Ron Liepert

[Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 1, May 10th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I am sure the hon. member is referring to the inequities that came out of this particular budget as it impacted parts of Saskatchewan, northern Alberta, and Newfoundland.

In some parts of this particular assembly, we seem to focus on things like EI. This budget should be incenting the private sector to continue to create jobs, as was the case in Alberta up until recently. The goal is to have zero people collecting EI, not continue to argue whether it is relative in a particular part of the region or not.

However, the government is going in the wrong direction. The government believes it can create jobs, and it has never been proven in the history of this country that government creates jobs; it is the private sector.

We could have cut small business taxes to create jobs in the private sector, but the Liberals chose not to do that.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 1, May 10th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I am not sure that was a slip of the tongue, because I would agree with him. This is a government for the few.

The facts are clear. We have the best middle class in the modern world. The middle class is doing just fine in this country, and this particular member is, I am sure, referring to the Liberals' so-called tax cut for the middle class.

If we run the numbers, they are a joke. It is a buck a day that this particular tax cut would result in for the average family. At the same time, we would be going into debt of some $30 billion to fund an extra dollar a day for families.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2016, No. 1, May 10th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to participate in this particular debate today. Before I do so, I will say that I know there has been a lot said in this House and elsewhere about the situation in Alberta. However, it would be clearly inappropriate to not make a few comments about the heroes of Fort McMurray and northern Alberta, and also the heroes of all of Canada who have come forward with donations and with expressions of goodwill. It is important to recognize that at every opportunity we have.

I had the opportunity to speak to the budget debate about three weeks ago. I talked a bit about the situation in Alberta and about my constituents and how they were feeling at that particular time, three weeks ago. It is not a good time in Alberta. They were wondering how it could get any worse. I can say that, in the last week, it has gotten a lot worse.

However, what I did say in that particular address was that Albertans were looking for hope. I still believe that Alberta is an entrepreneurial province. We will recover, and we will in many ways use what we have been going through in the last year and certainly in the last week as a learning experience. I know we will be better for it. However, along the theme that I used in my previous remarks, I can say that in no time in our history in Alberta do I believe that there was a time when we were looking for more hope.

In preparing what I was going to say today, I like to think about things in terms of one word. What one word can describe the particular bill we are talking about, the budget that was introduced recently, and that first six months of the current government? After some thought, the one word that really came to mind was hypocrisy. When we Google hypocrisy, we see that it says “the behavior of people who do things that they tell other people not to do...” and “...people who say...thing[s] but do [something else]”. So much of what has gone on in the last six months has been exactly that, and much of it has been reflected in this particular budget and in this particular bill.

We had a campaign in October in which Canadians were promised that, first, there would be a slight deficit that the current government would run of about $10 billion. We have seen in the budget and all of the projections that it is certainly going to be much worse than that. Second, the promise was that the books would be balanced by the end of the particular term, and we now know that has gone by the boards. Third, there was a promise to reduce the small-business tax rate. Again, the Minister of Small Business and Tourism today proudly stood in the House and talked about the small-business tax rate on January 1 being reduced. Guess who reduced that small-business tax rate. It was the previous government that put in place the bill that reduced small-business taxes on January 1, but it was the current government that reneged on its promise to reduce taxes further. Regarding Bill C-15, hypocrisy really describes where we are.

Then I move on to how the government has acted in the last six months, and again the word hypocrisy came to mind. We have seen, as has been mentioned on many occasions in this particular short session, that the government has chosen to use closure. I know that, if the member for Winnipeg North has the opportunity to ask me a question, he will rant on about all of the times the previous government used closure. I am not suggesting for a moment that closure does not have to be used at certain instances, but what is hypocritical is that the same member for Winnipeg North, when in opposition, used to rail at the previous government about using closure; and now here we have some six months later, within a period of a few weeks, the new government using the same mechanism. I can only use that same word again, hypocrisy.

We also hear Liberals talking about things like openness and transparency and, again, I would say we could attribute that to hypocrisy.

I said in a speech earlier in the House that I was getting the feeling that the Minister of Natural Resources was getting a little uncomfortable because he was having to deliver a message that he probably did not necessarily believe in. When it came to pipeline discussions and the future of the energy industry, he was being directed by many environmentalists within his caucus. I did not get the feeling that he was all that comfortable delivering the message, and I still feel that way.

