Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in this place for the first time to give a speech since our summer recess. I spent much of the time since I last saw members in this place, as we all have been doing, travelling through my riding. It may look like a small dot on a postage stamp to people who are looking at it quickly, but actually, given that it is five separate small islands, Saturna, Salt Spring, Mayne, Pender and Galiano, ferry transit between them makes it difficult to get to all parts of the community. Certainly, it takes a lot of time to travel with B.C. ferries. I am certainly supporting the motion from my colleague just down the way here, from Courtenay—Alberni, to find ways in the next budget to provide some funding to assist and have some equity between the way Atlantic Canada ferries are subsidized and B.C. ferries. I am detracting from my main point, which is that on the Saanich Peninsula, as the name of my riding, Saanich—Gulf Islands, suggests, I represent quite disparate areas geographically. Getting to nine different communities, as I do twice a year, to make sure I hold community meetings as conveniently as possible for all my constituents, means that I have just been on a very inspiring and constantly humbling experience of listening to my constituents in each of the five small southern Gulf Islands and throughout the Saanich Peninsula, from the very tip of it at the very northern part of the peninsula, near Swartz Bay and the airport, all the way down into areas that are covered by the MP for Victoria. We share some territories there. The concerns from constituents in Saanich—Gulf Islands are not unlike concerns from constituents I imagine my colleagues have heard across the country. There is a lot of concern about the cost of living, particularly around housing. There is a lot of concern about access to medical care, access to a family doctor and provision of health care services. In my communities, everywhere I went, there was the concern of the climate crisis. This summer, British Columbia had a state of emergency declared for the whole province as fires burned out of control. It was terrifying to see the sights out of Peachland and the areas around the Okanagan. We also had extreme weather events throughout British Columbia this summer. As a former Cape Bretoner, my heart broke to see the roads washed out and the floods and the loss of life in Cape Breton from the floods there. In other words, whenever I am travelling through my community of Saanich—Gulf Islands, I know that what I am hearing resonates with Canadians across the country. There is no question that Canadians are concerned about the cost of living, and I will be supporting Bill C-38, which we debate now, but I do so with some misgivings, because it, once again, piles on the notion that we are heavily taxed, which some Canadians are and some Canadians are not, and that a temporary relief measure like this will make a real difference. I also have a long memory, and I remember that back in 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the fuel excise tax permanent in the 2008 budget, which was one of the better things he did in terms of public policy. Again, in the 2013 budget, he confirmed and committed that the municipal order of government would be able to access those funds as a predictable, reliable source for public transit. This has changed over time in terms of where that funding comes from. For municipal orders of government across Canada, one of the concerns I have is, as we temporarily suspend the excise fuel tax, not only does it have impacts on our overall debt and deficit, because that is just money not coming in to the general federal revenue at a time when we have unprecedented levels of deficit already, but it also creates confusion for municipal orders of government. I have spoken to mayors who say that yes, they are told by the federal government that there are other infrastructure funds and they can apply through those, but they are not as transparent, not as predictable and not seen to be as reliable for helping people who are looking for public transit. I do have a number of points to make about this, but while we look at fuel taxes in today’s bill, let us just for a moment focus on public transit. This country, for a wealthy industrialized country, a member of the G7, has an embarrassingly poor public transit system, particularly in rural and remote areas of Canada, particularly if we are looking for an affordable form of transportation like a bus or a train. If a person owns their own vehicle, yes they can mostly get from A to B, but if they do not, they can be in some peril, recalling that the findings of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls included a strong recommendation that Canada commit to a ground transportation system that was affordable and reliable in rural and remote areas, because it is the vulnerability of the poor that places indigenous women and girls hitchhiking on the Highway of Tears. For people trying to get from Prince George to Vancouver, are within rural interior B.C., or for that matter, are in Saskatchewan or Alberta, we used to have a bus service that was quite reliable in most provinces, but it retreated everywhere and all at once. We used to have many more routes on Via Rail, and they used to be more affordable. I have heard Alto mentioned a few times in this place. However, the Green Party thinks that Alto needs major overhauls to become what it could be, but in the meantime, it does absolutely nothing for Canadians who do not live in the Windsor-Quebec corridor. It does