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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 42

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 21, 2022 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 42 - Mar/21/22
Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)
  • Mar/21/22 12:17:23 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is a great pleasure to be back in the chamber and speaking to an NDP motion. There is no question. We do not have to go far or talk to many people to realize just what a challenging time it is for so many Canadians, for so many reasons. I think one of the things that compounds that sense of frustration, anxiety and fear that people are feeling as their household budgets tighten is the contradictory messages that they are hearing about why that is happening and what could be done about it. If we listen to the government some days, when it suits their purposes, it tells us that the economy is doing great, that it has rebounded, that we are past the problems of COVID, that we have excellent job numbers and good growth, and that money is flowing in and things are good. At other times, the government gives a bit more of a realistic assessment, if it is in excuse-making mode. This is hard for Canadians who are struggling so much in their households and at the grocery store, as our leader was just saying, putting things back on the shelf that their kids would be excited to eat or that would be a normal part of their family cook night. It is frustrating to hear that things are going well, that things are back to normal, because that is certainly not the experience that people are living at the pumps, at the grocery store and around their kitchen tables. It is incumbent on us, as public policy-makers, to try to find a path through those contradictory messages to something concrete that can be done. For sure, there is a lot going on in the world right now, whether it is the continuing economic fallout of COVID and what that means for supply chains, or what climate change means for supply chains and is going to continue to mean for supply chains going into the future. There is what is happening in Ukraine right now, which of course has dramatically increased the price of gas at the pumps. There are all sorts of things happening that are hard to control, not just for individual Canadians, to be sure, but even for governments. That makes it that much more important for governments to act on the things it can do something about. An important part of the story that we do not hear enough of, although we heard a little of it from the Parliamentary Budget Officer at the end of last year, and part of the reason why Canadians can be living such a difficult financial experience at home and in the personal experience of their families, their loved ones, their friends and their neighbours, in the midst of this apparently good economic news, lies in the fact that more and more of the wealth that is being created is going into fewer and fewer hands. If we are just talking about the economy in general, if we are talking about GDP, if we are talking about how much money is being produced in the Canadian economy, if we are talking about the value of the exports that are leaving Canada, then we can hear good news. That is why, in corporate boardrooms and in the boardrooms of banks, they are celebrating. They hear that good news and they do not feel the pinch, because they are part of that 1% that is getting not only a good chunk of that but a bigger and bigger proportional piece of that pie. As the pie grows, not only is their piece increasing relative to the size of the pie but the amount of the pie they get is also increasing. That is why we can hear about good news for the economy and big economic growth and all these things that, normally, Canadians would expect to mean that life would be a little better for them, in the midst of so many stories of hardship, people worried about losing their homes and, in fact, more people than ever losing their homes. Homelessness is going up in Canada since the pandemic. The cost of housing is getting ridiculous. It was already ridiculous and growing astronomically before the pandemic, and it has only gotten worse. Housing prices have almost doubled in the last two years. I apologize if I do not have that stat exactly right, but the fact that the number is even what would occur to someone who has been hearing these numbers day in and day out as likely close to the number is a sign of how bad things have gotten. I wanted to put some of these thoughts on the record to help Canadians who might be listening understand how we could be presented with apparent good economic news again and again by the government, by certain economists and by large corporations in their presentations to shareholders, yet feel so helpless in the face of very difficult economic circumstances. I said earlier, and I will repeat, this makes it all the more important, because some of the things driving inflation are outside the control of government, that the government zero in on the things it can do something about. Wealth inequality is something governments can do something about. It is something governments, at one time in the post-war period, did something about. Over the last 30 or 40 years we have seen successive Liberal and Conservative governments undoing the good work that was done in the post-war period. That work made sure that, in a time of a sense of strong social bonds, when people went to fight for freedom and prosperity, they were owed a good life when they came back, and that their families, who sacrificed while they were away fighting, worked in factories producing munitions and supported the war effort in other ways, were owed a good life when they came back. That meant ensuring a small number of people at the top did not get to run away with all the wealth while everyone else suffered. That system, which was built when there was that strong sense of social solidarity, has been undermined now for a very long time. It is about time, if we are going to do anything about the very real pinch Canadians are feeling now, we tackle this problem of wealth inequality. The Liberals have made promises to that effect, various kinds over the years, but they have not acted on them in the way that they need to if they are really going to fix the problem. One of their most recent promises was to have a surtax on banks, which made extraordinary profits during the pandemic, not their normal extraordinary profits but additional profits on top of their normal extraordinary profits. As such, asking them to pay a little more on that additional extraordinary profit is not at all unreasonable. In fact, I think it is something we are morally required to do and we have so far failed in our duty to do that. The crisis in Ukraine has shown that the lack of financial transparency both in Canada and across the world is not benign. It is not even just about missing out on the opportunity to invest that extraordinary profit, which we might tax a portion of, back into programs, as we should, like dental care, pharmacare or supporting good public education. All of these are things we need to do, and I could go on with that list, but I only have so much time so I will not. We have also seen the way that actors on the international stage who control this amount of wealth benefit and are able to support people like Vladimir Putin by hiding his wealth around the world. That is how the concentration of wealth and power can become very malignant indeed. We should not wait until a dictator feels so empowered and emboldened, not just by what is going on in his own country but what is going on in the international world of finance, that they can go ahead and do what Putin has done in Ukraine and still feel confident that they are going to be able to enjoy their yachts and palaces and that their buddies are going to continue to travel the world with impunity. That is where the question of wealth inequality and what is going on in Ukraine and in other parts of the world come to get mixed together and show why it is important on an ongoing basis to make sure we are not encouraging the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few people at the top. It is why I am proud that not only are we proposing what the Liberals proposed in the last election with a surtax on the profits of the banks, we are proposing it be expanded to other big corporate winners of the pandemic like big box stores and oil and gas companies that are now raking it in with prices that are really high at the pump. We have also included the demand for a public beneficial ownership registry, because that is what we need on two fronts. We need it to take on the likes of Vladimir Putin and his oligarch cronies who are hiding his wealth across the world, and we also need a public beneficial ownership registry in order to be able to properly record the wealth of the top 1%, so that they can be taxed to pay a fair share of the services we need to provide so that all can benefit. That is why this is such an important motion. I am looking forward to all members supporting it at the vote.
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