44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 17, 2024 11:00AM
- Jun/17/24 11:32:42 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a wonderful honour to rise in the House of Commons to speak on behalf of the people of Peterborough—Kawartha and, of course, all the people across Canada who feel they do not have a voice.
The bill we are talking about today is a private member's bill put forward by my friend and colleague, the member for Cumberland—Colchester, who is a doctor himself. He has seen the implications across this country of not just a health care crisis in access to primary care but also the consequences resulting from inflation, a cost of living crisis and, really, a downfall of leadership. These things are all connected to our mental health.
The summary of Bill C-323 explains that the bill would amend the Excise Tax Act in order to exempt psychotherapy and mental health counselling services from the goods and services tax. Basically, right now, psychotherapists and mental health counsellors are the only ones who have to charge tax, HST. Members can imagine that, for people who do not have coverage, this extra tax that they have to pay out-of-pocket is a really big deal. When we look at people who cannot afford housing or food, this is impacting their mental health; now they cannot afford access to mental health and counselling services.
My colleague, the member for Cariboo—Prince George, has dedicated a lot of his life's work to mental health. He was key in creating the 988 suicide helpline, a critical piece of legislation. It is very simple to use the helpline for suicide awareness. However, the member also amended the bill before us to include massage therapy, so registered massage therapists would not be excluded from this.
It is interesting that, in Canada today, counselling therapists and psychotherapists are the only regulated mental health service providers that must remit tax on their work. I want to talk about this a bit because, many times, we hear people say that this is not political or partisan. However, every single thing in our lives is politics. There is a great saying: “If you do not want to get involved in politics, politics will do you.” However, we have seen a massive movement in the last nine years, quite frankly, where people would have otherwise said, “I'm not political, and I don't want to do that”, as Canadians are quite friendly, congenial people and do not like confrontation. However, when their lives become miserable and they suffer, they have to stand up, pay attention and get involved, which is what we have seen across this country.
The incidence of mental health issues in our country has drastically increased. All we need to do is go outside and walk the streets. Substance abuse disorder is an illness. There is a reason somebody is using drugs or substances to mask their pain; they cannot manage the feelings, emotions or stress in their life.
Do members know of the shocking stats in Canada? I will read some of these. We have 22 people a day who are dying of overdoses. However, this is not some socio-economic crisis of people who are lower income or something like that. I have people come into my office, moms and dads, whose kids come from loving, beautiful homes, but something happened. There is one story of a young boy in my riding who died of an overdose. His mom came to see me, and we talked about him. She said, “You know, things really changed for him when he started to use marijuana as a teenager.” She said, “The doctor said it to him so perfectly that when he used marijuana, he didn't have the same reaction as someone else, and he was basically allergic to it. Some people can have sugar; some people can't.”
This was really profound to me, but the problem is that almost seven million Canadians do not have access to a doctor. They do not have access to somebody who can explain to them what is going on or give it to them in common terms.
There are kids who are lost right now because of a combination of a whole bunch of factors. When parents are not okay, the kids are not okay. Parents are sitting around the dining room table, and they are stressed about trying to pay for housing, trying to afford groceries and every single thing. We have people who are making more than they have ever made in their life, and they are taxed to death. Now we have another tax coming in. It is a job-killing tax. In a doctor shortage crisis, It is going to pull back doctor retention and recruitment in this country even more. People need doctors to refer them to a specialist, and Canadians do not have access to that. What does that come down to? It comes down to more tax.
This is an article from the Canadian Medical Association. It reads:
Increasing the capital gains inclusion rate for corporations will create another barrier to retaining and recruiting physicians in a time when our health system and the providers within it are already under constant strain....
This not only undermines the well-being of health care professionals, it jeopardizes the stability of our struggling health care system. The risk of already over-stretched physicians leaving the profession or reducing their hours in response to heightened taxation is real.
Dr. Kathleen Ross of the Canadian Medical Association went on to say that “incorporated doctors are unlike other businesses as the corporation is primarily used as a vehicle for retirement savings or parental and sick leaves.” In response to the Minister of Finance's comments about provincial governments, Dr. Ross said, “We do support remunerating physicians according to their expertise”; however, in her view, “pushing the issue onto other governments is not the right approach.” I am talking about that policy because it is all connected.