nothing for people in rural parts of New Brunswick where medical care can be a five-, six- or eight-hour drive from a hospital. If it is winter and the roads are icy, or for a senior, there are no alternatives to get there except to get in a car and drive. Again, while we are talking about this fuel excise tax, because of its historical connection to transit, I wanted to use this occasion to make a few points on that. I am hoping that the federal government brings it forward in its next budget. I had begged the Prime Minister before the 2026-27 budget. When I met with the Prime Minister in early October 2025, I made this very point that we need affordable ground transportation in this country. We do not have it particularly for rural and remote Canadians, but we are also looking at a lot less predictability around the funds for urban public transit. Going to this piece of legislation and the focus on a temporary suspension of fuel excise taxes, there will be some ways in which that assists some Canadians: those who are buying gas. Again, if a person cannot afford to own their own car, they are not buying gas for a car. According to Statistics Canada, one out of 10 Canadians right now is living below the poverty line. That should command our attention. There is a growing gap in this country between the wealthiest and the poorest. I remember when I used to feel sort of complacent or self-satisfied as a Canadian thinking, “Well, that gap between the rich and the poorest is in the United States. It is not so much here.” We actually are going through a very significant shift. The middle class is feeling the crunch. When we talk about the affordability crisis, we are largely talking about the fact that, as some of my colleagues from other parties have already mentioned, we have families with two incomes who still cannot make ends meet. There is that crunch in the middle class, and affordability has become increasingly difficult. What has happened to the income distribution in this country? We may be in a class war where the upper class or the billionaire class has already won, and we did not even know there was a war. Again, one in 10 Canadians lives below the poverty line, but what is happening to the wealthiest? According to Forbes, in 2000, it could track 15 billionaires in Canada. I am not against billionaires. Well, actually, I kind of am. I think that billionaires should be taxed so that we can reduce them to mere millionaires so that they have to count their pennies like the rest of us mere millionaires. I am kidding, obviously. I am not in that group, but it does strike me as something that should command our attention that, right now, there are 76 to 82 billionaires in Canada. Again, 26 years ago, there were 15. Now, there are somewhere between 76 and 82 billionaires. Some Canadians are doing quite well. Some Canadians do not worry about the fuel excise tax. In fact, they do not worry about their income tax either. We are not taxing their wealth, which we really need to look at. We need to look at taxing assets. For what it is worth, in the last election campaign, thanks to the Parliamentary Budget Office and the act that oversees it, political parties had the right to ask for the Parliamentary Budget Office to give all political parties access to an analyst to look at budgetary planks that the party was looking at to see what the PBO thought of budget proposals. It happens that the Green Party platform, of all the party platforms in the 2025 election campaign, was the one that brought us closest to balanced budgets. I do not think anyone saw that in the news because, despite our efforts, we did not get any news coverage of the fact that we had the platform that brought us closest to balanced budgets. We did that through a combination of measures. One that was very successful was a tax on financial transactions. It used to be called the Tobin tax. In the late 1990s, the House of Commons passed a motion in support of Canada pursuing the Tobin tax. We applied it domestically and looked at what would happen if we put a 20¢ tax on every $100 of transactions in the stock market or currency transactions. Now that is not going to affect those people who are struggling in the middle class, nor does it have any impact at all on the one in 10 Canadians who are below the poverty line. However, applied to stock market transactions and currency transactions, it could bring in $55 billion to Canada’s general revenues. That could really make an impact for Canadians who are struggling. That could provide the transit that people need to get from A to B when they are in the group of people who either cannot afford to own a car or find it much more convenient not to have to operate one, particularly in urban areas. Again, rural and remote Canada also needs ground transit. When we look at the current situation and the price of gas being one of the main drivers of inflation right now due to the decision in February of this year by the United States and Israel to launch attacks on Iran. These violate the United Nations charter. I suppose I could be charitable and say the Prime Minister misspoke when he initially said that Canada was supportive of what the U.S. was doing in bombing Iran. Regime change has never actually occurred through foreign countries violating international laws to bomb them. In any case, ever since that occurred, the price of gas has been spiking, especially since the Strait of Hormuz started being blocked, which was entirely predictable, although somehow Trump and his advisers did not predict it. The effect of higher gas prices has been devastating