Mr. Speaker, in the debate on Bill C-45, the concerns of the Liberal opposition fall into two categories.
First, from a procedural point of view, the government is again trying to jam Parliament, making sensible debate very difficult and rendering any votes on the bill both muddled and meaningless, all because Bill C-45 is another offensive omnibus bill, one that exceeds every legitimate precedent and that clearly constitutes an abuse of power.
Second, when economic growth is slowing to a crawl; when Canadian productivity is worse than we thought; when household debts are reaching dangerous proportions; and when worldwide financial risks are “alarmingly high”, to use the words of the IMF, Bill C-45 is stunningly complacent. There is nothing significant to promote growth, jobs, innovation and productivity, or to achieve genuine sustainable development in one of the world's most important resource economies, or to foster a dynamic and successful middle class, or to combat growing inequality between different sectors, regions and demographic groups.
On the procedural point, so-called omnibus bills obviously bundle several different measures together. Within reasonable limits, such legislation can be managed through Parliament if the bill is coherent, meaning that all the different topics are interrelated and interdependent and if the overall volume of the bill is not overwhelming. That was the case before the government came to power in 2006.
When omnibus bills were previously used to implement key provisions of federal budgets, they averaged fewer than 75 pages in length and typically amended a handful of laws directly related to budgetary policy. In other words, they were coherent and not overwhelming.
However, under this regime the practice has changed. Omnibus bills since 2006 have averaged well over 300 pages, more than four times the previous norm. This latest one introduced last week had 556 sections, filled 443 pages and touched on 30 or more disconnected topics, everything from navigable waters to grain inspection, from disability plans to hazardous materials.
It is a complete dog's breakfast, and deliberately so. It is calculated to be so humongous and so convoluted, all in a single lump, that it cannot be intelligently examined and digested by a conscientious Parliament.
Worse still, routine matters and positive measures are interwoven willy-nilly with destructive and contentious issues so that at the end of the day there can be no clear vote on anything, and thus the basic reason for this House to exist, to vote and to decide, is subverted.
Clearly Bill C-45 and its immediate predecessor, Bill C-38, are an abuse of power, and there is no greater authority for that indictment than the Prime Minister himself. When he served in opposition, he complained bitterly about a rather tiny omnibus bill back in 1994 that dealt with just five interconnected topics and ran a grand total of 21 pages.
In high dudgeon at the time, the Prime Minister said that the modest bill was:
—so diverse that a single vote on the content would put members in conflict with their own principles.
He continued:
We can agree with some of the measures but oppose others. How do we express our views and the views of our constituents when the matters are so diverse? Dividing the bill into several components would allow members to represent views of their constituents on each of the different components in the bill.
He asked government members in particular to worry about the implications of omnibus bills for “democracy and the functionality of...Parliament”. That was the Prime Minister in 1994 complaining about a bill of a mere 21 pages.
By contrast, what we have before us today in Bill C-45 is massive, with more than 400 pages and more than 500 sections covering more than 30 different topics, amending more than 60 other pieces of legislation, some of which were never mentioned in the budget itself.
The Prime Minister must be totally twisted out of shape by this perversion of parliamentary democracy. It is either that or, now in power, his previous principles have become expendable. Canadians fear the latter is the case.
It is not just manipulative omnibus bills that break the rules of decent behaviour. It is also ministerial binges on $16 orange juice and lavish limousines and ornamental gazebos in Muskoka, all at the taxpayers' expense, and never a word of complaint from the Prime Minister. It is hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on the most self-serving tax-paid advertising, external crony consultants, a bloated cabinet and 30 extra totally unnecessary MPs. It is routinely invoking closure to stifle debate. It is forcing parliamentary committees to do the public's business in secret behind closed doors. It is ministers' offices interfering with the public's access to information. It is systematic personal attacks to discredit and intimidate charities, NGOs, public servants and parliamentary watchdogs from the budget officer to the Auditor General, from the information commissioner to Elections Canada. The government will try to shut up anyone who has the temerity to speak truth to power. Ultimately, all of this leads to bad governance, like the multi-billion dollar F-35 stealth fighter boondoggle, which both the Auditor General and the Parliamentary Budget Officer have depicted as dishonest and incompetent.
Expendable principles also lead to election financing fraud, for which the party opposite has been charged and convicted. It also leads to deceitful robocalls and tampering with people's right to vote. Abusive omnibus bills are part of that same matrix of wrongdoing with impunity.
How can this be fixed? The government accepted a Liberal idea last Thursday and Friday to carve out MP pension reforms, which were previously in Bill C-45, so they could be approved separately and immediately. That was a decent start. It proved that these bills are severable. Yesterday, the government accepted another Liberal suggestion to subdivide Bill C-45 for committee study. Instead of being sent as a single lump to the finance committee, the various subject matters in Bill C-45 will each be examined in detail by the House standing committee that has the appropriate expertise.
That is a very good second step. However, voting is the key. After all the debating is done, the vote will still remain convoluted because Bill C-45 will not be voted upon in sections or by topics but rather all together, at once, as one lump sum. That makes any such omnibus vote quite meaningless.
This too can be fixed. We call upon the government to structure the final vote on a topic-by-topic basis. It should not muddle scientific tax credits with bridges to Detroit, not confuse the IMF with the EI financing board, but should call separate and distinct votes on each of these topics and let the result be clear and honest.
With distinct and honest voting, and subject to the detailed review that will take place in the appropriate committees, there are certainly some measures in Bill C-45 that Liberals could support—for example, the IMF reforms, the CMHC adjustments, the concept of monetary penalties for violations of the internal trade agreement and, no doubt, others.