Right now we have the lowest GDP per capita of any G7 country. That means people have never been poorer. How did that happen? There has been wasteful spending, but taxation used by the government is also a big piece of it. The Liberals and NDP have a coalition. It spends and spends. The government has to make up that money. This may be the hundredth time I will say this, but the government does not have money. It has our money. It has taxpayers' money. I will keep talking about that in the House of Commons. If the government spends too much of it, it has to make it back in revenue.
The current private member's bill is saying that there has been enough taxation. Forty-six per cent of Canadians' paycheques are going toward taxes. That is unbelievable. One has to work until June to pay for the taxes in this country before one actually even starts making any money. This takes away one's motivation to go to work. Then there is this carbon tax in place. Conservatives have been saying for months that the tax should be axed; we know the carbon tax drives up the cost of every single thing in this country. Fuel is being taxed. We need fuel for everything. Farmers grow the food that has to be trucked to the grocery stores. The business owner has to raise their prices to cover those increased costs.
The Liberals and NDP think that the carbon tax is the best thing for the environment, that everything is great and that they are doing a great job. The Parliamentary Budget Officer wrote a report on the economic analysis of the carbon tax; the report revealed that it is costing $30 billion more. That is almost $2,000 per Canadian family. They gagged the PBO. On May 14, the environment minister had his bureaucrat, his deputy minister, write a letter to the PBO, asking him not to release the report.
Conservatives put on the pressure, and the report was released; everything we have said is confirmed. The government is taxing people into a mental health crisis. It is not compassionate. It is not pragmatic. Evil is what it is. It is irresponsible. The most compassionate thing a leader can do is make life affordable and give Canadians the autonomy to make decisions for their lives, to be able to provide for their family, to want to go to work, to have purpose and to feel proud and confident.
This private member's bill is a very simple piece of legislation that removes the tax for psychotherapists, mental health counsellors and massage therapists to ensure that people can access the resources they need. We support it. We ask for the support of the House, and we hope it gets passed and Canadians can afford to live and improve their mental health.
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- Jun/17/24 2:12:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years of raising taxes, the Liberal-NDP government is doing it again with a new job-killing tax on health care, homes, farms, small businesses and fishing communities. Members heard me right. The taxaholics are again digging deeper into the pockets of Canadian taxpayers. The NDP-Liberals are raising taxes on doctors during a doctor shortage, on farmers while we have a food price crisis, on home builders in a housing shortage and on small businesses during a cost of living crisis that the federal government created.
To Liberals, hard work pursuing the Canadian dream should be punished, not rewarded. A common-sense Conservative government will fix this mess. We will introduce lower, fairer and simpler taxes to restore the Canadian dream. We will make sure hard work delivers strong paycheques that can buy affordable food, energy and homes in safe neighbourhoods. Conservatives will bring it home.
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- Jun/17/24 2:23:17 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the fanatical rhetoric of the extremist minister will not change anything, nor will his carbon tax change the weather. His carbon tax is not going to eliminate a single forest fire, a single drought or a single heat wave. All it will do is turn up the heat on Canadian taxpayers. Now we know that the Liberals' talking point about eight out of 10 Canadians does not include a $25-billion hit to the economy, which works out to almost $2,000 in lost wages and higher prices for families. Again, if they have been hiding this, what else are they hiding about their other tax hikes?
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- Jun/17/24 2:51:28 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, July 1, moving day in Quebec, is fast approaching, and it is set to be a disaster because of the housing crisis. The government, supported by the Bloc Québécois, created this situation with its exorbitant, inflationary spending, and we are now seeing homelessness in places like Trois‑Rivières, Rimouski, Rouyn‑Noranda and Sept‑Îles. All these towns are located in Bloc ridings.
To alleviate the housing crisis, can the Prime Minister and the Bloc Québécois commit to stop wasting taxpayers' money?
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- Jun/17/24 6:16:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are here this evening to debate Bill C-69, the budget implementation act.
