- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Green Party
- Saanich—Gulf Islands
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,862.18
- Government Page
- May/8/24 4:52:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we do not really have a lot of time in this place to dive into things like productivity. What increases Canada's productivity? Why do we lag in productivity? I have long found a line by Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, pretty compelling. It is, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it’s almost everything.”
I have heard answers to that over the years, and I know I do not have time now to get into the research of why that is. The notion that Canada and our economy is based on hewers of wood and drawers of water makes our productivity quite low. Countries with high productivity have value added in their exports. They do not ship out raw logs, raw bitumen or raw product. They have a lot of value added with worker contributions.
As our exports increasingly become low-value, unprocessed resources, productivity falls. However, I do not hear from many of my colleagues in this place, or anyone, decrying that we are shipping out raw bitumen or raw logs. That is what hurts productivity.
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Mr. Speaker, it is the first chance I have had to address the hon. member for Portage—Lisgar since his win in the by-election. I would like to congratulate him. I look forward to working with him in this place, as I did with his predecessor.
In terms of the piece of legislation before us, I am very concerned that we apply a new lens to foreign investment in Canada, from a national security point of view and from a national sovereignty point of view. We have had the recent experience, which I have mentioned in this place, of something that did not ring any bells or raise any flags as it began, which is a company called Paper Excellence. It is owned by one billionaire from Indonesia who has now bought up the majority of the pulp and paper sector of our economy: Resolute Forest Products, Catalyst paper and Domtar. How do we track that? What triggers an investigation when we start seeing the Canadian economy bought up and held in countries like Indonesia where we do not at this point have a relationship that would let us track that?
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Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Windsor West for a speech full of good examples of things that have happened in the past. I would also reflect on the fact that, by a hair's breadth, we nearly lost Aecon Construction to the People's Republic of China. Again, that would never have had a security review if we had not started mentioning it in this place. This is progress.
I want to reflect and ask the hon. member for Windsor West if we do not want to also have a lens on. I know this is still in the philosophical framework of Bill C-34. It is still in the frame that we are better off when everything is traded all around the world and we have a massive globalized economy. Clearly, we are always going to have a globalized economy. However, in the wake of COVID, would it not be better to have many supply chains within Canada, to rebuild Canada's manufacturing capacity, to have the jobs here at home and to have food grown at home for Canadians?
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- Nov/17/22 6:40:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my heavens, I need to say a few things.
I intervened in the National Energy Board process. I read all 23,000 pages of its so-called evidence, and I can swear on a stack of Bibles that nowhere in there was there a cost-benefit analysis. In fact, the National Energy Board blocked the evidence from Unifor, the largest union in the oil sands, when its representatives testified and had expert evidence that the pipeline project would cost Canadian jobs and that Unifor was against it. The National Energy Board said that jobs and the economy were not in its mandate and then magically ruled that, yes, there would be a lot of environmental damage if this went ahead, but it was in the national interest.
I think the national interest is in a viable planet. I think the national interest is in making sure we try to stabilize at 1.5°C, and we know that every international body is saying no new fossil fuel infrastructure if we have an interest in human civilization surviving to when my daughter, now 31, is my age. By God, this must be stopped.
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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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- 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 6:30:34 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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Madam Speaker, the statement of the hon. member that any more government spending leads to inflation is not borne out by many periods of time in this country and around the world.
Certainly some kinds of spending can fuel inflation. This is a very strange inflation we are experiencing. There are some real increases in price due to supply chain disruptions. There are real increases in price based on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There are distortions based on the usual kind of inflation, which is generalized through the economy, where the Bank of Canada is raising its rates in order to slow it. There is a minuscule proportion of the overall inflation pressure from carbon pricing, and in any province where the federal backstop is at work, the money is returned to the citizens of that area.
To get a broader sense of that, some government spending is essential to help lower-income Canadians be able to cope with various pricing pressures.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciated the member's focus on the excess profits of the oil and gas sector.
I do not like using the term “excess profit” and I do not like using “windfall profit”. Let us be clear about what we are talking about: We are talking about immoral war profiteering. That is what we are seeing right now. If hon. members across the way want to laugh, let me refer to the business columnist in The Globe and Mail, Eric Reguly, who called this out in his August 8 column. He pointed out that the profits of oil and gas right now have nothing to do with business acumen and everything to do with war.
I would ask my hon. colleague if he agrees with the Parliamentary Budget Officer that by doubling from 15% to 30%, the additional $8 billion coming into the Canadian economy and the government coffers could help us take care of the poorest of the poor.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Joliette for his speech.
I completely agree with the member for Guelph. It is good to reflect with him on ideas that are slightly more complex and on a nuanced approach. These are not very simple issues and it is difficult because of the different challenges, which are complex. For example, we have the war in Ukraine, Canada's current situation, and issues related to the pandemic, as well as the impact of climate change and the climate emergency on our economy and economies around the world.
I want to ask my colleague from Joliette and the Bloc Québécois what they think of the idea of providing a universal guaranteed livable income to everyone to protect all Canadians from these complex problems.
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Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague is from the neighbouring riding of Victoria where she is doing great work.
I would just say that we have to finish the work that started under Lester B. Pearson, Tommy Douglas and David Lewis, and that includes pharmacare. It will save Canada money and it will be better for our economy.
People think that our ridings, Victoria and Saanich—Gulf Islands, are fairly wealthy, but I have seniors living in their cars. I have people for whom I pay their electricity bills so that they do not fall out of their apartment and end up living in a car. We have desperate needs, and Bill C-12 will help, but pharmacare is essential.
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