Pierre Poilievre

[Finance, April 18th, 2018]

Says the President of the Treasury Board who was the greatest defender of the sponsorship scandal anywhere in Canada, Mr. Speaker.

He now expects us to believe that the novel he held up, which he calls his “budget book”, has any legal weight in restricting on what the government spends this $7 billion no-strings-attached Liberal slush fund.

What crisis justifies giving those Liberal ministers the power to spend that money with no restrictions right in an election year?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 1, April 16th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, the member from British Columbia is a great champion for entrepreneurship. He understands that entrepreneurship is about allowing people to produce prosperity for themselves, their families, and their communities. That is one of the points of distinction between this side and that side. As he correctly points out, governments tax industries and people into submission. As Reagan put it, “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

We see it over and over again. Let us just consider the current example of the Trans Mountain pipeline. The government has wrapped the project in so much bureaucratic red tape that the proponent has suggested that the project may no longer be economically viable and they may cancel it altogether. Now the government is saying, “It is okay. We will just take taxpayers' money to prop up what we have been holding down.” One wonders why it did not just get out of the way in the first place and let this ecologically friendly, safe, and secure project go ahead without so much burden.

Again, the government imposes taxes, regulations, and other costs until businesses finally cannot operate. Then it says that it needs to spend more money to prop up all these failing businesses. We saw it impose massive new taxes on small businesses, or at least attempt to, in the fall, before we stopped it. Simultaneously, it is saying that we need billions of dollars of corporate welfare to save businesses from collapse. Why not just get out of the way in the first place, so that enterprise can rely on investment and sales to generate its revenues and pay its bills, rather than constantly forcing businesses to hire lobbyists, suck up to politicians, and turn to government?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 1, April 16th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I like the member as well. He talks about the Liberal approach to tax fairness. In the last election, the Prime Minister said that he would go after wealthy tax cheats. It was not until after the election that we found out whom he meant. He meant pizza shop owners, farmers, and welders who own small businesses. He meant waitresses who might get a discount on a sandwich during their break at the restaurant. He meant diabetics, from whom his government attempted to take away the disability tax credit. Those were the wealthy tax cheats the Prime Minister had in mind.

That reminds us that whenever government gets big, costly, and expensive, it is always the working class that pays the bills. That is because capital and higher income people are more mobile. They have the ability to reap the benefits of big government without absorbing the cost. Of course, workers do not have the same ability. They cannot hire a fancy accountant or move their money offshore. They cannot get on a plane and just move somewhere else to work for another company around the world somewhere. As a result, when all the bills come due for big government programs, it is always working people who end up shouldering the burdens.

The solution to that is to contain government and allow people to keep more of what they earn to expand free enterprise, a system based on voluntary exchange, where one can get ahead only by offering something to someone else that is worth more to that person than it costs to pay for it. That system of voluntary exchange and free markets has lifted literally billions of people around the world out of poverty. It is the number one determinant of economic success, and it is the greatest invention for the creation of material prosperity and the defeat of poverty ever conceived by any human being.

I am sure the hon. member from the NDP would agree with that.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 1, April 16th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly can, as a matter of fact. She said we would not have seen Canada as the fastest job-creation jurisdiction in the G7 if Conservative policies were in place. Actually, that is exactly what we saw. When the great global recession struck here in Canada, we had the best job record anywhere in the G7. In fact, we were the last country to go into deficit and the last country to go into recession, and we were the first to come out of recession. That was the result of careful planning in the good times.

In the years leading up to that great global recession, which originated outside our borders, our previous finance minister, Jim Flaherty, paid off $40 billion in debt so that we had a cushion and could absorb those external shocks. We then quickly recovered and turned that short-term, externally caused deficit into a surplus so that when the next worldwide shock struck, the 70% drop in oil prices in late 2014, we were once again insulated against its effects, and we were able to move forward with a solid economic position. That is a good reminder that when times are good, we should squirrel away everything we can so that we are prepared for the bad times that may come ahead.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 1, April 16th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, there are only two questions that Parliament must ask when presented with a budget: what does it cost us, and what do we get for it as Canadians?

Let us start with the cost of this budget. Costs are borne out through government in three ways: spending, debt, and taxes. Debt and taxes are the symptoms; spending is the cause. Whatever Parliament agrees to allow the government to spend, it must ultimately tax or borrow from the citizens and from bondholders.