We are again debating the out-of-control inflationary spending by the Liberals that is driving up the cost of literally everything for Canadians. In the budget for which this is the implementation act, we saw another $61 billion in inflationary spending piled on the backs of Canadians, on top of the billions we have seen over the last nine years. It must be noted that, as a result of this, Canadian taxpayers are on the hook for $58 billion in interest on that debt, which is more than the federal government sends to the provinces for health transfers. This point has been made, but it is worth restating because it is such an astronomical number.
All this debt and interest equals more taxes on the backs of Canadians, which is why, on April 1, we saw the Liberals increase the carbon tax by 23%, notwithstanding the outcry from premiers and Canadians. It is on the way to quadrupling, which we now know will be a $30-billion-per-year hole in the economy. The report has now become public. Of course, there is the recent job-killing tax hike as well.
The problem with all the spending, taxes and red tape is that these things are killing our economy. Canada is now the worst-performing economy in the G7 and in the OECD. Since 2019, the last year before COVID, GDP per capita in Canada is down 2%; in the U.S., it has increased by 8%. Therefore, we really have a huge gap here between our two countries. We are at the very bottom and the U.S. is at the top of the G7, after nine years of the Prime Minister. The OECD calculated that Canada's economic growth will be the worst of the nearly 40 advanced economies in the OECD in this decade, again in the very basement. It will be below Greece and Italy, which are often the historical underperformers. If this trajectory continues and is not reversed, the OECD projects that Canada will have the worst economic growth for the next three decades.
Therefore, as we debate the budget, all of this means that we are on track for the worst decline in Canada's standard of living in 40 years, according to a Fraser Institute report from last month. In fact, we are seeing the widest gap in GDP per capita, which is a measure of the standard of living, between Canada and the U.S. since 1965. That is according to RBC.
This is alarming to me, and it should be alarming to all Canadians. It should be setting off alarm bells on the government benches as to how we got here. Clearly, all the inflationary spending, debt, taxes and red tape have compounded it. Really, it is what we have been calling economic vandalism.
Over the weekend, I was talking to a constituent who has a trucking firm. He told me that his orders are down and people are shipping less. This is in the midst of the greater Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario. He is seeing that decline in business in the daily orders he is getting. He told me that, often, trucking is a harbinger of a decline in economic activity. We know this is true. Therefore, it confounds me that this is the case. How did we get this way in Canada? We have so many advantages that have been squandered by the Liberal-NDP government, with its fiscal and economic policies. The budget, with its taxes, exacerbates the issue even further.
In Canada, we have everything the world wants. We have 18 LNG projects awaiting approval; they are on the desk of the Prime Minister. The Germans, the Japanese, the Poles and the Greeks have all come to Canada looking for our LNG. We can help get the world off coal and replace Europe's dependence upon Russian natural gas. However, the Prime Minister told the German chancellor that there was no business case for LNG, so Germany went to Qatar, which helped it build the facility in seven months. This was a lost opportunity for Canada and Canadian jobs.
Canada has all the critical minerals, as well as many rare earth minerals. The world needs them, the world wants them, and we need them for our own economy. While we have 6% of the world's lithium, we do not extract it because of the government's bad policies and ideological aversion to natural resource extraction industries.
We also have nuclear expertise; not far from my home in southern Ontario, there is the second-largest nuclear plant in the world. There is a whole supply chain of companies that help feed that throughout southwestern Ontario, some of which are located in my constituency. That is another advantage that Canada has, yet our economy and standard of living are in decline, with the worst decline in 40 years. How can this be? Despite all these obvious advantages, along with smart people and good people, Canada is lacking in private sector investment in our economy. We saw that in the recent report about the lack of entrepreneurs that will take risks and seed innovation.
Therefore, it is not surprising that, after nine years of Liberal taxes and out-of-control spending, entrepreneurialism is being stifled. We saw that Canada lost 100,000 entrepreneurs. In the year 2000, Canada had three entrepreneurs for every 1,000 people. Today, that is down to 1.3, on average, per 1,000 people. The Prime Minister has bloated the size of the federal government at the expense of entrepreneurs and innovation. What is sad is that this is happening in Canada; we have every reason to succeed, but the government, these policies and the budget are dragging us down.