I would say the same thing about the Minister of Finance. I do not get the impression that the Minister of Finance is that all comfortable delivering the budget he had to deliver, with some of the things in the budget and in this particular bill, including the decision by the government to repeal what the previous government had done in terms of the age of eligibility for old age security, returning it to 65 from 67. The reason I say I do not think he feels all that good about it is that, before he was elected, he wrote a book called The Real Retirement. Within that book, the finance minister, before he was elected, advocated on the necessity to move old age security eligibility from 65 to 67, and here we have the same individual now delivering a budget that would repeal that.

I have a feeling that in many cases the government is sending mixed messages. Certain ministers are sending messages that I do not believe even they believe. I guess it will be a matter of time before it catches up to them.

I want to talk about one other part of the budget, which is infrastructure. We hear so much about infrastructure spending and how all of this borrowing is going to fix all of our infrastructure problems. When I look at this budget, and I mentioned this several weeks ago and will repeat it, I see we have a commitment by the government for some $10 billion over the next two years in infrastructure spending across this country. That might sound like a lot of money when people do not know the difference between $1 million and $1 billion, but let me put it into context.

It has been a few years, but I served in the Alberta legislature for eight years, and in almost every one of those years, the provincial budget in Alberta for infrastructure was $5 billion. It was $5 billion for Alberta alone. We have a federal government that is allocating $5 billion for all of Canada and is somehow taking great credit for this budget, which would plunge Canadians into debt, $150 billion over the next four years, to not build infrastructure, because the evidence is not there. It is simply, as one of my colleagues said when the previous member was speaking, that we are putting our groceries on our credit card. That is concerning.

With those few comments, I would say that the government has invoked closure on this particular bill and when it goes to committee, as all of the bills that the government introduces do, we know Liberals will use their majority at committee to ensure there are no amendments to the bill. Being a member of the finance committee—and it will be interesting to see if the parliamentary secretary can challenge me on that—I am not expecting to see much change in this particular bill.

[Barrie Strafford, May 9th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Dr. Barrie Strafford, who passed away two weeks ago today at the age of 87.

I am so pleased I had the opportunity, the Friday previous to his passing, to have a chat with Barrie, where, like he always did, had bought a table to support the Bow Valley College fundraising scholarship luncheon. So when Barrie did not show up for work on Monday morning, everyone knew something was wrong.

Barrie and his wife Brenda immigrated to Canada from England in the 1950s. Tragically, Brenda was killed in a car accident in 1974, but that tragedy inspired Barrie to create the Brenda Strafford Foundation, which has gone on today to be responsible for an 80-bed women's shelter for battered and abused women in Calgary, several long-term care centres, including Wentworth Manor, which is in my riding where my mother-in-law happens to reside, but, more important, a number of health care centres for the underprivileged in Jamaica, Haiti, and the Dominica.

I know Barrie can rest peacefully because his foundation and 40 years of good work will be carried on by family members, volunteers, and staff.

[Business of Supply, April 19th, 2016]

Release the names then if you are so transparent. Your five minutes are up. Get to the point. Answer the question.

[Instruction to Committee on Bill C-2, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned earlier, I think we have pulled the plug way too quickly on this. For most new programs, it literally can take a generation to determine whether the public picks up on them and finds success using them. Therefore, as I said earlier, this should have been given a lot more time to see whether it was successful.

It has been mentioned on many occasions that the TFSA itself is a relatively new program. It has only been in existence for less than 10 years. The take-up, if I recall, is something like 20% of Canadians who have been putting money into a TFSA in some form or another.

As I said earlier, there is always the opportunity for those who want to take some of their income and put it into a TFSA for one of their children. One of my colleagues mentioned earlier that this was how he purchased his house. It was because he had, with the help of his family, built up a TFSA that allowed him and his wife to purchase their first home.

I think we need to give this a little more time before pulling the plug on it.

[Instruction to Committee on Bill C-2, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, as the member points out, I have no idea what the government House leader has in the way of an agenda coming forward. We all know that the weather is getting nice, so I am not sure how hard or how long he wants us to work here. All I can say to the hon. member is that it would be a more appropriate question to put to one of the members of the government, if they so choose to take a few minutes of the time left to speak on this particular motion.

[Instruction to Committee on Bill C-2, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, there is no question about that, and I think my hon. colleague for Durham has put it very well.