The Liberal government loves to spend. The stats show that it has been increasing spending at an annual rate of roughly 6.5% to 7% per year, which is three times the combined rate of inflation and population growth. In other words, spending is growing three times as fast as the need. That spending, of course, requires a source. The government has been plundering taxpayers and borrowing to pay for that spending ever since it took office.

Let me talk briefly about the government's approach to spending. In an adjoining piece of legislation to this budget bill, the government will attempt to change the way in which Parliament approves the executive branch's expenditure of money. We, as Canadians, live in the British parliamentary system, which for roughly 800 years has meant that the power of the purse rests with the elected officials and that the crown cannot spend what Parliament does not approve. That principle originated in the fields of Great Britain at the time that King John signed the Magna Carta.

Typically governments have come forward before the House of Commons with detailed spending plans, item by item, agency by agency, department by department, and purpose by purpose, saying “Here is what we want to spend. Here is what it is for.” Then, Parliament has scrutinized that spending and passed it, and that government has been restricted by the specificity that it put in that legislation. In other words, it can only spend the money on the things it said it would, and only in the amounts that it said it would spend.

Instead, this year the government wants to do something that has only once been done in Canadian history, and then only during a crisis, and that is for Parliament to approve $7 billion of discretionary spending, which ministers on the government's Treasury Board can spend whatever they want on, as long as it stays under that $7-billion limit.

As I said, normally that $7 billion would be carefully earmarked in the main estimates that come before the House, and we as parliamentarians would approve or reject it. If it were approved, then the government would have to spend each dollar where it said it would. However, not this time.

The government has changed the system in a way that allows the government to have a big bundle of cash for a group of politicians sitting on the Treasury Board to allocate as they wish. As it stands, based on the system of financial reporting, the results of that spending will only come out in subsequent public accounts.

The public accounts for the fiscal year we have just entered will not come out until the fall of 2019. As members all know, we will be in an election at that time, and therefore those accounts cannot be tabled in the House until after the election. What the government is asking us to do is approve $7 billion of discretionary spending, and it will get back to us after the election on how it spent it.

One example of the attitude of the government to spending money was what the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Finance was saying. He was bragging that the government has spent an extra $1 billion on tax collectors. Normally, most governments blush when they talk about the resources they put into tax collecting departments. The Liberal government openly brags about it.

We all know that tax collection is necessary for any functional country. We also know that given their druthers, the Canadian people would like to see lower taxes and lower costs, and less money spent on bureaucrats hounding our small businesses and workers, as has become the customary practice of the government. We have seen tax collectors go after the tips of waitresses, shoe salesmen's discounts, and the disability tax credit for people suffering with diabetes.

However, the government brags openly about its expenditure on those same tax collectors, which is the Liberal approach to spending: Spend more. Spend now. Spend faster. What does that bring? It brings debt, which is the next pillar of the current Liberal government's plan. It is more debt.

The Liberals ran in the last election on a $10-billion deficit, which meant they would increase the national debt by a mere $10 billion a year. In the first two budgets, that deficit was twice what they promised. This time, it will be three times what they promised. Not only that, they promised that the deficit would be gone by 2019, which is next year. Now they say that will not happen for another quarter century. During that time, Canada's national government will add almost half a trillion dollars in additional debt. That assumes that the government introduces no additional spending in the upcoming pre-election budget next year—an unlikely story. It also assumes that direct program spending will only go up by about 1.5% over the next five years, when the government has been increasing that spending at a rate of about 5.5% since it took office. Therefore, we are expected to believe that the Prime Minister is a new man, that he has changed, and that he will not increase spending at 5.5% but only 1.5%. Who believes that the Prime Minister has even the intention of changing his ways, when his words have not suggested that he believes restraint is necessary?

Originally the government told us that its plan, its anchor, was that the deficit must never be more than $10 billion. Now the Liberals have shattered that promise. The Liberals said their anchor was that they would not add more than $25 billion total. Well, they have already done almost double that in new debt since taking office. They released that anchor as well.

However, the new anchor that the Liberals say will guide them in their spending is that the debt-to-GDP ratio will decline. That is, the debt will never be allowed to grow faster than the economy. Now, there are problems with using that measurement as an anchor, which I will list. One, the debt-to-GDP ratio of the Government of Canada is an incomplete measure of the country's ability to withstand indebtedness.

