44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 3, 2022 10:00AM
- Nov/3/22 3:00:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Stephen Poloz, the former Bank of Canada governor, was very clear that our investments in Canadians during the pandemic prevented a deflation in our economy.
What do the Conservatives say on taxes? When we lowered taxes on the middle class in 2015, how did the Conservatives vote? They voted against it. When we lowered taxes on Canadians in 2019, the Conservatives voted against it. In 2021, when we lowered taxes on workers, how did the Conservatives vote? They voted against it. When we lowered taxes on small businesses this year, the Conservatives voted, once again, against it. How did they vote on dental and rental supports? Members know the answer. They voted against it.
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- Nov/3/22 4:01:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, for the past several months, I have been travelling across Canada—to more than two dozen cities and towns—to meet with Canadian workers and Canadian businesses.
I visited an auto parts manufacturer in Etobicoke, a potash mine outside Saskatoon, and the women and men in Sherbrooke who make the boots our armed forces wear around the world.
I visited the port of Saint John in New Brunswick, and a family farm in Olds, Alberta, and in Dartmouth, Brampton and Calgary, I spent time with some of the truckers who keep our economy humming. The Canadians I spoke to were all so proud of our country. They were proud of the hard work they do every day to feed Canada and the world, build our cars, send our goods to global markets and raise their children, but they were also anxious about whether our future will be as prosperous as our past, and anxious about paying the bills today.
That is where I want to start, with the high cost of living so many of us, along with so many Canadians, are concerned about.
I know it has felt like just one thing after another since COVID first reached our shores. We turned the economy off, and then we turned it back on again. Vladimir Putin illegally invaded Ukraine, and now we are dealing with inflation. These are related, of course. Global inflation is not created by the decisions of any one government alone, but by the combined aftershocks of two and a half years of historic turmoil.
Inflation was 6.9% in September, after falling for the third month in a row. That is lower than in the U.S., the U.K., and the eurozone.
For Canadians feeling the pinch at the checkout counter, or when they fill their tanks with gas, it is still too high. This is a challenging time for so many of us—for our friends, for our families, for our neighbours.
It is important, as both the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, that I am honest with Canadians about the challenges that still lie ahead.
Interest rates are rising as the Bank of Canada steps in to tackle inflation, and that means our economy is slowing down. It means there are people whose mortgage payments are rising. It means business is no longer booming in the same way it was since we left our homes after the COVID lockdowns and went back out into the world. That is the case in Canada. That is the case in the United States, and that is the case in economies, big and small, around the world.
Canada cannot avoid the global slowdown any more than we could have avoided COVID once it had begun infecting the world, but we will be ready. Indeed, we are ready. That is because, for the past seven years, our government has been reinforcing Canada's social safety net. We have improved many important programs and added some new ones too.
These investments in Canadians are like a well-built house with a solid roof—needed in all seasons and in all weather, but most essential when the temperature drops.
That is why, as fall turns to winter, we will continue to stand up to those who would cut the EI and the pensions Canadians have been contributing to for their entire working lives, and need today more than ever. It is why we created the Canada child benefit and why we are making child care more affordable. It is why we enhanced the benefits that those who served with our flag on their shoulder depend on. It is why we doubled the Canada student grant, to make it a little easier for all young people to go to college or university or to pursue an apprenticeship. It is why we enhanced the Canada workers benefit, and why we increased both old age security and the guaranteed income supplement.
That is why it is so important that the Canada pension plan and our most important benefits are all indexed to inflation. In today's fall economic statement, that is why we are delivering on a plan that millions of Canadians voted for just over a year ago and why we are delivering new measures to enhance the social safety net that is there to support all Canadians.
We are working to deliver lower credit card fees, so that small businesses do not have to choose between cutting into their already narrow margins and passing fees on to their customers. We are taxing share buybacks to make sure large corporations pay their fair share and to encourage them to reinvest their profits in Canadian workers and in Canada.
