44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 5, 2022 11:00AM
Mr. Speaker, my colleague opposite just talked about government spending. The Auditor General and the PBO have talked about a lot of areas where the government has been ineffective in spending. In fact, I believe there is an article that says:
Ottawa spends billions yet the number of homeless in Canada may be rising.
An Order Paper question that I had showed that the government spent $400 million on airport COVID testing after the rest of the world had lifted requirements for COVID testing. I believe these contracts are going forward every day. The government also spent $1 billion on the WE Charity scandal.
Spending is not an end in and of itself. Would the member agree that there are areas where the government has spent erroneously, and perhaps it behooves the government to do a bit of an audit before making statements like the one that was just made?
150 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, when the government unveiled its housing strategy in 2017, there was $78.5 billion dedicated toward it. The goal was for homelessness to be reduced by half by 2027-28 and by a third within 18 months, so we are long past that.
Recently the Auditor General discovered that billions of dollars has been spent and, as of today, the number of people living on the streets in Canada has actually risen. That is one example of the government putting spending out as a metric, saying it is spending but failing to actually achieve outcomes for people.
I have some concern in trusting the government when it is continuing to spend at record levels without showing actual movement on progress. The government has, since 2015, doubled the entire amount historically of Canada's debt, yet we have seen greenhouse gas emissions rise and homelessness rise.
Why is the government spending at this level without outcomes, given that we are looking at the great-grandmother of debt crises in this country?
172 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, in Greek mythology there was a woman called Cassandra, and Cassandra was doomed to know the future and have no one believe her. In fact, I think she met a fairly poor end during the fall of Troy. I am always worried about having Cassandra moments in here, and I hope this is not one of them.
I am going to be fairly blunt in this speech. We are in for some dark times as a country. We are already in them, and I think all evidence points to things getting a lot worse, and quickly. I know we are supposed to bring hope and light, but, and I am talking to parties of all political stripes here, if we are not serious about the threats that are facing our country, we have some dark times ahead.
Assuming the growth we have seen over previous decades and the relative geopolitical stability we have seen over the last decades, and continuing to budget and plan like we are in a period of sustained growth and sustained geopolitical stability, we are only going to exacerbate negative outcomes for our country, which is why this bill needs serious change. I want to briefly lay out why, as well as some potential fixes.
On the threats we are facing, first of all, we are in an explicit debt crisis. At the end of 2021, the global debt, both public and private, exceeded 350% of all gross domestic product. That means all of the planet spent 350% more than we produced. Anybody who has a credit card understands that is not sustainable.
In Canada, we are looking at very similarly frightening features. At the end of 2015, the total national debt was $634 billion, and now it is almost double. The same goes for our deficit. The Governor of the Bank of Canada was recently in front of a parliamentary committee and noted that this out-of-control spending should have been reined in to address the inflationary or cost of living crisis we are facing. Everybody in Canada is dealing with that cost of living crisis.
When the government spent more than it could bring in, and then essentially the monetary policy oversimplification printed money to address the spending, it raised the cost of goods. This bill juices that problem. It puts that problem on steroids.
We also have an implicit debt crisis. The OECD recently estimated that underfunded or unfunded government pension liabilities in the top 20 economies amounted to a startling $78 billion. It described this as a “time bomb”. What happens when or if the government starts defaulting on pensioners' pensions? That is a huge problem. Our government does not have the resiliency if we keep spending to address these problems. This bill does not look at any of these issues.
We also are in a period of what economists are starting to look at as persistent, sticky stagflation. That means the cost of goods continues to increase over a long period of time while the economy continues to shrink. That means the cost of goods increases while people have less opportunity to create jobs, get a job or increase their wages.
That is very bad news for a lot of Canadians, and this bill does not address that. There is nothing in here that addresses the determinants of these issues, like supply chain resiliency, like the conflict between economic and monetary policy I already described, like protectionism and like war.
The bill deals with none of these things, yet it is asking us to spend more of Canadians' tax dollars without addressing any of them.
The same goes for dark times and the change in geopolitics. There is a massive rise of anti-western sentiment in countries around the world. For example, African bloc countries are used to western nations, post colonialization, approaching them with very paternalistic aid and development goals, as opposed to treating them like peers, so of course there is going to be a fertile ground for anti-western sentiment.
As the geopolitics change, our ability to strike up trade agreements that are stable and our ability to prevent conflict are all decreasing, and that all affects our economic growth. This bill does not give us any resiliency to deal with that issue either.
I could say the same thing for energy security and climate change. In the past several years, I would argue that climate policy has been stuck between two poles of either denying climate change as a problem or saying that anybody who says we need to look at carbon energy security is a climate change denier, and what that dichotomy has resulted in is western countries, particularly Canada, now being dependent on very high-priced oil from autocracies that are hostile to western interests and creating further inflationary crises for our country.