There are a number of family-oriented tax incentives that the former Conservative government brought in that allowed families to, what I would call, pick and choose how they wanted to shape their life, how they wanted the tax system to best suit them, whether it was through the universal child benefit or, as my colleague mentioned, the fitness tax credit or the arts tax credit or income splitting.

As well, I had a constituent come to me the other day who was quite upset about the initiative by the new government to reduce the amount for TFSAs. He said he had a son who was earning in the low-income category, which our friends from the third party have referred to. He said that the tool allowed him to put after-tax dollars into a TFSA so that his son could have a reasonable retirement account, because he does not have a pension plan. This was a way that he could help his son, who could then manage that money and make it grow for him.

Therefore, I think a lot of this ability to control one's own destiny has been taken away.

[Instruction to Committee on Bill C-2, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I have trouble finding reasons to disagree with what the member just said, because I think we are saying much the same thing. There are a whole host of things that we could debate throughout the evening and never agree on at the end. However, in this particular case, I think this is an opportunity for the government to be held accountable.

The TFSA is a relatively new way of saving for the future. There has been some criticism that this or that percentage has had a take-up on the TFSA. The third party in the House and the government have argued that few people have maxed out under the new maximum that exists, which the former government brought into existence. However, in the first year of any program, we have to give it time to work its way through the system. I think that we need to give this a bit more time, and I would be happy to make those comments to the finance committee.

[Instruction to Committee on Bill C-2, April 18th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to rise and make a few comments on this particular motion. I happen to serve on the finance committee with the hon. member who has proposed the motion, and one of the things I have learned in the short period of time I have had to work with the gentleman is that he is a very effective and convincing speaker. I found out today that he is also very creative, because this is a nice way to get another 30 minutes of debate on the budget that maybe there was not time for during the regular debate. I know I got squeezed out of my time for speaking, so I will take this opportunity to make a few comments that relate to this particular motion.

I will support what the hon. member is proposing, but probably for entirely the opposite reasons that the member raised in proposing this motion. I am all in favour, on our committee, of having many different opportunities to examine and study various legislation, and if this particular initiative ends up giving us more opportunity to go into various parts of this legislation in depth, I am certainly all in favour of it.

I also look forward to perhaps having the chance to ask some of our witnesses some questions that I think the government has failed to answer. I will give a couple of examples.

I had the opportunity, during my few brief moments on the budget address, to talk a bit about this middle-income tax cut that the government is proposing. It is the kind of thing that I always like to refer to as a lot of smoke and mirrors.

The government members continue to talk about this so-called middle-class tax cut. My hon. colleague raised the point that clearly this is not a tax cut necessarily for the portion of the taxpaying public who are probably most in need of a tax cut, and that is a point our committee could certainly take the time to review.

In addition to that, when we run the numbers on this particular tax cut and calculate the average savings that this tax cut would provide to the average so-called middle-class Canadian, it works out to about $540 annually. That is from the numbers that were provided by the government's own finance department. If we take that $540 and divide it by 365 days in a year, that ends up being about $1.25 a day.

We all know what $1.25 a day will buy. As I started to say before I got cut off in my budget address, if we took an average couple, at $540 a year or $1.25 a day, at the end of the week that couple might be able to go to Tim Hortons on a Saturday morning and actually have a couple of cups of coffee. That is really what that so-called middle-class tax cut would do.

We continue to hear from the government about what it is doing for the so-called middle class, but really the substance is not there. If we could actually take that out and pull it aside and have the government members on the finance committee talk less about their so-called middle-class tax cut, that would help our deliberations at the finance committee immensely. Then, of course, we could spend a bit more time talking about the merits of the tax-free savings account.

I listened intently to the member's comments in proposing this motion. He was talking about the tax-free savings account and criticizing it because people could actually put things like stocks and actual investments that were going to make some money into this tax-free savings account, as though somehow that was illegal or not correct.

The whole point of the tax-free savings account is to manage our money so that it provides us with the ability to retire because it has grown. If we do not put things such as stocks into our tax-free savings account, what is the purpose of having it? We all know that if we put cash in there, it will not grow. The whole purpose of it is to grow.

I would be happy and delighted to debate that point with the member at the finance committee. If we have the opportunity to call some witnesses, I would be more than delighted to have that discussion with them as well.

In summary, I am quite happy to support the motion as proposed by my colleague. However, I would make it clear that I support it for entirely different reasons than he has stated.