Budget Implementation Act, 2024, No. 1  This task force will design a tax reform for lower taxes that would, one, bring home hiring and more powerful paycheques to Canada; two, bring home fairness by reducing the share of the tax burden paid by the poor and working class while cracking down on overseas tax havens and tackling government-funded corporate welfare; and, three, bring home 20% less paperwork by simplifying the tax rules. Lower, simpler, fairer. We will make this a country where hard work is rewarded with a bigger paycheque and a bigger pension to buy affordable food, gas and homes in safe communities.

The Budget  Madam Speaker, I will end corporate handouts to all industries. I do not believe in corporate handouts. We are the only party that stands against corporate welfare. We believe businesses should make money, not take money. We believe in the free market, not state capitalism. It is the NDP and the Liberals who continually stroke these monster cheques to businesses that have not earned the money.

The Budget  Before I go any further, let us point out the incredible irony that, as she and her leader point out, Canada's 0.1% are doing better than ever after nine years of the Prime Minister promising to go after them. Yes, they have benefited from the tens of billions of dollars of undeserved corporate welfare handouts and grants, ironically supported by the NDP; of corporate loan guarantees that protect them against losses in cases of incompetence or dishonest bidding; of contracts, of which there are now $21 billion, granted to outside and highly paid consultants, many of them making millions of dollars a year in taxpayer contracts for work that could be done inside the government itself if that work if of any value at all; and finally, of those grand fortunes that have been inflated by the $600 billion of inflationary money printing that has transferred wealth from the working class to the wealthiest among us.

Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1  It means limiting the government's role in the economy. It means not throwing away money on corporate welfare, but rather lowering taxes for all productive businesses. It means allowing workers and parents to spend their own money, rather than having politicians spend it for them. It means allowing people to see and say on the Internet what they think, want to see and want to say without censorship by the state.

Fall Economic Statement  Out there in that field there is some lithium, copper and nickel, but companies have to wait seven years for us to give a permit for anyone to dig that mine. She says she is going to give out a bunch of corporate welfare to mining companies, which can fill their bank accounts with taxpayers' cash. If they cannot get a permit to dig the mine, they will not be able to turn it into anything other than big, fat boondoggles for taxpayers.

Questions on the Order Paper  With regard to the Output Based Pricing System (OBPS): (a) how much has the federal government collected from industry; and (b) how much has the federal government paid out under the OBPS in direct rebates to businesses (excluding project-based funding and corporate welfare grants) since it first came into effect?

Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2020  Madam Speaker, first, that is a complete falsehood. Conservatives have spoken out against corporate welfare. We were the first party to stand in the House and insist that the wage subsidy not go to paying dividends. I warned, on the floor of this House of Commons, the then finance minister, Bill Morneau, that if he did not ban it, corporations would use the wage subsidy to pay dividends to executives and wealthy shareholders.

Government Business No. 8  They never actually do, in practice. We propose that if we want to stop handing money to the rich, we should stop the corporate welfare schemes that use taxpayer money to fill the pockets of wealthy and influential people. Let us cancel the $35-billion Infrastructure Bank, which is nothing more than a backstop of profits for large construction and private equity firms.

Finance committee  You very carefully explained the downside of constrictive and restrictive government corporate welfare programs. I agree with you that the government would have been far better off having a simple liquidity program that would put cash in the hands of businesses by reimbursing some of their remittances and then allowing them to direct it to whatever they thought most necessary.

Finance committee  I'll just inform the committee of my planned motion, and we can consider it after the present sustainable finance motion is voted on. It reads, “That the committee undertake a study on corporate welfare”. “That the committee undertake a study on corporate welfare”.

Finance committee  I asked the Library of Parliament how much Canada's federal government is spending on corporate welfare, handouts and schemes. It estimated that the number was somewhere around $7 billion a year. That doesn't include tax loopholes and other forms of tax preferences. It just includes cash benefits from the government to these enterprises, and we don't actually see any evidence presented for the benefits.

Finance committee  Cross, you are the former chief economic analyst of Statistics Canada, so you would know more than almost anyone about how to measure and calculate things. How could we create a model to properly calculate the cost of corporate welfare, so that we no longer have these one-sided analyses from government departments, lobbyists and other insiders that only show the purported benefits?

Finance committee  I think that's one of the reasons we need to have this study. We continue to hear from the bureaucracies and the recipients of these government corporate welfare programs how many benefits they are bestowing upon us, but nobody can tell us—we had the departments here, and you're here now—the damage it does to take the money out of the economy in the first place.

Finance committee  Can you tell us the total amount the Government of Canada spends on what is colloquially called “corporate welfare”?

Business of Supply  That is to say if the government brings in one new economic regulation, it would need to get rid of two of them in order to remove the red tape that is holding back our economy. We would replace wasteful corporate welfare, like the millions for Bombardier, Loblaws, Mastercard and BlackBerry, with lower taxes for all entrepreneurs to unleash their power to generate wealth and get us through these hard times.