We are delivering a multi-generational home renovation tax credit, which will help families across Canada afford to have a grandparent or a family member with a disability move back in if they want to. We are tackling housing speculation and making sure that homes are for Canadians to live in, not a frequently flipped investment asset.
We are delivering on our commitment to make home ownership more affordable for young people and new Canadians with a new tax-free first home savings account that will make it so much easier to save for a down payment. We are also delivering with a doubling of the first-time homebuyers' tax credit, to help cover the closing costs that come with buying that first home of one's own.
We are permanently eliminating interest on the federal portion of Canada student loans and Canada apprentice loans.
We are working to make sure families do not need to choose between taking their child to the dentist and putting food on the table. We are creating a new quarterly Canada workers benefit to deliver advance payments and put more money, sooner, into the pockets of our lowest-paid and often most essential workers. This means the Canada workers benefit will now support 4.2 million Canadians.
We are providing hundreds of dollars in new targeted support to low-income renters. For the Canadians who need it the most, we are doubling the GST credit for the next six months.
I have some very good news about that. For the 11 million Canadian households who need help the most, those GST cheques will start arriving in bank accounts and mailboxes tomorrow.
We are providing targeted inflation relief, because that is the right thing to do.
As the Bank of Canada fights inflation, we will not make its job harder. We are compassionate and we are also responsible.
Canada has the lowest deficit and the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7. In our April budget, with inflation in Canada and around the world elevated and still rising, we knew we had to chart a fiscally responsible course, and we did. In April we committed to bringing the deficit down to just 2% of GDP this year. Today, we forecast it will be just 1.3% of our $2.8-trillion economy.
We can bring the deficit down today because our pandemic spending worked. Thanks to the historic support we provided and thanks to the incredible resilience of Canadians, Canada is entering this time of a slowing global economy from a position of fundamental economic strength.
There are 400,000 more Canadians working today than before the pandemic. Our economy is now 103% the size it was before COVID hit. So far this year, Canada's economic growth has been the strongest in the G7, stronger than in the United States, stronger than in the United Kingdom, stronger than in Germany, stronger than in France and stronger than in Italy or Japan.
Thanks to that enviable economic performance, we are able to provide targeted support to the most vulnerable while still shrinking our deficit. In the months to come we will be able to invest in the Canadian economy and to be there for the Canadians who need it the most, because we were responsible in April and because we are keeping our powder dry today.
Canadians are tough, and the Canadian economy is resilient. That is why we can all be confident we will get through this, just as we have gotten through so much over the past two and a half years. In fact, there is no country in the world better placed than Canada to get through the coming global slowdown.
When we do, with our fundamental economic strengths preserved, and the pandemic recession behind us, there is no country in the world better placed than Canada to thrive in a post-COVID global economy.
We grow food to feed the world, and we mine the potash that farmers here and elsewhere need to grow their own. We have the critical minerals and metals that are essential for everything from cellphones to batteries to appliances to electric cars.
We have the natural resources to power the global net-zero transition and to support our allies with their energy security as that transition continues to pick up speed.
Critically, Canada is the democracy that has all of these resources in abundance.
The global economy is at a turning point. We are entering an era of friend-shoring, a time when our democratic partners and their most important companies are seeking to shift their dependence from dictatorships to democracies. That is why the Prime Minister and Chancellor Scholz signed an agreement in Newfoundland for Germany to buy Canadian hydrogen. That is why the United States has moved from a buy America to a buy North America policy on critical minerals and electric vehicles.
That is why our Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry has been signing agreements with global car manufacturers and battery makers—a new one almost every day, it seems to me.
That is why our Minister of Natural Resources is pitching Canada's critical minerals to the world and working hard with provinces and territories to get them out of the ground and to global markets. The world knows that Canada can build the electric vehicles of today and tomorrow. Canadians can mine and process the critical minerals that those vehicles, our phones and our computers are all made of, and Canadian energy workers, the very best in the world, can make Canada the leading provider of energy as the global economy moves to net zero.
