Luc Thériault

“Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise and represent my wonderful riding. Today, I will be speaking to Bill C-31, the budget implementation act from last year. This legislation deals with the allocation of public funds from the previous fiscal year, which ended on March 31 and, in my opinion, should have been passed by this House a long time ago. In fact, tomorrow, November 4, it will be one year since the previous budget was tabled. This is from a government that said it would move at speeds never seen before in the history of Canada. The Liberals have not done that with their legislative agenda and all of the procedural tools available, even including time allocation, to move this bill forward. When borrowing is increasing and debt service costs are consuming more public resources, the government has an even greater responsibility to be transparent in how it accounts for every dollar. After the spring economic statement earlier this year, the Parliamentary Budget Officer highlighted “absence of key planning and governance detail for many new measures”. Indeed, since the government tabled the budget a year ago, there has been nearly $5 billion in various announcements not tied to the budgetary process; in other words, spending before parliamentary approval. That includes $1.75 billion for a venture capital fund; $750 million for an agricultural growth pathway program; $430 million to unions; $200 million to an Inuit organization; $173 million for women’s entrepreneurship; $168 million for a research ecosystem; $145 million to FIFA; $813 million for research chairs; $100 million to Gaza; $100 million to Vital health, and I do not even know what that is; $100 million to ELYSIS, and I do not know what that is; $100 million for offshore wind in Nova Scotia; and $100 million for women’s economic leadership. I will not comment on each of these announcements made by ministers. However, I will note that when the government gets completely into the habit of making spending announcements outside of the budgetary process, following the usage of public funds through the budget and estimates process in Parliament becomes almost impossible for the average member of Parliament. Now, on the Liberal side, that does not seem to matter very much because most of the Liberals never speak in Parliament anymore. They have delegated that role to one member, the member for Winnipeg North. That is sad. I actually believe there are lots of intelligent people in the Liberal caucus. Either they are not allowed to speak or they do not know how, but it diminishes the capacity of this House to scrutinize and to have proper debates. I want intelligent Liberal members to raise their voices on behalf of their constituents, but they do not. That is a shame, and it is eroding the democratic traditions of this chamber. The PBO now projects that federal borrowing will increase by $732.9 billion over the next five years, and that the federal debt will continue running substantial deficits as Liberals continue to spend more in a way that outpaces even higher revenues by the government. Interest payments will be the fastest-growing federal expense, skyrocketing to $83 billion projected by 2030-31, consuming 13.6¢ of every dollar in federal revenue and costing a family of four nearly $8,000 annually compared to just $2,500 five years ago. The government promised to lower the debt-to-GDP ratio in the last election. Then it was changed to deficit-to-GDP ratio in the last budget a year ago. This is especially concerning as the Prime Minister has doubled the deficit with the biggest deficit outside the COVID pandemic and the highest spending as a share of GDP since the 1990s debt crisis. To be clear, Conservatives think that these are necessary but insufficient fiscal anchors. The deficit must just simply be reduced. The bare minimum is that the government keeps its word to reduce the debt and the deficit as a share of our economy, but we are not doing that. We have not seen the results that Canadians expected a year ago, and a year and a half ago, since the last election. To achieve this, the government has to look very carefully at our taxation system and overhaul it as part of the budget that is going to be announced this week. I have been pressing the finance minister and the minister responsible for small businesses to do just that. In fact, I have introduced a couple of tax reforms I hope to see presented in the next week. The first is that the GST and HST small supplier threshold should be increased from $30,000 to $60,000 and adjusted to inflation going forward. In Canada, once a business exceeds $30,000 in annual revenue, the owner must register for GST and HST, collect and remit the tax, file returns and take on additional administrative responsibilities. This threshold has not changed for more than three decades despite inflation. I am raising that change to the tax code in good faith, in the hope that the government will make that change because the people impacted by it the most will be, in many cases, the Canadians working the hardest and struggling the most. It is the stay-at-home mom running a side business out of her kitchen like a bakery just to pay for her kids’ hockey and dance lessons. It is the father working as a car detailer on evenings and weekends to cover his kids’ hockey fees or that trip to the Okanagan for that tournament their kid really wants to go to. Let us make it easier for those people. Let us encourage entrepreneurship in our tax code. We have not done that. The second policy I would like to see the government adopt is to increase the federal small business deduction limit from $500,000 to $700,000. This limit was last increased in 2009. Since then, inflation and rising business costs have steadily eroded its value, and growing businesses are hitting that threshold sooner than policy-makers originally intended. Increasing the limit to $700,000 and also adjusting for inflation would allow businesses to keep more of their hard-earned dollars. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business, in advance of the next budget, in response to this one, have all called for an overhaul of our taxation system to reduce the taxes on our entrepreneurs. As I have said in this chamber many times before, we have lost many entrepreneurs in Canada because it is no longer profitable to be an entrepreneur like it was 25 years ago. I say to the government that it should be more transparent with how it spends taxpayer dollars. Announcement after announcement, without the ability of Parliament to properly scrutinize how that money is being spent, is not good for anyone nor for any Canadian. It should adopt a more transparent model. Second, it should overhaul our taxation system with the lens of making Canada more competitive and more open for business. The government should take those two points moving forward, make some necessary changes to improve the entrepreneurial landscape in Canada and provide the transparency we need to allow Canadians to see how the government is spending money and what the actual results of those expenditures are. We cannot do that today, and it needs to change.”