The Canadian government is supported by taxpayers. Those taxpayers have to support other levels of government which also have debt. Alberta is adding almost $10 billion to its debt this year, which means that one-fifth of every expenditure that the Government of Alberta makes is paid for by borrowing. Ontario has doubled its debt in the last 10 years alone, and it is the most indebted subnational government in North America. Atlantic provinces are similarly indebted. Their aging populations will retire in disproportionately large numbers, meaning fewer taxpayers and more people needing health care at a time when their provinces are already struggling with large debt interest payments to lenders. Therefore, the same taxpayers that the federal government are relying on to support the federal debt also have provincial debts that are growing exponentially. Finally, those taxpayers have personal debts, which happen to be among the largest in the OECD. Right now, the average Canadian household has $1.70 in personal debt for every dollar in disposable income.

If we take the personal debt, the corporate debt, and the government debt of the entire economy, it is three times the size of GDP, which is a larger ratio than Greece, Spain, or other basket cases on debt around the world. This is according to Gluskin Sheff, which is a major financial firm that performed that calculation just a month and a half ago. Therefore, if we take all the debt that the Canadian economy is supporting, we are in a worse financial position today than is Greece.

The government just assumes that all of its good luck will continue. Oil prices have doubled. The American economy is roaring. The world economy has picked up. Interest rates have been at historic lows. The real estate bubble in Toronto and Vancouver has created a short-term and unsustainable employment boom and revenue for the government it cannot count on. All of these events are temporary. They are out of the government's control, and they could be gone just as quickly as they appeared.

If we are running massive, promise-shattering deficits today, while lady luck is smiling, how will we pay the bills when she starts to frown? The government has not prepared for those eventualities. In fact, its arbitrary debt-to-GDP ratio anchor creates a whole series of perverse policy incentives.

The debt is the numerator in that measurement, and the GDP is the denominator. If we were hit with a financial crisis that caused the GDP to shrink, to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio, as the government claims is its promise, it would actually have to cut spending dramatically in the middle of a recession, which is exactly the opposite of what it claims should be done during such economic times. It would have to cut spending to reduce the size of government faster than the economy overall was reducing in size, and it would have to do so in a way that would allow it to run budget surpluses in order to pay down the debt at a faster rate than the economy was shrinking.

Who in the House would really think it was responsible to prepare for a rainy day by suggesting that if a financial crisis were a problem and an external threat were to arise, the solution, according to the government's plan, would be to cut spending and dramatically reduce the government's ability to respond? That is effectively what the government's current anchor would require it to do to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio in the event that a crisis came along and shrunk the GDP. Nevertheless, that is the anchor it chooses to rely upon as it goes forward.

That brings me to taxes, because, as we know, today's deficits are tomorrow's taxes. The government cannot ultimately spend any money that it does not tax, either by taking it out of the pockets of people today or by forcing them to pay interest on debt tomorrow. That interest, by the way, is going to rise by one-third over the next five years under the government's plan, from about $25 billion to $32 billion. That is an increase of $7 billion or $8 billion in the amount Canadian taxpayers will give wealthy bondholders. That is another wealth transfer, by the way, from the working class to the super-rich. That always happens through higher taxes.

What do we know about the government's record already on taxes? According to the Fraser Institute, which conducted an objective and scientific analysis of the taxes paid by middle-class Canadians, 80% are already paying higher taxes under this government, on average $800 more. With other projected tax increases, those the government has already legislated or committed to, it will be about 90% of Canadian taxpayers, and they will pay, on average, over $2,000 more in taxes once the government's full plan is implemented.

Taxpayers are already contributing more to feed the government's insatiable, uncontrollable spending. However, the government is just getting started. It has an additional carbon tax it wants everyone to pay. That tax is laid out in a 206-page section of the budget bill we are now debating. Let us step back a minute and ask ourselves what we were told about this carbon tax.

First, we were told that it would be revenue neutral, that the government would cut taxes as much as it raised them. While people might pay more for gas, groceries, electricity, and other basic essentials, they would get an income tax break or perhaps a consumption tax break. As a result, it would be a strictly neutral transaction shifting taxes from what we earn to what we burn. That was the promise. However, nowhere in these 206 pages of legislation on the federal carbon tax is there any mention of a tax reduction to offset the new burden to be paid by Canadian taxpayers for the carbon tax.

Second, we were told that the carbon tax would be simple. There would be a wholesale levy, and then the marketplace would do its work. The government would put a price on something we do not want, and people would therefore consume less of it, that being carbon-intensive goods, and the problem would solve itself. We would not need all this bureaucracy: regulators, administrators, rules, and accountants to administer the tax on the end of the small business or household. That would all be behind us.