on inflation and the cost of food. It has had a real impact, certainly for North Americans, and globally it has created a lot of instability in markets. It has created a lot of concern. One thing it has also created is a windfall level of profits for the oil and gas industry. Here we are debating a minor change that will affect the Treasury of Canada by increasing debt and deficit, but why are we not talking about the need for an excess profit tax on the industry that right now is essentially war profiteering? The oil and gas sector has, in the last year or so, had an extraordinary increase in profits, and some of it has certainly been to the benefit of Canada’s economy. Our government books and the Alberta provincial government books are better off for high fuel prices, but it certainly has not helped the average Canadian or for that matter the average American or people around the world who are struggling. They are also struggling, as I mentioned earlier, because of the climate crisis and the impact of having to become climate refugees, sometimes several times in the same year. I think of people in northern Ontario, near Wabakimi Provincial Park, in first nations communities that burned to the ground and had inadequate preparations for such events because the November 2025 budget gave scandalously scant attention to the need to protect communities and to build up a national firefighting force to buy water bombers. What we had was a commitment to lease water bombers and that was it. We were going to lease three water bombers over four years. There was nothing for what we need to do for flood protection and for building up. By the way, firefighters in this country are not even classed under occupational health and safety rules as first responders. They are at the back of the bus in terms of the protection for their own lives, their own salaries and their own pensions. I will go back to the issue of windfall profit taxes. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, if we applied windfall profit taxes on the oil and gas industry, that could bring into the coffers of the Government of Canada between $18 billion and $48 billion. Again, that could assist us quite a lot in paying down the debt. With respect to the $34 billion, for some reason, I like to convert billions back to millions so we can think about what it really means to be a billionaire and what it really means for the Canadian government to spend the money it takes in through taxes. One billion dollars being 1,000 million dollars, we spent $34,000 million, without a single vote in this place, to build the Trans Mountain pipeline through a Crown corporation that we are now proposing would build a second pipeline. This is an outrageous waste of money, where the public purse is paying for something that the private sector does not think is worth investing in because there is no business case. However, if we brought in a windfall profit tax on the oil and gas sector and brought in $18 billion to $48 billion there and if we brought in, as we are advocating, a financial transaction tax to bring in $55 billion there, yes, we could start paying down debt and deficit. I meant to mention one thing about the pipelines that I forgot. The hon. Minister of Energy and Natural Resources was in British Columbia earlier this summer, and he actually said that the Trans Mountain pipeline was making “oodles” of money. To correct the record while I have a chance, in fact while the Trans Mountain pipeline in its year-to-year operations is more than breaking even and making some money, the revenues returned to the Government of Canada by the Trans Mountain pipeline have yet to be sufficient to pay the interest on the debt Canadians incurred to build it. If someone is making money in a normal business context, if they have spent $34 billion to build their business, personally I do not think they are making any money until they pay that off. They have a $34-billion debt and not one penny has been paid down but are under the assumption that pipelines are like something the tooth fairy leaves under one’s pillow and there is no actual cost to them. However, it is $34 billion and now the government is proposing to spend $40 billion for a project that has no private sector proponent. Regarding this bill, if we are going to provide real relief to Canadians and real measures for affordability, we do need to look at excess profit taxes on the very monopolistic small group of grocery store chains that we have in this country. We need to help farmers. Desperately, we need to help farmers so they can get food from their farms to the tables of Canadians, healthy local Canadian food. I applaud the measures the government has brought in for making greenhouses more accessible, but we need to make land accessible to young farmers and we need to do everything we can to ensure that the grocery store chains buy local and promote local so that our farmers can continue to provide healthy food to Canadians. We would not do much in Bill C-38 to actually deal with the affordability crisis. Yes, the Liberals have taken a page out of a position advocated by the Conservatives last year. Yes, I will vote for it, but I am concerned. Where is the government in really helping Canadians with affordability? Where is the help for remote and rural Canadians to get transit that is affordable? Where is the help to ensure that the poorest of the poor are not bearing a larger tax burden than the richest of the rich? It is time to actually consider tax fairness in this country, taxing wealth and excess profits of transnational corporations.
