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Results: 31 - 45 of 129
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
CPC (ON)
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
2021-06-16 16:52 [p.8552]
Mr. Speaker, you have notice from me of a question of privilege.
I am rising today because of the government's imposition of a new tax without needed approval of the House of Commons. It has breached the privileges of all members and has done so in contravention of Standing Orders 79(1), 80 and 83.1, as well as principles laid out on pages 827, 828, 829, 831, 833, 835, 841, 893 and 906 through 908 of Bosc and Gagnon's House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, 2017. There are also numerous rulings by the Chair and most important of all section 53 of the Constitution Act, 1867.
In essence, I am rising today to ask that you find a prima facie case of breach of privilege because of the government's imposition of a secretive and insidious tax designed to raise funds for it to spend at the expense of the Canadian people without holding appropriate votes in the House of Commons and possibly in direct contravention of other laws that have been passed by this House.
The new tax of which I speak is designed to raise more money for the government to spend. In fact, it raised more money for the government to spend in the last fiscal year than all other sources of revenue combined. This tax should be called the inflation tax, which is—
View Mark Gerretsen Profile
Lib. (ON)
Mr. Speaker, I would ask you consider what the member is suggesting to be a question of privilege and rule whether it is admissible for him to try to filibuster time in the House of Commons right now, which is clearly what appears to be the objective here. Can the Speaker provide some kind of insight as to whether what we are hearing in the House right now is actually a question of privilege?
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
CPC (ON)
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
2021-06-16 16:54 [p.8553]
Mr. Speaker, I speak of this illegal inflation tax, in which the government is funding its spending with newly created currency that increases consumer prices through the levy of inflation.
Before I go any further, let me clarify the difference between inflation and the inflation tax. It is not a tax when, independent and separate from government, consumer prices rise due to supply and demand dynamics. However, when they rise because the government and central bank coordinate to expand the money supply, thus raising consumer prices above what they would otherwise be and force consumers to pay what they would otherwise pay, that is a tax.
I do not raise this question of privilege lightly, but after careful consideration of the nature of the government's actions and their real-world effects on Canadians, both of which I have described. As well, I rely heavily on the jurisprudence from the Chair and the clear legal definitions of a tax.
To prove this breach, I would have to show three parts. First, that there is a privilege for members of Parliament at stake, and that the privilege is governments cannot tax what the House does not expressly approve through votes by each member in the chamber. Second, I would need to prove the policy in fact imposes a tax. Finally, I would need to provide proof the House did not approve this tax. Together, these points prove the government committed a prima facie case of breach of my parliamentary privilege by denying me the opportunity to vote on this tax increase before it took effect.
Let me start with the first part. Is there a privilege for each member to vote on any new taxes introduced or imposed on Canadians? The answer is yes. In fact, this privilege on Canadian soil originated with the British North America Act, section 53 of the Constitution, which reads:
Bills for appropriating any Part of the Public Revenue, or for imposing any Tax or Impost, shall originate in the House of Commons.
This constitutional principle is further enshrined in Standing Order 80(1), which states:
All aids and supplies granted to the Sovereign by the Parliament of Canada are the sole gift of the House of Commons, and all bills for granting such aids and supplies ought to begin with the House, as it is the undoubted right of the House to direct, limit, and appoint in all such bills, the ends, purposes, considerations, conditions, limitations and qualifications of such grants, which are not alterable by the Senate.
The failure of this House to “direct, limit, and appoint” revenue-raising measures is accordingly not only a violation of the Constitution but also of the privileges of members of the House set out in the Standing Orders.
In the Eurig Estate case, the courts considered the constitutional implications of a tax raised through such improper and indirect means. Justice Jack Major, writing for the majority, wrote that section 53 of the Constitution “...codifies the principle of no taxation without representation, by requiring any bill that imposes a tax to originate with the legislature.”
Justice Major goes on to say “My interpretation of s. 53...prohibits not only the Senate, but also any other body other than the directly elected legislature, from imposing a tax on its own accord.”
Any other body—
View Charlie Angus Profile
NDP (ON)
View Charlie Angus Profile
2021-06-16 16:59 [p.8553]
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I appreciate very much your wise counsel. However, I missed the last three paragraphs and I was wondering if he could repeat them because I did not quite get the point he was making. For clarity's sake, it might be good if he clarified it.
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
CPC (ON)
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
2021-06-16 17:00 [p.8553]
Furthermore, Mr. Speaker, Justice Major made clear that it is his interpretation that no body, other than the House of Commons, can initiate a tax increase. I would submit that “no body” includes the Bank of Canada itself, in collaboration with the government.
When the court said “there should be no taxation without representation”, it got to the heart of my point here today. It stated:
...the Lieutenant Governor in Council cannot impose a new tax ab initio without the authorization of the legislature.... “The Governor in Council has no power, proprio vigore, to impose taxes unless under authority specifically delegated to it by Statute. The power of taxation is exclusively in Parliament.”