We now have the legislation, and it is 206 pages long. There are permits. There are credits that could be traded between provinces, and there are different rates of taxation for different kinds of carbon products, all of which will have to be sorted out through endless paperwork by high-priced accountants and lawyers who will then administer this scheme.

This carbon tax, as established by this legislation, would benefit some. It would benefit those who are wealthy and well-connected and who have the ability to get their hands on the resulting revenue.

Ontario already has a carbon tax, and while it takes one-third more of the income of a low-income household than that of a rich household, it provides benefits to people who can afford to buy a $150,000 electric Tesla. If someone is a millionaire and can buy a Tesla, that person will get $15,000 as a bonus, but a low-income single mom trying to keep the lights on or pay for gas to get to work will pay more so that the rich guy can have his fancy electric car. It is another wealth transfer to the privileged elite using government as the delivery mechanism to move money from those who earned it to the privileged few who did not.

Herein lies the worst part of the carbon tax, and it is the cover-up, the carbon tax cover-up. For the last two years, I have asked the Liberal government what it would cost the average family to pay the $50-a-tonne carbon tax. The good news is that the government has that information. I know, because I submitted access to information requests for which it released the information. However, it released the information with some black ink over the numbers. We are not allowed to know the numbers. We know there is a cost, and we know that the government knows the cost, but it does not want us to know the cost.

This is the first time in my parliamentary career that a government has imposed a tax without telling people what it will cost them. The basic principle of parliamentary democracy is that the commoners must approve any tax the common people must pay, but we cannot approve what we do not know. If the government is so proud of its carbon tax, why does it not tell people what it will cost them?

Finally, the government will not tell us how much greenhouse gases will be reduced. We do not know the cost and we do not know the benefit, yet we are supposed to judge the cost-to-benefit analysis.

This budget costs too much and will achieve too little, so I am moving a motion to amend the budget bill. I move:

That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following: the House decline to give second reading to Bill C-74, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on February 27, 2018 and other measures, since the Bill: (a) fails to address the cost of the government's carbon tax to the average Canadian Family; (b) neglects to implement, or to even mention, the government's promise of a balanced budget; and (c) will continue on the path of adding debt at twice the rate foreshadowed by the Minister of Finance.

[Opportunity for Workers with Disabilities Act, April 16th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her question. First of all, I would like to make it clear that the government should never punish people who work. It should never take back more than a dollar for each dollar a person earns.

The system we have in Canada right now can make things better or worse, depending on the province and the individual situation. In some cases, people end up worse off when they decide to work, increase their hours, or get a raise. I think we can all agree that nobody should ever be in a situation where the effective tax rate exceeds 100%. That does happen in some cases in this country. The finance minister should do the math to make sure nobody ends up being penalized for working.

[Opportunity for Workers with Disabilities Act, April 16th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question, and I will address the two questions in reverse order. I have reached out to the current public services minister, who was the disabilities minister, to discuss this bill. She was very receptive. However, she was obviously unable to commit to government support, or opposition. I am looking forward to seeing the government's bill with respect to making workplaces more inviting to people with disabilities. I am sure there will be many good measures included in that bill.

The member also pointed to Mark Walker's success at employing people with disabilities, to great profitable success in the six Tim Hortons that Mark Walker owns. All of the performance metrics were higher because of, not in spite of, the fact that about 200 of his employees have disabilities. The service at the window was faster at the Tim Hortons that Mark Walker runs than it was on Camp Day when all of us politicians go to work at Tim Hortons. It was actually about half of the service time when persons with disabilities were doing the work than when the bigwigs like us were standing there trying to figure out how to do it. In the United States, Randy Lewis of the huge Walgreens distribution centre and the ruthlessly profitable business that it runs, became one of the most profitable in the company's entire ecosystem when 1,000 people with disabilities went to work there.

Again and again, we underestimate people. This bill gives them a chance to prove all of their worth to contribute and be their best.

[Opportunity for Workers with Disabilities Act, April 16th, 2018]

moved that Bill C-395, An Act to amend the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, work is a basic human need. Its wages feed, clothe, and shelter us. It offers the pride and purpose of doing something valuable for others. Work makes us a living. It also helps us to make a life. That is why almost a million Canadians with disabilities work—including about 300,000 with severe disabilities, according to Statistics Canada—but the system effectively bans many more from working. It is called the “welfare wall”, and here is how it works.

