Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, I rise today to speak as the critic of Bill C-46, An Act to amend the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act and the Income Tax Act, otherwise known by its short title as the “Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 3.” This bill authorizes two initiatives contained in the 2023 federal budget. It amends the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act to provide a $2-billion one-time payment for health care to the provinces and territories. As well, it implements the $2.5-billion grocery rebate, which is a one-time payment to 11 million low- and modest-income Canadians.

The $2-billion initiative stems from a February 7, 2023, announcement made by this government when it promised to increase health funding to the provinces and territories by $196.1 billion over 10 years, including $46.2 billion in new funding. This funding was to include:

 . . . an immediate, unconditional $2 billion Canada Health Transfer (CHT) top-up to address immediate pressures on the health care system.

. . . especially in pediatric hospitals and emergency rooms, and long wait times for surgeries.

Bill C-46 amends the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act to authorize this $2-billion payment. Budget 2023 also announced that the government has called for a grocery rebate to be delivered through the goods and services tax credit.

Individuals and families who qualify for the GST tax credit will see their January 2023 payment tripled, providing them with an additional payment equivalent to six months of their GST tax credit payment.

The payment amount under the grocery rebate will be $153 per adult, $81 per child and $81 for the single supplement. On average, this is the equivalent of up to an additional $467 for eligible couples with two children, $234 for single Canadians without children and $225 for seniors. Bill C-46 introduces the necessary legislative changes to authorize this payment.

Colleagues, if you are feeling a bit of déjà vu, let me reassure you that it’s not simply your imagination. You have been here before.

On September 20 of last year, the government tabled Bill C-30, known by its short title as the Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 1. With much fanfare, the government’s press release announced that this bill would “make life more affordable for Canadians.” How did it plan to do this? It did this by none other than providing an additional GST tax credit payment equivalent to six months of their GST tax credit payment. This was the equivalent of $467 for a family with two children, or almost $500. It was precisely what is happening in this bill.

In fact, if you take clause 2 from Bill C-30, and place it side by side with clause 3 from Bill C-46, which is before us today, you will find out that they are virtually identical. It was a simple exercise of copy and paste with a few minor tweaks.

The Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 1 provided 11 million people with a cheque equivalent to six months of their GST tax credit based on their 2021 tax return. Now, the cost of living relief act, no. 3 will provide 11 million people with a cheque equivalent to six months of their GST tax credit based on their 2021 tax return.

However, colleagues, please do not make the mistake of thinking that the government is lacking in ingenuity or creativity. Just because the two benefits look identical, it is important to point out that they are not. They are very different. The benefit provided under Bill C-30 was targeted tax relief, whereas this payment is a grocery rebate.

According to the government, they are two very different initiatives, but if you can’t see the difference, do not despair; you are probably not alone.

All my life, I have thought that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. However, I am learning under this government that this is not necessarily the case.

This government claims that it is a grocery rebate, even though the payment is not tied to actual expenditures. It does not need to be spent on groceries, and requires no submission of receipts to show that you ever bought groceries. It’s not a rebate and has nothing to do with groceries. But they have chosen to call it a “grocery rebate.”

This, colleagues, is a duck that cannot swim, waddle or quack; it has no feathers; it has no webbed feet and no bill. It does not look like a duck, sound like a duck or walk like a duck. Nonetheless, this government insists that it is a duck.

I have serious problems with this for a couple of reasons: First, our Prime Minister has repeatedly shown a complete and total disregard for accountability when it comes to sending cheques to people. We saw this during the COVID pandemic. The government provided much-needed relief in the form of various payments, and then balked at the idea of ensuring that it actually reached the people who needed it. He basically said, “Send the cheques. We’ll deal with the corruption later.” But he never dealt with it. Instead, taxpayers were defrauded out of billions of dollars that the government couldn’t be bothered to try to collect.

This Prime Minister repeatedly demonstrates disdain for the responsible and efficient use of tax dollars. He seems to take pride in opening the spending spout as wide as he can and as often as he can, regardless of where the money runs to. It’s like he doesn’t even care.