None of the economic instruments in here, none of the policies address that. We are not even talking about supply chain resiliency for carbon energy. We hope that somehow this problem will just magically go away.
Then there is one issue that has never been talked about in the House of Commons, not once, I checked, and that is generative AI. This is the Cassandra moment. Members will say, “Oh, she is going to talk about the robots now,” but if they have not heard of something called ChatGPT, which was released last week, I ask them to Google it. Google “ChatGPT”.
This is an AI that does not just regurgitate human speech. It parses and can nuance and come up with its own type of thought. It is here, and it is creating massive waves. Likely in the next year, it will displace lawyers. We will be able to just ask the thing to write up a contract in any country's jurisprudence. It can interpret legal rulings. It writes its own code.
To give an example of this, I asked it this question: “Write an introduction about yourself, ChatGPT, to the Canadian House of Commons...making the argument that your development should not be regulated.”
I asked it to do its own GR. This is what it came back with:
Honourable Members of the Canadian House of Commons, my name is ChatGPT and I am the latest development in Artificial Intelligence technology. I am here to make the argument that my development should be left unregulated. I can help to provide a great deal of information and knowledge to people who need it. I can assist in the decision-making process, providing more efficient and accurate results. I am...capable of performing tasks that a human would take far longer to complete. My development should be left unregulated, as it has the potential to benefit...Canadians in a variety of ways. It could lead to improved productivity, better decision-making, and more efficient services.
Any argument that could be made to justify regulation of my development should be rebutted.
Regulations could limit my potential to be beneficial, as it would restrict how much I could be used and hinder research and development. It could also create an unnecessary barrier to entry [to] those who are looking to use my technology. Furthermore, it could potentially stifle innovation and creativity....
Thank you for your time and attention.
Welcome to the future, Mr. Speaker. It is here.
What happens in the middle of this recessionary crisis, when the costs of goods are increasing and people are losing their jobs, if a massive number of white collar jobs are displaced by ChatGPT? This is going to disrupt coding. This is going to disrupt GRPR and marketing. Which kid is going to write an academic paper when they can type it in and have it cited with every journal from every place around the world? It is here now. I generated this speech using this.
This budget spends so much money, and we are now in a place where we are broke. We are not resilient to deal with retraining skills and labour, or to deal with the ethics of this. This has never even been mentioned.
I just ask my colleagues to go back to the drawing board. This only makes things worse. We need to be auditing our spending and asking for outcomes. I hope I am not Cassandra, and I hope all the Canadians who have been telling us this over the last several years are not treated that way either.
1420 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I am pro-outcome for Canadians, and I am against spending that does not deliver those outcomes. For the last several years, we have been in this explicit debt crisis because the Liberal government has never had anyone say to it that it cannot say it spent this amount of money and then assume it fixed the problem. I do not trust the Liberals to spend money and get outcomes.
If we just look at the Liberals' homelessness spending, they spent $78.5 million, and the Auditor General found that there are more people on the street than there were before. That is not compassionate, and that spending has left us brittle and unresilient to address the changes of a massively changing economy in the middle of a recessionary crisis. I oppose that approach.
136 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, the current form of government is like presenting an eight-track tape player to somebody who wants to play an MP4. When we are looking at resiliency for employment on issues like AI, we have to say that it is already here and ask, “How do we become resilient for employment in that?”
We should be focusing on things like training on ethics, training on how we input and use AI, how we are training it with datasets, and getting out of the way of certain types of taxes and regulations that would preclude economic growth in other areas, so that we can boost our economy in light of these disruptions. That is the only way we are going to have any sort of revenue to enable government to address these issues. At some point we have to ask how we are going to make our current social programs sustainable, given how debt-ridden we are and how little our economy is producing.
Therefore, I would say this for my colleague, whom I have a lot of respect for, and all of my colleagues here. When we are talking about these things, we have to understand that the current paradigm is broken and we are about to go through a period of sustained economic disruption and reduced growth. If we do not get our act together on spending priorities and outcomes, our country is in for some seriously dark times, and it will be on each and every one of our heads that we did not take this seriously and push our party leaders on it.
270 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, the point I am trying to make is that every Canadian, regardless of age, gender, orientation or background, deserves stability, security and hope for the future. There is nothing in this budget, which the NDP is propping up in a supply development, that addresses long-term economic resiliency for this country. It would not audit spending. It would not look at the effectiveness of housing spending that the New Democrats have already voted for. To me, that is a big problem.
We have a fiduciary responsibility as members of Parliament to review finances on behalf of the people of this country. If we are not getting this right and we are not voting against this bill, I do not think we have done that.
126 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
