Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1

Date: 2023_04_27
Chamber: HOUSE OF COMMONS
Mr. Patrick Weiler: it is an honour to rise today in this House and speak to budget 2023 and, more important, Bill C-47, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 28, 2023 . The budget this year comes at a time when Canada had the fastest-growing economy in the G7 last year and is projected to be the second-fastest-growing this year and when we have near record-low unemployment rate, having created an additional 865,000 jobs compared to what it was before the pandemic. However, we know those lofty numbers do not mean much for a lot of Canadians who are struggling right now. We have had high inflation since last year, peaking in September at 8.1%. It is now down to about 4.3%, but that has come as a result of the work of the Governor of the Bank of Canada in raising interest rates. We know that many Canadians right now are struggling with the high cost of living. That is why the budget would make some important investments to help many folks with affordability measures. Key to this is a new grocery rebate, which would help 11 million low-to-modest-income Canadians with up to $467 per couple to help with the rising cost of food. For students right now, as of April 1 of this year, we have eliminated all interest on student loans and we have increased the Canada student grants by 40%. We are also creating a new project and expanding a project to create automatic tax filing for Canadians, because we know it is really important for Canadians to file their taxes so they can get some of the benefits that I was just speaking about. This budget would also make historic investments in health care: almost $200 billion over 10 years, which would be key for areas like mine, where access to a family health practitioner is a very big challenge. We are also expanding Canada's dental care program for families earning under $90,000. Last year, we started it with children 12 and under. This year, it would be for Canadians who are 18 and under and those over the age of 65. There are also some very important investments that would be made to tackle the opioid epidemic, which has struck B.C. very hard. There are also some major investments in this budget in creating the good jobs of today and the good jobs of tomorrow. We know the world is rapidly transitioning to a cleaner economy, and that is why this budget would make significant investments in supporting renewable electricity projects right across the country, not just for the private sector, but also working with Crown corporations and provinces to do that. There are new tax credits for clean hydrogen. I know this is going to be very important for companies in my riding like Quantum Technology, which is involved in projects for the purification and liquefaction of hydrogen. There are also some major investments being made in zero-emissions manufacturing. With the creation of new funds like the Canada growth fund, we would be able to crowd in private capital for projects just like the one that was announced last week with Volkswagen, to create a massive new battery-manufacturing plant in Canada. Because it is National Tourism Week this week, I would be remiss if I did not mention that this budget would make some significant down payments on the launch of Canada's new tourism growth strategy. There is over $100 million that would go toward the regional development agencies to support local projects. There would be about $50 million going to Destination Canada to attract international events to Canada, and there would be investments made to speed up the operations at airports, including investments in improving the protection of passenger rights. With that, I will turn to the budget implementation act, which is where the rubber hits the road on a lot of these measures. I mentioned passenger rights. Right now, we have a backlog of about 30,000 people who are waiting for their cases of delayed flights or cancelled flights to be adjudicated. We would change the process that we utilize for this by switching the onus so that it is not on the travellers to prove that they should be refunded, but on the airline itself to prove that they should not. This would greatly speed up the process and get passengers the refunds they deserve. As I am a British Columbia MP, there are a couple of areas of this implementation act that are very important to me. The issue of money laundering in B.C. has really been put in the spotlight with the Cullen commission, which the Province of British Columbia commissioned and which delivered its report relatively recently. This report highlights many of the vulnerabilities that we have in Canada in tackling money laundering. Canada has the dubious distinction of being a haven for this, a process called snow-washing. It is because we have a system without the necessary checks in it and a very well-respected financial system. This budget implementation act would make some very important changes to help us better control this challenge. In particular, it would criminalize the operation of unregistered money services businesses; it would create an ability to freeze and seize virtual assets with suspected links to crime; it would improve the financial intelligence, information sharing and strategic analysis of FINTRAC; and it would create a new offence for structuring financial transactions to avoid FINTRAC reporting. Importantly, a commitment has been made to implement all of the recommendations that are listed by the Cullen commission. These measures also dovetail to other measures that we are currently debating in this House. We introduced Bill C-42 to create a national beneficial ownership registry so we will know who are the people behind a lot of the numbered companies, which are sometimes using this to evade paying taxes, evade sanctions or do money laundering. Importantly, this system would work very closely with beneficial ownership registries that the provinces are implementing, where the vast majority of companies are incorporated. There is also a commitment made in this budget to work with provinces and territories to look at things like unexplained wealth orders, which would greatly enhance the tools that law enforcement has to be able to locate and seize assets that could be from proceeds of crime. As I am a coastal MP, there are a number of measures in this budget that I was very happy to see, particularly the new vessel remediation fund and changes to the abandoned boats program. This measure was introduced in 2017 by my former colleague Bernadette Jordan, and it created a fund to clean up boats that had sunk to the bottom of the ocean and were polluting the ocean. This was incredibly important and actually removed a lot of boats from waters around my riding. However, we need to go a step further, because it is much more effective to take those boats out of the water before they sink rather than having to clean them up once they have already sunk. In the budget implementation act, we are establishing a new vessel remediation fund, which would be boat owner-financed, to provide the resources so we can do some of this very important work. There would be the creation of an allowance for financing of preventative measures, such as voluntary vessel disposal activities, so that vessels at risk of becoming dilapidated, wrecked or abandoned can access funding to repair, secure, move or dismantle and sell them. This is very important because it would save a lot money, reduce the amount of pollution we are seeing in the bottom of our oceans and help a lot of folks I know in my riding, like Don MacKenzie, who, out of the goodness of his own heart, has taken it upon himself to clean these boats up. I want to talk about something that I think we can all agree on in this House, and that is changes to the alcohol excise tax. As of April 1 this year, the alcohol escalator tax was supposed to increase by over 6%. Through measures that have been introduced in the budget implementation act, we have capped this at 2%. I know this will be a hugely important measure for the breweries in my riding, over a dozen, to be able to provide their products at a cost that is much lower than it would have been. It is really important that we do things like this and support small businesses, which, like all Canadians, are facing rising costs. The last thing I will mention is that there is a commitment in the budget this year to lower the credit card swipe fees. There is an agreement with Visa and Mastercard to lower credit swipe fees by 27%. This would save businesses thousands of dollars. It is a really important measure to support small businesses in Canada, so they, in turn, do not have to pass on some of the additional costs they would face as a result of those credit card swipe fees. With that, I would encourage all members of this House to vote in favour of this important piece of legislation so we can make some of these great changes and put them into effect.