that we could have better alignment. We agree. However, the government can do this without changing the Standing Orders. Many countries that have gone down this road have fixed budget dates. That is one of the tools available for the government. If the government wanted to fix the budget day to a certain time frame, then we could align estimates to that time frame. That is a simple solution, without changing the Standing Orders. It could be the choice of the government to do that, as many countries have done.

The quote of the parliamentary budget officer continues:

That said, Parliamentarians will need to determine whether the cumbersome workaround of creating a new interim estimates, appropriating money based on the previous year’s financial estimates, releasing a new main estimates in May and eliminating the spring supplementary estimates, is the best approach to meet their needs.

We have not had a discussion around the best approach to meet our needs. There has been no discussion of what this means that I am aware of. Rather, it has been an arbitrary statement of “Here is what we propose to do. Let's have sessions to show it to all parliamentarians of all parties and then tell them this is what we are going to do”, without much, if any, deep consideration of what it means for the long-term Standing Orders that make this House tick and are the rules of the floor of this House.

Ultimately the current government will be in opposition one day and will be sitting on this side of the House. Just as governments have changed over the decades and the course of our history, so too will the Liberals be over here. I cannot imagine, having been here almost nine years now, what the outrage would have been if our previous prime minister, Prime Minister Harper, had suggested that he would come into this House and put through changes to Standing Orders on this basis. We had a study of the Standing Orders to gain consensus. We were not able to get consensus, so we did not bring the changes forward. The current government seems so entitled, so arrogant, that it thinks it is entitled to determine a change for the course of this country on this floor. It is absolutely staggering to think how much arrogance that takes.

Another quote from the parliamentary budget officer states:

Unless the Government is able to present a clear plan to reform its internal management processes, this example shows that it is unlikely that delaying the release of the main estimates by eight weeks will provide full alignment with the budget.

This deep analysis of what estimate reforms mean, done by an independent officer of the government, it suggests that reducing the eight weeks of scrutiny that this House would have over estimates may not even return the result the government is looking for. I will grant that some alignments may be improved, but ultimately the total alignment of budgets and estimates will be determined by the government of the day when it tables its budget. It can determine that. It can have estimates align with the budget without changing the Standing Orders, yet the current government stands firm in saying that this is off the table, that there will be no discussion, that the government still wants the prerogative of tabling budgets when it wishes.

If we look at the history of the country, we see there were some periods when no budgets were tabled—and for good reason, in terms of what this House has to consider with respect to government spending—yet we are suddenly being told by the current government that it wants to maintain all of those privileges and prerogatives and that the opposition does not matter, because the Liberals were elected with a majority, which was 39% of the vote. When we won a majority government with those kinds of numbers, that majority was howled at by this side of the House. The opposition said that we had no legitimacy because we were elected with 39.5% of the vote. I look at what this means in the context of the long term and in the context of the hypocrisy being shown by the government side. When the Liberals were in opposition, they said that this approach was not acceptable because of the percentage of votes that we received when we were elected; now, all of a sudden, they are saying they have a mandate from all of the people and they do not have to consider the opposition on this one.

They are saying, “Let us just reduce the opposition's scrutiny on estimates. Let us reduce the amount of time the opposition has, and ultimately, if we continue the process and think it through, it means fewer confidence votes for the opposition.” Ultimately, that is what it means if we align the two and we do not have votes on supply, which are all confidence motions, and this House knows it.

Time and time again confidence motions come to the floor of this House, and they are at a time when the people can speak with some authority—not the 39%, but the ones who voted for opposition members, if they so choose. It has happened in our history, but the government does not want as many opportunities for that to happen. That is ultimately what the government is saying: “We want to reduce our risk factors as government in terms of confidence votes.”

I will continue with quotes from the parliamentary budget officer. There are a number of of them, and I think they are all worthy. The words are in the context of the report of the parliamentary budget officer, who has spoken quite a number of times on this issue, and I think they highlight not only the concerns that we have been raising to this point in this debate but also the concerns that our independent, non-partisan parliamentary budget officer brings to the table.

Here is a third quote:

The Government asserts that the Parliament does not play a meaningful role in financial scrutiny.

This is what the government asserts. The parliamentary budget officer disagrees with this view, stating in the report:

We note that notwithstanding the Government's performance information of admittedly poor quality, and their inability to reconcile the Government's spending proposals, parliamentarians have performed a commendable job of asking pertinent questions in standing committee hearings, Question Period and Committee of the Whole.

What has the parliamentary budget officer observed here and what has he reported on? He is saying the system works well in terms of scrutiny. He is saying the right balance is struck.

Why do we have to do it for the convenience of the administration of government? Why do we have to do it for the convenience of the minister? Why do we have to do it in order to reduce the powers of the opposition? This is what the government is driving at. The government is driving at reducing the powers of the opposition to hold the government to account. That is why we were put into opposition: to strike that balance. That balance, right now, is being threatened by the government. The government is taking another approach to accomplish the same types of results that it wanted previously.

Has the government dropped some of the more contentious things? I understand it has. I have been held up with delays in terms of travel, so I have not yet been able to read all of the discussions that have gone on, but when it comes to estimates reform, what the government could do today is act on reforming the estimates without changing the Standing Orders.

I stand here today as the opposition critic for the Treasury Board to oppose the reduction of the opposition's ability to hold the government to account and to be able to be the voice of the majority of the people, who did not vote for the present government.

We accept the results. I am not in any way, shape, or form diminishing that, but to say today that the government can unilaterally come into this House, put a motion on the floor, vote on it because it has the majority, and shove it down the throat of the opposition and the other people who care about the scrutiny of spending in government, who care about how dollars are spent, is absolutely wrong. It is something the government should not be doing.

[Taxation, April 13th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, during the last election, do members remember what the Prime Minister promised? It was small, modest deficits.

Since then, the Prime Minister has been nickel-and-diming Canadians by raising taxes and eliminating tax credits. This week, the Liberals tabled 300 pages of billions of dollars of new taxes and user fees on struggling Canadians, including increases for passports, fishing licences, and permits for small businesses.

How much more will these Liberals take out of the pockets of hard-working Canadians?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, April 10th, 2017]

With regard to meetings between Ministers, including the Prime Minister, and Canada 2020, since November 4, 2015: (a) what are the details of all meetings between Ministers and the President of Canada 2020, including (i) date, (ii) location, (iii) meeting description, (iv) list of attendees; and (b) what are the details of all meetings between Ministers and one of the co-founders of Canada 2020, including (i) date, (ii) location, (iii) meeting description, (iv) list of attendees, (v) name of co-founder?