- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Green Party
- Saanich—Gulf Islands
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,862.18
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise tonight and pursue the discussion of a very complex piece of legislation. It did not start out being complex, when our colleague initially put it forward as Bill C-234, but I appreciate the opportunity to speak to it. Of course, this is the greenhouse gas pollution pricing act as it relates to on-farm use of fossil fuels. It has now been amended in the Senate to exempt one of the larger uses of fossil fuels on farms. Of course, farm communities are not pleased; however, I wanted to step back.
This piece that would now be exempted under the Senate amendments is the on-farm use of propane fuel for grain drying. In other words, activities that take place in buildings are now no longer exempt from the fossil fuel exemption that came through in the first version of Bill C-234. As the Green Party members and I voted for Bill C-234 in its first iteration, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity, if I may, to explain why we voted that way and what I think we should do for a fundamental reconsideration of the way we price carbon on farms so that it has some intellectual and scientific coherence.
Let me first start with why we voted for Bill C-234 in its first iteration. I recall really clearly when carbon pricing came forward, which we favour, to be very clear. We think we have to monetize carbon. If we treat pollution as something free, nobody will pay attention to what it really costs society, what it really costs humanity to treat the atmosphere as if it were a large, free garbage dump for our pollution. That is clearly not acceptable. We moved forward, accepting that there would be, unfortunately, a patchwork, because some provinces had already moved forward.
British Columbia brought in Canada's first carbon tax, a well-constructed and logical revenue-neutral approach to carbon pricing. There have been changes, and some provinces brought in their own versions. What the current Liberal government brought forward was essentially a backstop; for those provinces that did not have their own systems, the federal government brought in a carbon price that would apply everywhere to try to equalize the pricing among all the different provinces and have a system that remained revenue-neutral.
British Columbia brought in the revenue-neutral carbon tax under the government of previous premier Gordon Campbell, who pretty much represented the right wing of B.C. politics. Nevertheless, it was a really well-designed carbon price. The revenue-neutral part of it was that, as British Columbians, we got tax cuts that were how we received what citizens now actually receive as a rebate check in those backstop provinces. This became a bit more complicated than it perhaps needed to be.
When the Liberals brought this in, they said they were not going to apply it on farms; farmers would not have to pay the carbon tax. At least, that was how it was communicated. When farmers realized that they were not paying a carbon tax on the diesel they put in their tractors or the farm equipment they use, but they were paying a big one on grain drying, they became quite concerned. That is the source of Bill C-234. We felt, in principle, that once the farming community has been told that carbon tax will not apply to them, one should stick to that.
It also happened that, because of the climate crisis, the need for grain drying increased. This is one of those things that may sound counterintuitive, of course, but we had what farmers in the Prairies referred to as “the harvest from hell” that winter. I am going to back up and say that I know it is not the first time we have ever had the need for grain drying. We have had wet harvests before. It was not a novelty, but it was particularly bad. They were still trying to get crops out of the fields when there was snow on them. Grain drying became much more intense, and the use of propane for grain drying actually increased. That is when farmers said, “Well, wait a minute. We were supposed to be exempt from carbon pricing.”
Before diving into what has happened to Bill C-234 since then, I want to step back and ask this: If we wanted to monetize carbon and, preferably, keep farmers who are essentially land stewards on board with the need to respond to the climate crisis, how would we do that? I would say that the reason farmers should be particularly on board with measures to reduce greenhouse gases and avoid an ever-worsening climate crisis is that, if there is one economic sector that is a big loser and at risk in a world of climate crisis, it is agriculture. In the Prairies now, there is a multi-year drought. Some of my friends who are farmers on the Prairies say not to call it a drought. They say to call it “aridification”, because it is just going to keep getting drier as a result of climate trends and global warming.
With respect to the impact on the cost of food, we talk about inflation in grocery prices, and a good chunk of that is the impact on certain agricultural products because of extreme climate events. Whether droughts or floods, extreme weather events wipe out certain kinds of food. The price of vanilla went sky-high because of the impact of storms hitting Madagascar, as but one example. Of course, grains all around the world started costing a lot more because of a combination of Putin declaring war on Ukraine and crop failures caused by extreme climatic events.
As someone who wants to see us all pull together, it was distressing that one component of Canadian society would be alienated from efforts to act on climate by what felt like and, I have to say, looked like a betrayal on a promise. This component is severely impacted by the climate crisis and, therefore, should be onside with doing something to keep it from becoming ever worse; at the same time, it is a part of our society that plays a big role in how carbon is sequestered. If the Liberals say they are not going to apply carbon taxes on farms, then farmers are surprised to be paying a walloping carbon tax, how did that happen? I am sorry to say this to my Liberal friends, but it is because the Liberals do not really understand a lot about farming; when they made the promise, they did not realize that fossil fuels used on farms were largely used in buildings to dry grain.