Our allies are counting on us, and our government believes that this ongoing shift is the most significant opportunity for Canadian workers and Canadian businesses in a generation.
Seizing this opportunity is what our April budget invested in, and it is what this fall economic statement invests in, too.
With major investment tax credits for clean technology and clean hydrogen, we will make it more attractive for businesses to invest in Canada to produce the energy that will power a net-zero global economy.
We are launching a new Canada growth fund that will help attract the billions of dollars in new private capital required to fight climate change and to create good jobs in Canada at the same time. From critical minerals to ports to energy, we will continue to make it easier for businesses to invest in major projects in Canada, projects with meaningful indigenous participation, projects that meet the highest environmental standards, projects that will create good jobs and projects that will allow Canadian workers to drive our economy forward.
We will continue to invest in tackling the productivity challenge that is Canada's economic Achilles heel. We will continue to invest in making sure Canadians have the skills they need to get good-paying jobs, and we will continue to bring to Canada more of the skilled workers that our growing economy requires. However, we know these investments represent only a down payment on the work that lies ahead, so, in the months to come, we will continue to work hard to ensure that Canada is the best place in the world for businesses to invest and create good-paying jobs from coast to coast to coast.
Now, the investments we are making today and the ones we will continue to make will be crucial to the future of the Canadian economy. They will help make Canada a leader in the industries of tomorrow, and they will help to build an economy that is more sustainable and more prosperous for generations to come. However, what matters most is what these investments mean for Canadians. For energy workers in Alberta, investments in clean energy mean there will continue to be good-paying jobs for them and their children. For a young couple in Vancouver, more workers in the building trades mean more affordable homes for their new family. For auto workers in Windsor, Canadian leadership on electric vehicles means they will build the next generation of cars that have powered our economy for more than a century.
Canadian workers know how important our social safety net is, and that is why our government will never deplete the contributions that keep Canada's employment insurance and pensions strong.
Canadians know how important training is to equip them for valuable, good-paying jobs, so we are investing in that, too.
Canadian workers also know that the single most important thing—the difference between managing to pay their mortgage and fearing they could lose their home; the difference between paying the bills at the end of the month and falling behind—is a well-paid, stable job, doing work they are proud of with people who respect them and their skills.
That is why our overriding economic objective during COVID was to preserve Canadians' jobs, and that is why today, what Canadian workers need is a government with a real, robust industrial policy, a government committed to investing in the net-zero transition, to bringing in new private investment, and to helping create good-paying jobs from coast to coast to coast. That is what we have been doing, and that is what we are continuing to do today.
In 1903, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier stood in this House and said:
No, this is not a time for deliberation, this is a time for action.... We cannot wait because time does not wait; we cannot wait, because in these days of wonderful development, time lost is doubly lost; we cannot wait, because at this moment there is a transformation going on in the conditions of our national life which it would a be folly to ignore and a crime to overlook;...
He was speaking then about the transcontinental railway, one that connected Canada and the Canadian economy from east to west, and which helped usher in a new era of prosperity for the people of our growing country. That project, like Laurier himself, was imperfect. The prosperity and opportunity it brought were not shared equally with indigenous peoples, with women, with new Canadians, but his message then is one we should heed today, that we must heed today.
At the turn of the last century, Laurier and a generation of Canadian statesmen understood that Canada was at a turning point and that we could seize it or risk being swept aside by the manifest destiny of more ambitious leaders. Today, we are likewise at a pivotal moment.
The global green transition calls for an industrial transformation comparable in scale only to the Industrial Revolution itself, and Canada is blessed with the talented people, the natural resources and the manufacturing base needed to drive that transformation. At the same time, Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine has upended geopolitics, reinforcing for our allies the value of turning to each other, to us, for the critical elements of their supply chains and for their energy security.
Together, these two great shifts represent a generational opportunity to build a thriving and sustainable Canadian economy. We can lead the world in a way that far exceeds our footprint as a country of just 39 million people.
