QUESTION PERIOD — Finance
Cost of Living
September 17, 2024
My question is for the Government Representative in the Senate.
First, I want to quote from a column by David Coletto of Abacus Data in The Hill Times:
Parliament and the federal government need to find ways to instill confidence in Canadians that there is a clear economic strategy in place to create wealth, grow the economy, and secure their future.
To be fair, on some indicators, the economy is doing well with the reduction of inflation — announced at a low of 2% today — the reduction in the Bank of Canada interest rate and a consistent affordability agenda covering tax rates, pensions, national child care and dental care.
However, the housing crisis is worsening. The overall unemployment rate is inching up, while the rate for youth unemployment is more worrisome.
Focusing on the issue of confidence, what are the government’s top priorities that speak to increasing the confidence that Canadians will have in their economy?
The government is focused on boosting productivity by investing in the technologies, incentives and supports critical to increasing innovation, attracting more private investment to Canada and investing in our people and workforce. These include improving access to training and re-skilling programs for our workforce with increased funding for Youth Employment and Skills Strategy programs; $207.6 million for student work placement programs; investing $2 billion to launch a new AI Compute Access Fund and Canadian AI Sovereign Compute Strategy to help Canadian researchers and start-ups access the computational power they need to compete and scale up; allowing businesses to write off the full cost of investments in patents and data processing equipment; building on past reforms to the Competition Act, which will lead to a more productive economy; and delivering a $93-billion suite of major tax credits to give the clean economy a boost.