It is fine to exempt tractors and on-farm equipment, but here we come to the crux of what I wish we had done, which we could perhaps still do: We can enlist farmers as the creative land stewards they are, as farmers sequester carbon through their practices and on-farm activities, such as zero-tillage agriculture, getting rid of summer fallow, and making sure they are doing more perennial and fewer annual crops. Farmers are massively effective at sequestering carbon in soil, and guess what? We talk about planting forests as a way of sequestering carbon and carbon sinks in forests. Those things are real; that is true.
However, right now, and largely because of climate change, our grasslands are better at sequestering carbon than our forests are. Why? The soils hold an enormous quantity of carbon. Climate conditions causing forest fires wipe out the carbon we were sequestering in forests, releasing it by the millions of tonnes into the atmosphere. It is not just in the summer; every province in this country started having wildfires that were out of control in the spring, in May of last year, and all the way through late fall and some into the winter. When forests burn, we lose all the carbon.
Here is something interesting, and scientists are looking at this a lot: When grasslands burn, we do not lose all the carbon. Most of that carbon is stored well below the soil, in the root systems that do not burn. Therefore, if we are offsetting for greenhouse gas, I generally think we are better not to plant a tree but to plant a billionaire; I usually say that in jest, just to make sure everybody understands that. We are better off protecting the grasslands.
Where ecosystems exist with grasslands, it is better to sustain them and keep them robust, which means this: What if, instead of just having carbon pricing on the fuel they burn, we pay farmers for every tonne of carbon they sequester? What if we had an actual balance sheet on carbon pricing, thanking and rewarding farmers who have taken on board protecting ecological services, such as wetlands, protecting biodiversity and making sure they are restoring the health of soil, improving the profitability and the health of the food, and keeping carbon out of the atmosphere?
I say thanks to farmers.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise this afternoon to speak to a very important, but also inadequate, bill.
I am honoured to stand today and recognize the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin peoples. We are on their land.
Bill C-31 represents two parts that would attempt to help Canadians when times are tough. Part 1 deals with dental care and an interim dental benefit and part 2 deals with rental housing and a one-time payment to help low-income renters. It is hard to be against anything in this bill. I hope to approach the two parts in equal measure in the time I have available.
A dental benefit is something that no Green Party member of Parliament could be against. We were the first party to propose bringing dental care into our public health care system. It was a central feature of our platform in 2015. We got it costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office, and it would be an enormous cost. We recognized that we would have to start, just as the government would do now, with dental assistance for children under 12, and then move forward to take on more. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in this area, particularly because dentists as a profession are not keen on moving in this direction, at least those I have spoken with.
However, we know that dental care is an essential part of health care. Without adequate dental care, other illnesses can occur and other diseases can occur. It really does create a poor start in life when our children cannot get access to routine dental care. Therefore, I fully support Bill C-31's interim first step at dental care. It is again a baby step, but it is better than nothing, and it does fulfill, as we understand it, the confidence and supply agreement between the New Democrats and the federal Liberals.
However, I know my constituents are asking, with the health care crisis in this country, if this really is the top-of-mind thing we should be addressing. We know, and certainly this is the case in my community, that many people do not have a family doctor. Many places across the country are seeing emergency services cut back, emergency wards closed some days and ambulance services less available. We are facing a significant public health crisis. This bill, while focusing significant resources on dental care for children under 12, does not speak to the things my constituents are most alarmed about. I wanted to flag that.
I am sure the hon. Minister of Health is well aware that the health care system in this country is in crisis. It is practically in free fall, and it is not just about money, with all due respect to my colleagues who say it is all about transfer payments. The Province of British Columbia, where I live, has received transfer payment increases, but the quality of care has not increased with those payments.
One of the local doctors in my riding put it as wanting to see measurable improvements in what they have termed as, and this is brilliant, the bed-to-bureaucrat ratio. They have seen money come in. Talking to health care professionals, I hear about the layers between the person doing the work, the frontline health care worker, and the boss. There are layers of bureaucracy between that health care worker and that decision-maker, and that bureaucracy expands in layers, but health care does not get easier.
One of my friends, who is a wonderful community nurse on Salt Spring Island, was telling me about going to visit a home where somebody needed help to get a vaccination for COVID. They could not go to the clinic. Two nurses went out. One nurse does the vaccination and the other nurse spends the time trying to handle all the required paperwork. She is with the other nurse, so two nurses are in the same house, and most of the work and most of the stress is on the nurse who has to fill out the paperwork.
We really need an emergency meeting of the federal Minister of Health and all provincial colleagues to look at health care, listen to doctors and to nurses, and fundamentally rethink what we are doing in health care. It must remain public. It must remain single payer. We must not allow the emergency of the moment to allow any further privatization creep into our public health care system, and that is an enormous risk because it is not like it is new.