We can lead the fight against climate change, and we can do it in a way that creates good jobs and new businesses for Canadians from coast to coast to coast. We can build affordable homes and deliver affordable child care, helping our economy grow and making life more affordable for middle-class Canadian families. We can ensure that everyone in this country can enjoy the prosperity we are investing in together.
That is the future that we can create for ourselves and for our children. However, we cannot wait, because time truly does not wait. We cannot wait, because in these days of wonderful development, time lost is doubly lost.
I know that times feel tough right now, and they are, but we have a well-built house with a solid roof, and we have survived far colder winters before. Just as fall turns to winter, so, too, does winter turn to spring.
There are warmer days ahead. We will reach them together by building a country where everyone can earn a good living for a hard day's work, by building an economy that works for everyone, by investing in the Canada we are all so proud of today so that we can be even prouder of our amazing country tomorrow because, of all the countries in the world, the 21st century will surely belong to Canada.
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- Nov/3/22 5:07:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition was honest with Canadians, the Canadians he is not going to be supporting through this fall economic statement. He told them right away. He told students, for example, that he is not going to support the permanent elimination of interest on student loans. He told the lowest-income workers that he is not going to support the continuation of the Canada workers benefit and making sure they get that in advance. He talked about incentivizing companies to invest in Canada, but actually, in the fall economic statement, there are really important measures that are going to help us build the economy of the future.
This is very consistent with his actions to date. Whether it is the Canada child benefit, the Canada dental benefit, the Canada housing benefit or whether it is supporting low-income workers and those most vulnerable in our country, he has consistently refused to stand up for them and to support them. He talks a big game, but when there is actual action to do, he does not deliver.
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- Nov/3/22 6:30:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank all my colleagues in the House. I thank the Liberals, the Conservatives, the Bloc members and the New Democrats for giving the Green Party of Canada the opportunity to make some comments. I appreciate that.
We have reviewed the 2022 fall economic statement. It is not a budget. We have yet to see the 2023 budget and the decisions that will be made in the spring.
Still, the Minister of Finance has made a few decisions. She has taken a certain approach and given some indication of where the government is heading.
What we see here is an honest assessment, more honest than that of many finance ministers, in saying that things are not going to be great very soon.
It is important to be honest, to face the economic reality. Canadians are not the only ones facing it. We are faced with a global problem, the increase in the cost of almost everything we use on a daily basis. In my opinion, that is not inflation.
The Minister of Finance was honest about what we are facing, as was the Department of Finance, in saying that we are not looking at economic growth in the next couple of quarters. We are looking at a slowdown. Yes, the minister has said we have a good house and we have a good roof, which are good things, but we are facing unprecedented global challenges. In looking at this statement, I am going to be as non-partisan as I can possibly be in saying that we have some new indications that suggest a growing awareness of something that I am going to say probably more boldly or baldly than other politicians will say.
First, let me say there are some good-news pieces to this budget and some missed opportunities. I really hoped to see a tax on the windfall profits of enormous oil and gas and other fossil fuel enterprises, which have been clearing billions of dollars every quarter. It has been described by others, not just the Secretary-General of the United Nations, that these windfall profits are not due to the economic wisdom or the genius of those in the fossil fuel industry who know how to ready their industry for great success. Let us be clear that this is because of Putin's war in Ukraine. This is war profiteering. No sector or CEO should be proud to return profits to shareholders because of war profiteering. They should not be proud to do that when they are raking in unprecedented levels of profit and Canadians are suffering. That is something of which no business's CEO should be proud.
I am from the Maritimes and I am friends with the Irving family, so forgive me if I mention the Irvings. They own the only refinery in Canada that imports Saudi Arabian oil and has also experienced windfall profits. However, it turns out from today's news, they also figured out a way to avoid paying taxes in Canada through a bit of a shell game with its own insurance company offshore. Canadian corporate leadership needs to look themselves in the mirror and ask what they are doing for Canadians, all of them.