When people with disabilities earn a paycheque, governments sharply claw back supports for income, housing, medications, and other help. These clawbacks, plus taxes, mean that often people are poorer when they work more. They are stuck behind the welfare wall.

For example, if a person with disabilities who is earning the minimum wage in Saskatchewan goes from working part time to working full time, he would see his take-home pay drop from $21,600 to $21,500 on an annual basis. That is right: he is working double the hours and making less money at the end of the year.

Just read the social assistance website in New Brunswick:

For example, a single mother with one child may receive $861 each month. If she has no income at all, she would receive the full $861. If she has income of $300 a month, then she would receive $561 in social assistance.

Therefore, she makes $300 and immediately loses $300. It is like a tax rate of 100%, and that does not include other taxes, such as income taxes, payroll taxes, and gas taxes to drive to work, or clawbacks of non-cash benefits such as housing and medication. When all of these different work penalties are added together, many have a negative wage for working.

Mark Wafer, who hired 200 workers with disabilities at his Tim Hortons shops, once asked an official with the Ontario government, “What is the best way to get off disability assistance?” She replied, “Die”.

That is not just the experience of an entrepreneur talking to government; that is the insight of Canada's former chief statistician, Dr. Munir Sheikh, who wrote:

... in Canada, many inappropriate tax-transfer policies have helped to condemn people to being trapped behind low-income and poverty walls and, rather than improving social mobility, may have worsened it: we refer to it as the Zero Dollar Linda model following the work of social policy expert John Stapleton, who examined the incentives that caused a Toronto woman, Linda Chamberlain, to return to social assistance after a successful attempt to rejoin the workforce.

Chamberlain's story is a tragic one. “After three decades of battling schizophrenia and homelessness and poverty, Chamberlain finally got a job”, wrote Toronto Star columnist Catherine Porter. As a reward, the government boosted Linda's rent almost 500% and cut her disability payment, making her $260 a month poorer because she worked. Therefore, she had no choice but to quit and remain in poverty on social assistance, ironically at greater cost to the system.

Linda is not alone. Statistics Canada surveyed people with disabilities who were not in the labour force even though they indicated they could work or had worked in the past. I quote Statistics Canada's findings: roughly 94,000 people reported that if they were employed, they felt they would lose additional support. About 82,000 people reported that they expected their income to drop if they worked.

It is time to knock down this welfare wall. It is time to allow people to earn a living. It is time to pass Bill C-395, the opportunity for workers with disabilities act.

This legislation would require governments to permit these workers to keep more in wages than they lose in clawbacks and taxes. It would do this through measurement, action, and enforcement.

First is measurement. The bill would require Finance Canada to calculate how much governments take away in taxes and clawbacks of income, housing, medication, and other help for each thousand dollars a worker with disabilities earns. This calculation would only use publicly available tax and benefit rules, not personal financial information.

Second is action. If the calculation shows people were losing more than they gained from work, within 30 days the finance minister would have to identify and report to Parliament changes to tax and benefit programs that would fix the problem. He might adjust federal disability tax credits, the CPP disability plan, or any other federal measure to make work pay.

Third is enforcement. Provinces must already meet numerous existing federal conditions in exchange for billions of dollars in federal transfer payments. This legislation would add one more condition that would require provincial taxes and benefits to always allow people with disabilities to gain more than they lose from work. To be clear, the federal government would not dictate how provincial policies work; rather, it would instill one simple principle: do not punish people with disabilities for working. Provinces would have total liberty in how they instill this principle.

For example, in British Columbia, people used to lose their drug coverage if they got a job and left welfare. That is not the case anymore. Economist Kevin Milligan, who advised the governing party on its platform, wrote, B.C. “replaced an 'all or nothing' program for social assistance recipients with one that is income-tested and more gently smoothed out as incomes rise. This had the effect of removing a very tall 'welfare wall' that provided a disincentive to work for people on benefits.” Similar solutions can allow other Canadians to get jobs without losing life-saving medications.

Respecting the bill and allowing people with disabilities to work could save taxpayers money. Data from the Ontario government showed that if one person on disability assistance gets a $17-an-hour job, the government saves $14,000 in benefits and collects an extra $1,000 in taxes. Imagine what we would save if we knocked down the welfare wall and freed tens of thousands of workers with disabilities to earn a living and escape poverty.

Speaking of poverty, the best anti-poverty plan is a job. If an individual is of working age but lives in a household where no one works, that person has a 50% likelihood of living in poverty today. However, if an individual works full-time year-round, that person will only have a 3% chance of being poor.