The other problem I have with this grocery rebate is that it is blatantly misleading. If it’s a rebate, there should be receipts to back up the payments. If receipts are not required, then let’s not call it a rebate. Let’s call it what it is: a tax rebate.

Yesterday, at the Senate’s National Finance Committee, Senator Carignan asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer, or PBO, about this. This is what the PBO said:

There’s no doubt that the cheques sent to people based on their income and family situation do not have to be based on particular types of expenses. So, there is no direct connection with grocery expenses, and young people living with their parents might receive it and might not be buying groceries . . . .

Colleagues, the question I have is this: Why does this government struggle so hard with being transparent and truthful? There is a solid pattern of either blatantly telling an untruth or intentionally distorting reality. I’m not sure that you could fit a piece of paper between those two, but I’m trying hard not to offend senators by calling it what it is — especially after yesterday’s ruling on the issue of parliamentary language.

Colleagues, this is not a responsible way to run a government.

There is another pattern here as well with this government: Less than one month after announcing the Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 1, we were debating another bill entitled the Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2. This bill introduced the dental benefit and the rental housing benefit. The dental benefit was worth $650 per year and the rental housing benefit was — wait for it — $500.

When the government announced the most recent measure — the cost of living relief act, no. 3 — the National Post penned a headline which summed it up nicely by saying, “The Liberal fixation on addressing complex problems with $500 cheques.” The article went on to say:

For the third time in 12 months, the Trudeau government will be taking a complex policy problem and attempting to address it with a one-time $500 cheque.

Colleagues, we support putting money back into the pockets of the hard-working people who earned it in the first place. What we don’t support is the terrible government policies which have put so many Canadians into difficult financial circumstances.

It is no secret that the Prime Minister’s inflationary spending has caused the price of everything to skyrocket, and makes life increasingly unaffordable.

Interest rates are higher than they have been in decades. Families that bought a typical home five years ago, with a typical mortgage that is now up for renewal, will pay $7,000 more a year. Paycheques don’t go as far as they used to. Canadians are cutting their diets. Mothers are putting water in their children’s milk because they cannot afford yearly food inflations of 10%. Seniors cannot afford to heat their homes. Home prices have doubled since 2015, so 35-year-olds live in their parents’ basements. According to Bloomberg, Canada has the second most inflated housing bubble in the world.

Food bank usage is at an all-time high. According to recent figures, food banks and other food-related programs across Canada served over 5 million people per month last year. That, colleagues, is expected to climb to more than 8 million people a month in 2023 — a roughly 60% increase.

Yet, in spite of these hardships, the Prime Minister’s response has been to shrug and pile on by jacking up the carbon tax once again, in spite of the fact that the Parliamentary Budget Officer has noted the tax will cost the average family between $402 and $847 in 2023, even after the rebates.

The truth is, colleagues, that the so-called grocery rebate will not come close to covering the rising cost of food that Justin Trudeau’s fiscal policy is fuelling. Canada’s Food Price Report 2023 predicts that a family of four will spend up to $1,065 more on food this year. That is $598 more than the $467 rebate that they will receive.

Furthermore, as I noted when I spoke to the Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 1, this bill does not help people as much as the government makes it sound like it does. For starters, you need to understand that this money is only going to those who would normally receive a GST credit benefit. So, if you don’t file an income tax return, you will not qualify for the benefit. This means that many people who need it the most will not receive it.

Second, as Statistics Canada has pointed out in the past:

Since the economic well-being of an individual also depends on family income rather than just personal income, those who qualify for the GST credit are not necessarily disadvantaged. An example would be a young adult living with parents and working part time at a low-paying job. . . . the majority of recipients . . . are from multiple-earner families or those with more than one recipient (for instance, a child and another relative of the major income recipient living in the same family).

In other words, senators, as I said before in this chamber, don’t think for one moment that there is some kind of surgical precision in the deployment of this money. There is not.

The third thing that I would point out is that the GST tax credit was designed to be a tax rebate of GST expenses, not some kind of a cost-of-living-reduction tool. Using the GST tax credit in this manner is a blunt instrument, which will not necessarily result in the lowest earners receiving the higher amounts. For example, the 9 million recipients who are single with no children will only receive the base amount of $306, but if you earn more than $9,900 a year, you will receive 2% of every dollar earned over and above that amount to a maximum of an additional $161.

