QUESTION PERIOD — Finance
Fiscal Management
September 29, 2022
Honourable senators, my question is for the Leader of the Government in the Senate. Senator Gold, this question actually comes from Justin in Ottawa. His question is specifically about Employment Insurance, or EI, premiums, which Justin from Ottawa describes as a direct payroll tax, a tax that your government will be raising in a few months at a time when Canadians can ill afford another tax increase. He asks: “Why the Prime Minister chose to raise EI premiums — a direct payroll tax — for him and every other Canadian?”
Of course, government leader, that was Justin Trudeau in 2013 in the House of Commons. In 2022, Mr. Trudeau is trying to claim this isn’t a tax increase, but I digress.
My question, Senator Gold, is why is the Prime Minister raising taxes for Canadians who are already struggling to make ends meet as a result of his fiscal mismanagement?
The struggles Canadians are experiencing are real. They are not the function of this government’s mismanagement. On the contrary, this government has been there for Canadians and will continue to be there for Canadians with very concrete measures, as I was at pains to elaborate on over a certain amount of background noise the other day in the chamber.
The fact remains that the measures this government is taking are there to secure the integrity and well-being of all Canadians, including their future.
Government leader, that’s exactly the response I expected because it’s the response we’ve been getting all along now for years.
We had a Justin Trudeau in 2013 who believed in accountability when he was in the opposition. The irony is, he was trying to hold to account a government that had historically low inflation, a fiscally responsible government and a government that left the country in 2015 with a balanced deficit. Seven years later, we have Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with historic record-high inflation, historic record-high deficits, historic record-high debts and a cost of living that is destroying middle-class Canadians and those working hard to join that class.
At the end of the day, to go back to the question, my supplementary is simple: In the real world, we have something called accountability. It exists in corporations, in academic institutions — it exists in almost every walk of life. Maybe one or two institutions don’t have that realm of responsibility. For this economic inflationary catastrophe that middle-class and poor Canadians are going through, who are we going to hold responsible? Clearly, from your answer, it’s everybody’s fault but the government’s.
Do we hold the Bank of Canada responsible? Do we ask him to resign? Do we blame the two Liberal finance ministers, one of whom was already thrown under the bus to make up for the WE scandal? Is it the current finance minister? Or, at some point, can we hold responsible for “JustinFlation” the Prime Minister in general?
Senator Housakos, I think we both enjoy some aspects of this, but if my answers are predictable, so too, frankly, are your questions.
This government has made enormous efforts in order to ensure that the Senate returns to its proper role and not simply be an echo chamber of the House of Commons. Alas, that message, I guess, is not accepted by all.
The fact is that inflation and the hardships Canadians are facing are caused by multiple factors, some within and many without our control. It is easy and facile and, dare I say, hardly sober and serious, the need to blame someone for something that is much more complex. It may be satisfying, and it may work well on Twitter clips, but it is not a proper and, dare I say, responsible way to help Canadians understand not only the difficult situation that they are in — and they are — but the help that all parliamentarians should be affording them and that this government is doing its best to provide.