On some topics we would like to offer the government better alternatives. One example is the employment insurance hiring credit for small business. This measure is necessary only because the Conservatives are increasing the payroll tax burden on small businesses, indeed on all employers, each and every year. Last year and the year before and next year and the year after and every year into the foreseeable future, the government is increasing job-killing EI payroll taxes by some $600 million every year. Then it brags about a tax credit that gives back about $200 million. It takes away $600 million and gives back $200 million. As a consequence, employers are generally worse off. Those employers are paying more new Conservative taxes on jobs than they are getting back in any of the credits.
Business would have a greater incentive to generate new jobs if the government would just stop its annual payroll tax increases. When Liberals faced the challenge of a tough economy in the 1990s, we first froze EI payroll taxes and then we cut them, not once, not twice, but 12 consecutive times. We brought them down by more than 40%, and 3.5 million net new jobs were created. There is no room here to brag about the hiring credit. It is a temporary band-aid over the damage being done by higher and higher Conservative EI payroll taxes year after year.
Another area where Liberals would suggest a better idea has to do with the registered disability savings plans. The changes outlined in Bill C-45 are fine as far as they go. They offer some technical improvements in the plans, but they do not go far enough. Still left out, still discriminated against, are those unfortunate Canadians who are diagnosed with long-term debilitating conditions, like multiple sclerosis, for example. Given the capricious nature of diseases like MS, the sufferers may be fine today, with no signs of disability yet emerged, but they know that their future prognoses are quite likely to be problematic. What they would like to do now, while they still are able to earn a living, is to set up a registered disability savings plan and start building some financial security for their more difficult days down the road. But the government says no. To have an RDSP, they must be permanently disabled right now. They cannot make provision for the future. They have to wait until their disability overtakes them. Such rigidity in the rules is shortsighted, mean-spirited and just plain foolish. It can and it should be fixed in Bill C-45.
In the fight for greater equality of opportunity, other things should be done too. Personal tax credits for children's arts and sports, for volunteer firefighters and for family home caregivers should be made equally available to all of those who qualify, not just the more wealthy. As strange as it sounds, the government's tax credit structure is designed in such a way that those below a certain income level do not quality. It is perverse. It punishes the poor. Why is a child from a wealthy family more deserving than a child from a low-income family? Why are more wealthy firefighters or caregivers more deserving than low-income firefighters or caregivers? Of the 25 million people who file tax returns in Canada each year, more than one-third, some nine million families, have incomes so low that they are not eligible for these tax credits. It is unfair, it is wrong and it should be fixed.
Therefore, the government should stop increasing the EI payroll taxes and fix the flaws in registered disability savings plans and family-based tax credits. These things would actually promote economic growth and reduce the inequality among Canadians, but sadly, they are not in Bill C-45. Also, the government should not mangle the scientific research and experimental development tax credit by eliminating capital expenditures from the formula, because that is explicitly discriminatory against some sectors and some regions of the country that need this incentive.
We also want the government to get serious about the situation of young Canadians. Most of those young Canadians have seen very little improvement in their prospects since the depth of the recession four years ago. Unemployment among those under the age of 25 keeps hovering close to recession-like levels of 15%. Some 250,000 fewer young Canadians are employed today than before the recession began. Worse still, 165,000 young Canadians have just given up and dropped out of the job market. From preschool to grad studies, continuous, high-calibre learning is one of the keys to a strong, productive Canadian economy in a precarious world. While fully respecting provincial jurisdictions, the Government of Canada needs to be more than just an idle spectator when it comes to this crucial determinant of Canada's overall economic success and Canadians' individual wellbeing.
We will thrive, or not, in a tough global environment on the quality of our brain power. Therefore, it is good public policy for the federal government to invest in early learning and childcare, to break down financial barriers to post-secondary studies and skills, to ease the burden of student debt and shift toward more grants than loans, to bolster more curiosity-based pure research, to foster innovation and to make Canada the most connected and digital country in the world.
Squarely within federal jurisdiction for aboriginal education, the federal government must end the cap that limits first nations' access to post-secondary learning. In the kindergarten to grade 12 system, the feds need to fill that disgraceful gap between what they invest to educate aboriginal children and the much higher amounts the provinces invest for non-aboriginal children. That discrepancy has to be fixed.
Sadly, none of these courageous measures are to be found in Bill C-45, nor does the bill address the urgent need for more affordable housing, especially for seniors, students, the disabled and others with special needs. It does not take the creative step of transferring the entire federal gas tax to local municipal governments to help underpin community infrastructure. It does not advance the principle of a more extensive CPP, while it perversely maintains the government's odious decision to cut the future pensions of the poorest and most vulnerable of senior citizens. Those pensions will be cut gradually in the future at a saving of something approaching 0.3% of GDP. The burden of that minor saving for the Government of Canada will fall squarely on the backs of the lowest-income and most vulnerable older Canadians who have no alternatives.
Bill C-45 fails in the first obligation of every government, to keep Canadians safe. There is erosion in border services, prison security, our spy system, Maritime search and rescue, consumer product labelling, emergency preparedness, community crime prevention, cyber security and, most blatantly, food safety.
Why the government would choose to make these areas its primary focus for cutting has a lot of Canadians scratching their heads. They want to be able to count on their governments to ensure public health and safety, first and foremost. However, the government seems to have that priority nowhere significantly on its list.
On procedure and on substance, for what it does and what it fails to do, Bill C-45 in our judgment cannot be supported as it stands today.