This means in practice that a single person earning just under $10,000 a year will receive $154 under this bill, whereas a single person earning twice that amount will receive $234, which is 52% more. For a GST rebate, the program makes sense because those with higher incomes pay more GST. But for a measure which is supposed to provide targeted relief to those who need it the most, this is a poorly designed program.

Colleagues, this government is very good at creating problems and pretending to solve them. They are very much like a serial arsonist who occasionally shows up at a fire they started with a few buckets of water claiming to be a hero. I would suggest, colleagues, that Canadians are no longer buying it. As I mentioned earlier, the other part of this bill is the amendment to the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act to authorize a $2-billion payment to the provinces. Once again, if you are having a flicker of déjà vu, it’s probably because, last June, we were debating Bill C-19, the Budget Implementation Act, 2022, No. 1. Division 6 of Part 5 of that bill amended the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act to authorize — wait for it — a $2-billion health care payment to the provinces.

Honourable senators, the provinces desperately need this money because, on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s watch, our health care system has become completely broken. There is a growing shortage of health care workers. Millions of Canadians cannot find a doctor. One of those Canadians emailed me just this morning from Kleefeld, Manitoba, just 10 miles down the road from where I live, saying that he had lost his family doctor and he could not get another one.

According to the Canadian Medical Association a few months ago, our health care system is collapsing. The deal that this government made with the provinces in February of this year is badly needed. But don’t be fooled: it was the bare minimum. And while this $2-billion initial payment sounds like a lot of money, it doesn’t go very far when you divide it between 10 provinces and 3 territories.

For example, public health care spending in Prince Edward Island is over half a billion dollars per year. Prince Edward Island will get $8.7 million from the $2‑billion pot. The Yukon expects to spend $589 million on health and social services this year. They will receive just under $2.3 million from this bill. My province of Manitoba has budgeted $7.9 billion for health care this year, and will receive just over $72 million, less than 1% of their annual budget.

Don’t misunderstand me, colleagues. The provinces are happy to receive the support, but I want to point out that this payment amounts to a bucket of water on a four-alarm fire.

I suggest you save your applause for something more substantive. The fact is that much more must be done to fix our health care crisis, and it has become very clear that this Liberal government is not up to the task. I would point out, however, that if the government doesn’t introduce a quick fix to Bill C-47 on the other side, the provinces will end up getting $4 billion instead of $2 billion and the grocery rebate will be doubled. That, colleagues, is because Bill C-46 is basically copied and pasted from Bill C-47. You’ll find the grocery rebate at clause 29 of Bill C-47, and you’ll find the federal-provincial transfer at clause 242. This duplication is a problem because there are no coordinating amendments between the two bills. This was brought up at both the House of Commons Finance Committee last week and our National Finance Committee yesterday.

So, colleagues, here we are once again. And I know — the government leader is shrugging already — even on this, the government will come along and say, “Just trust us. We will fix it. We will fix it.”

Colleagues, here we are once again rushing through a bill that the government suddenly slams together at the eleventh hour. It’s like they just woke up and realized that grocery prices have gone up, and they scrambled overnight to put something together — except even that doesn’t make sense because the so-called grocery rebate and the health transfers to the provinces were included in the budget document. That means that they have been on the government’s radar for a while.

Even though it was on their radar for a while, they still are left scrambling to throw the legislation together and then have to rush it through the other house with no debate and no examination by committee, and they’ll expect us to expedite it as well, flaws and all.

I could go on and on, senators, but let me just make one more brief point. If you open up Bill C-46 and look at the inside page of the cover, you will find what is referred to as a “Royal Recommendation.” Royal Recommendations only need to be included in money bills if the expenditure was not anticipated in the estimates. We just had Supplementary Estimates (C) and the Main Estimates in this chamber. The fact that Bill C-46 contains a Royal Recommendation means that neither of these two expenditures were anticipated at the time that the estimates were being put together.

Colleagues, I would despair, except that I know for a fact that a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre will work tirelessly with our provinces to address the critical problems we are facing in order to find and implement real solutions.

Senator Martin: Hear, hear.