I will emphasize the risk in Canada, versus a country like the U.K., of the two-tier system.
Canada's deal with the United States, which was NAFTA and is now CUSMA, means that health care in Canada is a market. It is not just about taking care of people, and the enormously and obscenely wealthy health insurance industry in the U.S., which provides a lesser quality of health care than what we get in Canada, looks north of the border. The more we allow privatization, the greater the risk that we will lose our public single-payer health care system.
I will turn to the second part of Bill C-31, which deals with rental accommodations and includes a welcome short-term $500 benefit for rent paid on a principal residence in 2022. It is a band-aid. Let us look at a real solution, and on that I want to compliment and thank my hon. colleague from Kitchener Centre, who has placed before us Motion No. 71. This is an affordable housing strategy, not what Bill C-31 offers with an affordable housing band-aid. This is an affordable housing strategy that targets the real causes of the enormous escalation in the price of getting a roof over one's head in this country.
The motion starts by recognizing that it is “a fundamental human right”, as recognized under the Canadian national housing strategy and also under international human rights law, to have housing, and that housing must be adequate to people's needs. The hon. member for Kitchener Centre, in his motion M-71, identifies correctly the problem with housing and why the prices have escalated.
It is that we stopped having the price of a home, and I say “home” and not “investment”, tied, as it was historically, to what a community can afford. If someone is living somewhere where everybody's income is roughly the same, and that tends to happen across Canada, nobody is going to start charging $2 million in a community where the average income is $70,000 a year. I am just not going to start trying to sell a house there, because I would have no buyers. When homes became disconnected and unrooted from place and when homes become a free-floating investment open to any speculator from anywhere, that disconnection and commodification of a home into investment territory is when we started seeing massive escalations in pricing.
Vancouver was ground zero for this, tied to money laundering, crime and all manner of nefarious activity, but it has spread. We have targeted, and the member for Kitchener Centre with Motion No. 71 targeted specifically, real estate investment trusts. These REITs create investment opportunities, and they are not taxed appropriately. We need to actually ensure that REITs are no longer exempt from paying corporate income taxes.
There is much more we need to do with housing and making sure it becomes more affordable. The current Liberal government in the budget that was tabled this spring takes some baby steps in looking at non-resident ownership, but there are other areas we have not yet addressed. I would urge the government to look at the impact on available housing stock of the popularity of Airbnbs.
Airbnbs create a tremendous opportunity for investors to buy multiple residential properties. They are unlike the tourism industry, the hotels and bed and breakfasts, which have, over decades, had to pay for their insurance, train their employees and keep their employees with good wages. Right now all of those regulated industries in tourism are being undercut by Airbnbs.
They sound like they must be the most lovely things in the world. It is as if we are playing in The Holiday with Kate Winslet and going back and forth to someone's home. It is not. This is a big business, and it is taking a lot of housing out of market availability for young families that want to buy a home and for people who want to rent a room in someone else's house while they come to do seasonal work in the Gulf Islands. Those properties are disappearing to Airbnbs, and we really do need to tackle that.
I commend the government for bringing forward Bill C-31, but I do not think it is preparing us for the economic storms that are likely to come. We have a number of warnings globally of a coming recession. We need to do much more. We need to tax the excess profits of those who are making a fortune while others suffer, particularly big oil, get that $8 billion and redistribute it to Canadians who need it the most.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, the hon. member for Whitby, for sharing his time with me. I am honoured to stand here on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin nation and say meegwetch.
This has been a somewhat frustrating debate, as many speakers have noted. There is unanimous support in this place for Bill C-30, yet there are things we want to debate. For my part, I would just like to say that I support Bill C-30 because Canadians need help. Raising and doubling the GST rebate that would go to lowest-income Canadians would amount to $2.5 billion in total, and it would reach, in small amounts, 11 million Canadians. That is not something to sneeze at. People want help, and as my hon. colleague from Vancouver Kingsway said moments ago, $500 is not a small amount of money when one is really up against it. It will make a difference, and that is why I will vote for this.
We also have Bill C-31 that would provide a one-time only payment of $500 to help low-income renters as well as begin the really important work toward including dental care in our health care system, an idea originally proposed by the Green Party of Canada.
There is nothing not to like in this bill, but there is much to talk about because it does not address really large problems like what happens if we go into a recession. What if this inflationary problem is not solved by what the Bank of Canada has done in raising rates? The rate hikes have been quite dramatic. What if the rate hikes push us into a recession? That is a reasonable thing to ask, since that has happened many times before. As a matter of fact, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives' economist David Macdonald, every time over the last 60 years that rate hikes have been used to address inflation, recession has occurred.
This really is a very difficult situation because we must also face international crises, including the climate change crisis, the pandemic, and the war between Russia and Ukraine.