I contrast that to 2014, when there was a headline in The New York Times declaring that Canada had the strongest, most prosperous middle class in the world. In fact, The New York Times suggested that the Canadian dream had replaced the American dream in many respects in 2014. That is why my omas and opas came to Canada from the Netherlands following the Second World War. After the hunger winter, when the Dutch people were literally being starved to death by the Nazis, it was Canadian troops who liberated them. Many Dutch people came to Canada seeking hope, opportunity and freedom, and that is the story of many Canadians over the course of our history.
These people came with nothing in their pockets, as my grandparents did. They could work hard, save up, buy a home and start a family, but after nine years of the Prime Minister, that is no longer possible. It was possible in 2014, when The New York Times had that headline. Now, mortgages, down payments and rents have doubled, and taxes are up. That is why Canadians of all generations and backgrounds are upset. They are very upset. The most common thing I hear is people asking how it is that the Canadian dream has faded away. They ask how the freedom to work hard and succeed, to have that opportunity and hope, has drifted away after nine years of the Prime Minister.
It used to be that nine in 10 young people had given up on the dream of home ownership. It is now nine in 10 Canadians overall who see no future and no hope. That is an indicator of what the government farcically calls a budget that has fairness for every generation, when it is actually unfairness for every generation. They government has eroded that hope. I will be voting against Bill C-69, the budget implementation act, because it does not serve the interests of any generation of Canadians.
It is long past time that the Liberals get out of the way so that common-sense Conservatives can unleash Canada's potential and people can bring home powerful paycheques. Let us bring it home.
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- Jun/17/24 10:09:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I want to speak this evening about the concept of the government's assertion about tax fairness in this budget. I would like to read into the record some facts that push back on the government's assertion that a fairly significant tax increase it has included in this budget is only going to affect a very small number of Canadians.
I am reading from an article in the National Post. When I was putting my notes together for this speech, I thought that it actually summarized it very well, so why reinvent the wheel? This is an article written by Matthew Lau last week, which reads:
In its latest announcement on the capital gains tax increase, the Liberal government presents as a “quick fact” that it’s “increasing capital gains taxes on 0.13 per cent of Canadians, in any given year.” There are three problems with the 0.13 per cent figure. First, it is misleading; second, it is incomplete; and third, it ignores tax incidence, which is the concept that the economic burden of a tax falls on different people—in fact, on very many more people—than simply those who face a higher tax bill.
That concept of tax incidence is something that I encourage colleagues to understand, prior to continuing to vote in favour of this budget, because it will detrimentally impact the Canadian economy. The article goes on:
Let’s take the three problems in order. First, the 0.13 per cent figure is misleading because of the phrase that follows: “in any given year.” The taxpayers who are part of this 0.13 per cent in one year are different than the taxpayers captured in this group in another year. For many Canadians, reporting an annual capital gain in excess of $250,000 is a once-in-a-lifetime event—or an immediately-after-lifetime event if the capital gain threshold is triggered when a deceased person’s assets are liquidated.
What this is saying is that this affects families. It continues:
This means that even if only 0.13 per cent of Canadians pay this higher tax rate every year, a much greater percentage of Canadians will be hit with this tax hike over the course of their lives. [An] Economist...concluded that, “As a share of Canada’s tax filer population, those impacted by the new capital gains proposal on a lifetime basis is 1.26 million or 4.3 per cent of tax filers compared to the budget estimate of 0.13 per cent.”
Second, the 0.13 per cent figure is incomplete because it excludes corporations. As the Liberals estimated in budget 2024, approximately 307,000 corporations (again, in a given year) will be subject to the tax. About 6,000 of these are likely to be publicly traded...so many Canadians will effectively be subject to the higher capital gains tax through their investments, [and through their] pension...assets.
The government does not talk about how this tax increase is going to affect people's investments and particularly their pensions. The government has not adequately costed that or talked about it in its presentation of this tax to Parliament and to the general public.
Then there’s the approximately 301,000 private corporations, many of which have multiple owners, such as partners or family members, so even excluding exposure to publicly traded corporations, many Canadians will be hit by the capital gains tax...through their investments. “Overall,” [an economist] estimates, “4.74 million...investors in Canadian companies will be affected, representing 15.8 per cent of all filers.” Or more than 100 times the Liberals’ stated figure of 0.13 per cent.