The same is true for people with disabilities, who generally have a higher poverty rate. However, people with disabilities who are employed are only 8% likely to be below the poverty line. Let me give the House a startling example.

Let us put two people side by side, one who has a disability and a job and the other who has no disability and no job. The second person is more than twice as likely to be below the poverty line, which shows that it is joblessness more than disability that causes poverty, and it is not just material poverty.

While we are always told how dangerous it is to overwork, we often forget the greater danger to health and happiness of not working at all. Allow me to quote former British Medical Journal editor Dr. Richard Smith, who said, “Unemployment raises the chance that a man will die in the next decade by about a third. The men are most likely to die from suicide, cancer, and accidents and violence. ... Separation, divorce, and family violence are also linked with unemployment.”

He went on, “But it is mental health that is most harmed by unemployment. The unemployed experience anxiety, depression, neurotic disorders, poor self-esteem, and disturbed sleep patterns, and they are more likely than the employed not only to kill themselves but also to injure themselves deliberately.”

Dr. Diette, a Washington and Lee University economist, wanted to determine if unemployment causes bad mental health or if it is just the other way around. He studied the mental health of people who had never before experienced serious psychological distress. Those who went on to lose their jobs later became at least 125% more likely to suffer such psychological distress than those who kept working.

Elsewhere, researchers tested 1,000 laid-off Danish shipyard workers for psychiatric symptoms during a three-year follow-up period. He found these workers suffered worse mental health results than other workers who kept their jobs at a different shipyard. Here we have a very large sample size of people in the same country and in the same industry. Those who were not working went on to suffer far worse mental health than their counterparts who continued to have jobs.

Some would say, “Of course unemployment harms health and happiness. People without jobs are stressed about money”, but that is only part of the story. University of Zurich economist Dr. Winkelmann found that life satisfaction for unemployed German men was significantly lower on a scale of 1 to 10 than for working German men, even when their total incomes were the same. How can this be? We are always told that work is a necessary but miserable slog, and we would all be happier retiring at 30. Trendy TED talkers are always talking about this amazing future when robots will do all the work for us, yet evidence proves that people are happier and healthier working, even when money is no issue.

Why is that?

First, it is because work makes us valuable to others. Tibet's Nobel Prize-winning spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and the American Enterprise Institute president wrote together that virtually all the world's religions teach us that diligent work in the service of others is our highest nature and thus lies at the centre of a happy life. In one shocking experiment, researchers found that senior citizens who did not feel useful to others were nearly three times as likely to die prematurely as those who did feel useful. That is especially true for people with disabilities, whose skills and contributions are often undervalued by ignorant attitudes and small-minded people.

Second, work connects us to one another. A workday is a constant flow of exchanges of goods, services, emails, phone calls, handshakes, questions and answers that link us together, and in each of these exchanges a worker is important to someone else. That is especially true of people who might be isolated and lonely. Their work colleagues form a social network, and even a family. A worker matters to his colleagues. He has a name, and as the Cheers jingle taught us so many years ago, sometimes we want to go where everybody knows our name.

Third, work puts us in control of our lives, which is a basic human need. “One of the most prevalent fears people have is losing control”, wrote psychologist Dr. Elliot Cohen. Welfare surrenders our control to a system in which politicians we do not know make decisions that shape our lives. Through work, however, we take control of our lives. We do, rather than being done to. We become active players, not passive observers. We are the independent authors of our lives.

For these reasons, work is a blessing, not a burden. A system that robs people of this blessing is not only foolish but inhumane. Therefore, let us knock down this welfare wall and open up opportunity for people with disabilities to earn a great living and live a great life.

[Justice, March 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, I have a point of order. As you know, it is unparliamentary to point out the absence or presence of a member in the House of Commons. However, earlier today the Prime Minister was extolling the virtues of the billions of dollars of spending that he complains our party voted against during the lengthy estimates voting process.

I simply point out that he did not vote for 15 hours straight. If he actually believed any of it was meritorious, why did he not stand in his place?

[Taxation, March 28th, 2018]

Mr. Speaker, the question was whether he would exempt middle-class taxpayers from his 11¢ a litre tax on gas. It is a disproportionately high expense for middle and low-income people, and he will make it even higher.

I will ask him a different question, because he evaded the last one.

I asked an official yesterday how much the carbon tax would cost the average middle-class family?” The response was “That information is something I can't share with you at this time.” Could the Prime Minister share that information with Canadians at this time?