These are complex problems, but those debating in this place, and for obvious reasons political parties, want short, simple bumper sticker solutions that convey support for their party by being definitive and being clear. It reminds me so much of the debate in this place over Bill C-30 or Bill C-31. It also reminds me of a somewhat famous quote from H.L. Mencken, a great journalist who wrote that for every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. We see that here so often in what we hear.
I will say what the complexities are and how they are not respected in this debate. This is not something that we can say is a simple problem. Even inflation in its traditional sense is not really simple, but this is not simple inflation. We have many factors. We thought initially that if we saw inflation in some prices of goods post-COVID that it would be in response to the pent-up spending desires of Canadians, who were not able to spend because COVID kept people from enjoying themselves, basically. The same thing happened after the Spanish influenza epidemic in the early part of the 20th century. The roaring twenties were a response to a very dismal period of people being locked down and to the massive number of deaths, in the millions, from the Spanish flu.
We were also told that we would see some initial inflation but it would be transitory and short-lived. That seemed to be holding true until February, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. That led to different costs and real costs rising because of the enormous impact it had immediately on the price of oil. Then there are climate impacts. Climate impacts are inflationary. It is important for my friends across the way to recognize that climate impacts have increased drought, have increased food prices and have increased the high price of some specific ingredients that make a difference in our shopping carts. All of these things combine to create what we are now experiencing in higher prices.
The response we get to this in terms of the interest rates is a debate in this place about how much money the Liberals spent in dealing with COVID and how they were just printing money. I would say this to my Conservative colleagues: I have no doubt that if Stephen Harper had been prime minister through a pandemic, he would have done exactly the same things the current Prime Minister did, because every economy in the G20 followed the same playbook. Every economy in the OECD was taking the same advice. Central bankers were using quantitative easing, a term I learned from the great former finance minister Jim Flaherty, who used quantitative easing. We were doing exactly what all the other economies around the world were doing, with virtually 0% interest rates and quantitative easing to get billions and trillions of dollars of money flowing into the global economy to confront the pandemic and try to save lives. These were complex issues, for sure, but they are simplified.
What I hear from the Conservative benches as we debate Bill C-30 is about inflation and the pain we are undergoing, to which Bill C-30 provides a band-aid. A band-aid is good when one is bleeding, by the way, but it is not a long-term solution. In this debate on Bill C-30, we have been hearing from the Conservatives that all the pain Canadians are experiencing is from the failures of the current government, that inflation is the fault of the current government and that global supply chain problems are the fault of the current government. I suppose the war in Ukraine, by extension, since that has been the proximate cause of the biggest price hikes in energy supply, is the fault of the government as well.
Disproportionately in this debate, the Conservative benches want to blame it for a very small increase, at 2¢ a tonne, in the price on carbon. That affects only some provinces. We have heard more than three times what the impact is. It is minuscule in the context of what we are experiencing and the real pain Canadians are feeling.
The simplification on the Liberal side is to ask us to compare Canada to other countries, as we are doing so much better than them. By the way, we have talked about our debt-to-GDP ratio, but just look at the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio. It is over 100%, so we are doing better than the United States by quite a lot. However, a single mother who is trying to buy groceries does not really care that overall Canada is doing better on our debt-to-GDP ratio. That is not top of mind. She really wants to know that somebody has her back, as the Liberals like to claim they do.
Both camps, to varying degrees, have oversimplified the problems we are facing. In doing so, I do not think we adequately respect the intelligence of thoughtful Canadians, who are more than prepared to understand that this is a global problem and that we are not the only country experiencing inflation. In fact, some of the countries that are experiencing inflation that is much worse than ours have no carbon price and have not gone through the same policy instruments. This is not a specific problem for which we can blame the Liberals. I will blame the Liberals for many things, but I cannot blame them for this inflation.
When we look at what this is about, I want to refer my colleagues to a book that I think is prescient and worth looking at. It came out in 2005. It is by James Howard Kunstler, who is a best-selling author. The book is called The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. In it, he pointed out that when the price of gas and oil becomes constrained by real events, we have a real challenge to what we presume to be our right to a certain standard of living, to a certain lifestyle, for lack of a better word.
We can look at the real costs of everything. I am going to quote Andrew Nikiforuk, writing in The Tyee and referring to the The Long Emergency: “Since April 2020 the cost of oil has climbed five-fold. The price of coal, the cheapest of fossil fuels, has hit new highs by nearly 150 per cent.” These are real costs that really affect prices.
What do we need to do if we are serious? We do not need band-aid solutions. We need long-term solutions, anticipating that we may well be in a recession. Let us look at a wealth tax. We need to go back and look at a general wealth tax, but specifically let us look at a windfall tax on oil and gas profits. Oil and gas profits due to the war in Ukraine have had unbelievable gains.
I have come to the end of my time. We need to tax back.
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