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Results: 1 - 15 of 47
View Patrick Weiler Profile
Lib. (BC)
Thank you for that.
Let's get back to the discussion of vaccines, given what we know about the immunization timelines for Canada: that all Canadians who want a vaccine will be immunized by the end of September. With these likely timelines, similar to when we know we'll be able to return to normal with the pre-pandemic ability to have social gatherings, to travel and otherwise, what would your advice be for the government with respect to whether it should or should not extend some of the pandemic relief programs, like the emergency rent subsidy, the emergency wage subsidy and the emergency business account?
Yves Giroux
View Yves Giroux Profile
Yves Giroux
2021-01-27 17:25
That's a very tricky area for me to venture into because, in my capacity, I provide information and analysis, but my mandate does not include providing advice to the government or to parliamentarians. Extending or not extending some of these measures is a decision that you collectively have to make as parliamentarians.
One thing that I can say, however, is that in our fiscal and economic outlook, we have assumed that the support for COVID-related measures will be allowed to expire as planned. If these measures were to be extended, then the deficit that we indicated in our documents would obviously be higher. As to whether the government should or should not extend these, I'll leave that to policy-makers.
View Patrick Weiler Profile
Lib. (BC)
From the financial analysis point of view, what would be the monthly cost of extending these programs, say, by another three months or by another six months?
Yves Giroux
View Yves Giroux Profile
Yves Giroux
2021-01-27 17:26
It depends on the programs themselves. CERB, for example, ran at about—if I'm not mistaken—$6 billion to $8 billion per month. The wage subsidy is probably running at close to a few billion dollars a month, so it depends on which programs you're talking about and on exactly when you're thinking about extending them. Extending a program when the economy is in a recovery phase is much less expensive than extending it, for example, right now when lockdowns are still in place in many areas of the country.
So, it depends on when these would get extended, but you're talking about easily $10 billion a month if you were to extend all of these programs beyond their scheduled expiry dates. Again, that's with huge caveats.
View Patrick Weiler Profile
Lib. (BC)
I've spoken to a lot of businesses in my riding that have been very, very hard hit by the pandemic, perhaps none more so than those in the hospitality or F and B sectors. El Segundo is a restaurant in Sechelt that opened up after the pandemic hit. It made commitments to open up far before the pandemic hit. It's not eligible for things like the pandemic relief programs. I'm wondering if you've analyzed the cost of extending these programs to businesses that were established after the onset of the pandemic or after mid-March?
Yves Giroux
View Yves Giroux Profile
Yves Giroux
2021-01-27 17:28
We haven't done that because the data we have would probably not allow us to do that, certainly not right now. It takes a little bit of time, with some delay and lag, to get information on businesses that have been recently established. So, we haven't done that—unless my colleagues want to chime in and contradict me by saying that it would be easy to do, but I don't think it would be easy to do at this point in time.
View Kelly McCauley Profile
CPC (AB)
We heard earlier today Mr. Green talking about some of the wage subsidies support. The government has listed the names of the companies but not the amounts. Now, we've also heard that the communist-controlled Bank of China, or whatever their bank was here, received subsidies. Foreign-controlled airlines received subsidies. Should CRA be releasing the information for transparency for parliamentarians and taxpayers to see how much has been received by the companies for these subsidies?
Yves Giroux
View Yves Giroux Profile
Yves Giroux
2021-01-27 18:03
That's very close in its design or its nature to a subsidy. In the case of subsidies, my understanding is that the amounts of subsidies that corporations and businesses receive tend to be public, generally speaking. In the case of the wage subsidy, there could be competitiveness issues in some instances, but generally speaking, I think the amounts that corporations have received should indeed be public.
Now that the government is disclosing who receives them, the competitive disadvantage, if there was one, has probably been eroded already. Disclosing the amounts would be more transparent.
View Matthew Green Profile
NDP (ON)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to go back to the small businesses. We heard about the programs that were rolled out, and we were talking about how we might be able to list who got what in some of these subsidies. I'd like to go further.
Were you able to disaggregate who received these by way of the size of their business, whether they were small or medium businesses versus larger corporations?
Xiaoyi Yan
View Xiaoyi Yan Profile
Xiaoyi Yan
2021-01-27 18:25
I know the data by industry exists, so it's detailed enough down to the size of the business within the particular industry.
View Patrick Weiler Profile
Lib. (BC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister, for joining our committee today.
I'd like to turn back to the matter at hand today, which is, of course, the supplementary estimates (B).
Minister, this spring we debated and passed in the House several bills that contained vital measures to help Canadians get through the COVID-19 pandemic, and in particular, the estimates and the Public Health Events of National Concern Payments Act provided authority for a variety of COVID-19 spending, such as the CERB and the safe restart agreement, and others.
You mentioned in your opening remarks that these supplementary estimates (B) present information on the $58 billion in statutory expenditures. How much of this statutory funding is related to the COVID-19 response measures, and how are these items presented in these supplementary estimates?
View Jean-Yves Duclos Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Weiler. That's an interesting segue from the earlier question by member of Parliament Lloyd.
Ninety-six per cent of the statutory expenditures in the supplementary estimates (B) are focused on the COVID-19 crisis, expenditures such as the safe restart for children at school, to provide PPE—personal protective equipment—to front-line workers, strong investments in vaccines, in treatments, in testing equipment and resources for provinces and territories. Those are all part of that very significant 96% of the budgetary dollars in the supplementary estimates (B).
View Kelly McCauley Profile
CPC (AB)
Would you be able to report back to us in mid-June on whether they have given you that information? That's disgraceful that DND, for half a trillion [Technical difficulty—Editor]. It's just like asking for the bid information on the ships, where they delayed for years.
Let me ask you one last question. Will all this emergency spending going on right now put into jeopardy the “Strong, Secure, Engaged” spending plans?
Yves Giroux
View Yves Giroux Profile
Yves Giroux
2020-05-29 11:18
That's a question that the government would be in a good position to answer. For example, in the need to return to more sustainable spending, if the government decides to cut some aspects of government operations and targets defence spending, then it could put in jeopardy “Strong, Secure, Engaged” spending, or DND spending more generally. However, if it decides to reduce other areas of government spending, it could leave DND [Technical difficulty—Editor].
These are all policy choices that the government will have to make when it decides the way in which it wants to return to more sustainable levels of deficit, or even a balanced budget.
View Julie Vignola Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you very much.
In your statement, you spoke about certain measures that could become permanent. What are the measures that could become permanent?
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