The Minister of Finance missed the opportunity today to set a course for companies that are experiencing windfall profits, be they in the fossil fuel sector, banking or insurance. Banking and insurance have had some increase, but not sufficient to really deal with the excess profit problem. If a handful of Canadian families hold a great percentage of Canadians' wealth, should we not be looking at a wealth tax? When a government says it sees that rough weather is ahead, it sees that Canadians are going to be facing increasing costs for many things, should we not, right now, be saying we need additional revenue to be able to ensure that those who are suffering the most from this can pay their rent, can cover their mortgages and can take their kids to the grocery store and not the food bank?
How do we make that possible? It is not from trickle-down economics that the economy is going to do so well in a year or two or three that it is going to lift everybody up. We know that story. The rising tide, it was said, will lift all boats and trick-down economics will work. We know how it works. The rising tide lifts all yachts. It does not lift all boats, and we know that people are going to need help with their own little boats very soon.
Another way to have more revenue is to stop spending money hand over fist, handing billions of dollars over to a sector that we know is responsible for our having to spend hand over fist other billions of dollars in a climate crisis. We have promised in this country since Stephen Harper was prime minister in 2009, at a G20 summit—
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- Nov/3/22 6:55:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, before the pandemic, one of our big concerns was the gig economy. A lot of people were looking at two or maybe even three very low-paying jobs to make a go of it. Now that sector seems to be short of people, as the people who used to be in the gig economy moved up to take the place of guys my age who retired. Some of us have not gotten the memo yet, but we have a lot of older Canadians who have backed out of the labour market.
We have an immigration plan that will bring more people into the country to fill those jobs. I wonder if the hon. member could reflect on whether we should make an extra effort to avoid a new class and new generation of low-paid gig workers in Canada.
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- Nov/3/22 6:56:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, a couple of years ago, the Canadian Labour Congress published a piece on the new world of work.
What does our economy look like for workers when we look at artificial intelligence? We have a gig economy that has already made many people insecure in the jobs they have. I completely agree with my hon. friend. What we are seeing is that as people retire, we have a demographic bubble of boomers who are leaving the workforce and we do not have enough people coming up behind us. That is why we are looking in this fall economic statement at increases in immigration and hoping that those people are trained professionals in the workforce. Construction workers particularly are mentioned in the statement.
We could do far more to prepare for artificial intelligence by moving to a guaranteed livable income as quickly as possible to protect our economy from the coming shocks. Then people could choose, knowing that they have just enough income to be above the poverty line, to maybe work a bit in the gig economy, maybe have a garden at home and maybe spend more time volunteering in the community. We would be a healthier society and better able to withstand any shocks that are coming once we adopt a guaranteed livable income.
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- Nov/3/22 6:59:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Hull—Aylmer for his excellent question.
We are now in a long emergency, as a book title called it.
Madam Speaker, about a decade ago, there was a book by James Kunstler called The Long Emergency, which predicted that we were going to see our economy significantly rocked by what will happen as fossil fuels become more expensive as we move away from fossil fuels. The Long Emergency was about where we are now: real costs are increasing, a real dislocation.
That does not mean ongoing inflationary trends. It does mean thinking about how a society flourishes despite these very unusual headwinds. They are unusual now because they are new, but they are not going away. We have to think about that and make sure that we design our economy and our economic signals of what makes us better off. The GDP is not a good measurement to help us chart a course through an ongoing climate emergency. We need to chart our course.
I think this is a global challenge. At the end of the Second World War nations met at Bretton Woods to figure out what are the global and shared financial institutions to help us get through that. We need new institutions and a review, a new Bretton Woods, that would help us with both the post-COVID impacts on our economies and the current climate impacts on our economies.
We cannot rewrite the laws of atmospheric physics and chemistry. We can easily rewrite the way we want our economy to work if all the economies and central banks of the world get together and say, “This is what we are looking at. How do we protect the citizens and the communities of all, and, I would hope, the non-human species of Mother Earth?”
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