Again, I want to emphasize what I said in the earlier part of that statement, which is that a lot of these are family members. These are family-owned corporations of tradespeople. That is why the Leader of the Opposition asked the Liberals to provide an amendment saying that if it is only going to affect 0.13%, then accept an amendment to keep it to that, but we know that they cannot. That is why they will not accept this amendment, because they know these facts, and they are just not telling the Canadian public. They are not being honest. That is not fair.
The article states:
This brings us, thirdly, to the concept of tax incidence, of which students will learn in a good economics class but which the Liberal government would like us all to ignore. A well-known example: on paper, corporate income taxes are paid by shareholders, but in reality the economic burden of the tax falls largely on workers in the form of lower wages. Corporate income taxes discourage investment, thus reducing labour productivity and the number of businesses bidding for labour.
The article continues:
No differently, the Liberal government’s capital gains tax discourages business investment and will have negative effects on workers...beyond those who earn high amounts of capital gains in [any] given year. Business investment has already fallen in alarming fashion since the Liberals took office: from 2015-Q3 to 2024-Q1, real per capita investment is down 13.9 per cent. A capital gains tax hike that distorts investors’ decisions to favour present-day consumption over long-term investment will make this trend even worse.
The incidence of the Liberals’ capital gains tax hike will fall on all of us, not just the 15.8 per cent...who are directly affected, or the “0.13 per cent of Canadians, in any given year” that the Liberals claim. For ordinary Canadians, learning about tax incidence for two hours could be a profitable and amusing activity; being whacked by a capital gains tax that the Liberals say will only affect the super-rich [but affects all of us], not so much.
The other point that has been made by economists and by any business person is that the brisk implementation of the hike guarantees that it will enforce Canadian investors to shed assets in a hurry to take advantage of the existing lower rate, but revenue will decline over time. While we know the Liberals are facing potential credit downgrades because of the incredible amount of debt they have incurred on the Canadian people and because of the incredible deficit they once again racked up this year, they are looking for a way to prevent that credit downgrade. They are looking for an easy cash grab.
One never wants to be in a position as a person where one is looking for a quick way to make money. That is where poor decisions are made. There are all sorts of crass examples I could give of that. Why would I not do that? This is like the equivalent of selling feet pictures for the Liberals. That is what the capital gains tax is. It is a quick cash grab to try to prevent Canada from having its credit downgraded.
This would all be bad enough if it was not for the finance minister, who I honestly do not know how she has her job. I am sure she is liked in the caucus. I do not have anything personally against her, but she is clearly incompetent. How the Liberal backbench allowed her to present a budget that was this unbalanced, with this in it, and to keep her job is beyond me. This is so irresponsible. What the finance minister said in announcing this should give all colleagues in this place pause for thought. Her comments were described in a major Canadian newspaper as, “[the finance minister's] remarks seem like naked class warfare in a miserably thin guise of technical fairness.”
The government has spent billions and billions of dollars. Are we in trillions now? It has spent so much money, and I do not think there is a single Canadian who can look at their life in terms of being able to buy groceries, to afford rent, to look at buying a house, to take a vacation or to look that long-term prosperity, and certainly not young Canadians, and who can say that they are better off now than they were nine years ago.
We have spent all of this money, essentially in peacetime, and the last few years are not pandemic time. There is no reason for this deficit this year. If the government has spent all this money in this short period of time and Canadians have nothing to show for it, then why are we still allowing the government to use spending as a metric?
Government members say that they are creating tax fairness, but they are just increasing taxes to make life more unaffordable and to create less investment for our country. As parliamentarians, we cannot allow them to do this. We have to hold them to account on this. I understand that there are different schools of political thought in this place about what the government should spend on and what it should not, but none of us, regardless of political stripe, should allow a government to spend without outcome, which is exactly what the government has done.
When we think about all of the waste, we have only scratched the tip of the iceberg on the scandal of the government's waste. We should never be listening to the government about trying to take more of Canadians' hard-earned money to let it go into the abyss. We have to stop it. I implore colleagues of all political stripes to vote against this budget. It is bad. The government needs to go back to the drawing board. Certainly, this measure it has put in there is not tax fairness; it is decimation for the Canadian people.
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