The court went on to say that section 53 “ensures parliamentary control over, and accountability for, taxation” and quoted the distinguished legal scholar Elmer Driedger, as follows:
Through the centuries, the principle was maintained that taxation required representation and consent. The only body in Canada that meets this test is the Commons. The elected representatives of the people sit in the Commons...and, consistently with history and tradition, they may well insist that they alone have the right to decide to the last cent what money is to be granted and what taxes are to be imposed.
Elsewhere, the court similarly held in the Westbank First Nation case:
...the Canadian Constitution (through the operation of s. 53 of the Constitution Act, 1867) demands that there should be no taxation without representation. In other words, individuals being taxed in a democracy have the right to have their elected representatives debate whether their money should be appropriated, and determine how it should be spent.
View Kevin Lamoureux Profile
Lib. (MB)
View Kevin Lamoureux Profile
2021-06-16 17:02 [p.8554]
Mr. Speaker, I am having a very difficult time understanding the question of privilege. Can the member specifically and concisely indicate what the new tax is that he is referring to. I do not understand the question of privilege at all. He seems to—
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
CPC (ON)
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
2021-06-16 17:03 [p.8554]
Mr. Speaker, just because the member does not understand the fact, that does not erase that it is indeed a fact.
I thank the member for Timmins—James Bay for his help along the way.
Peter Hogg, who, until his death last year, was Canada's leading constitutional scholar, underscored the point that I am making now in a 2002 article:
It must be remembered that the taxing power is the one upon which the rest of governance depends. As the King and Parliament both recognized in the 17th century, nothing important can be done without resources, and it is control of the taxing power that provides the resources. Moreover, no other power has as direct and immediate an effect on citizens as the taxing power, and (for that reason) nothing government does is as unpopular as the imposition and collection of taxes. There is a huge incentive for governments to offload this power to a delegate, who can raise taxes quietly without any irritating fuss in the Parliament or Legislature, and who can shoulder the blame when the media do get wind of the action.
As Professor Hogg noted, this is not a new problem. In fact, it is one of the oldest and most important matters in the system of parliamentary democracy. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that taxation is the reason we are all here today. The Crown's power to tax and the need to obtain the consent of those paying the taxes is why Parliament exists in the first place. We could look at 800 years of history, going back to the Magna Carta, to find that the principal disagreement between Crown and commoner has been on the subject of taxation.
It is essential to the privileges of every member of this House that every single levy or tax come before us to be voted on before it is enacted. I think I have clearly proven that it is the privilege of every member to vote on a tax increase before it is imposed.
What is the tax of which I speak? The answer is, it is the inflation tax. Is excessive inflation, which results from excessive money creation, in fact a tax? We can look to the definition of “tax” found in Oxford Languages, a 150-year-old dictionary, which defines taxes as follows:
A compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits, or added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions.
I will break down that definition. First, it is state revenue, “levied by the government”. Second, it is “added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions.” Third, it is a “compulsory contribution”.
First, is the inflation tax designed to generate state revenue, levied by the government? I will give the data to prove that in fact it is. In February 2020, the Bank of Canada owned $106 billion of government debt. As of the end of last month, that number had reached $412 billion. That is an increase of almost $300 billion in one year. It is also an increase of 300%. Last year, the amount that the Bank of Canada produced for the government by purchasing government debt was over $300 billion. It was the single biggest source of revenue for the government, bigger than income tax, consumption tax, tariffs and private loans combined.
Never before has the Bank of Canada been the single biggest provider of funds for the government's operation. It does this through a process whereby the government sells debt onto the market and the bank buys it back at a higher price. This has the effect of flooding government coffers with cheap credit that it could spend liberally, as it did last year and continues to do right now.
The result is a massive increase in the money supply. When the Bank of Canada uses its balance sheet to buy government debt, it increases the number of dollars in circulation. In the period since late winter and early spring of 2020, the money supply has increased by over $300 billion. In fact, from February 2020 to February 2021, the money supply grew by $354 billion. The deficit for the last fiscal year was $354 billion. In other words, the same amount the government needed to borrow was the amount that the Bank of Canada created.
This led to a 20% year-over-year increase in the number of dollars in coins, bills and bank deposits. That is the biggest increase since 1974, which was the last time the government went on a money-printing binge, which led to major inflation crises thereafter. For context, the increase in the money supply is so large that it could fund our Canadian Armed Forces for 10 years. To use another measure, fully one in six dollars in the entire M2 money supply has been created in the last year alone.
In the fiscal year 2021, the Bank of Canada was the single largest source of funds for the Government of Canada. All revenue from other sources was $294 billion, and net new borrowing was $41 billion, but revenue from the bank was $303 billion. That $303 billion is an extraordinary and unprecedented sum.
The bank did not do this on its own. Let me now speak about the direct coordination between the government and the bank that led to this massive increase in the money supply.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance actually said that there was coordination between the bank and the government. The coincidence that we see in the amount of money printed and the amount of money spent demonstrates this coordination as well. For example—
View Kevin Lamoureux Profile
Lib. (MB)
View Kevin Lamoureux Profile
2021-06-16 17:11 [p.8555]
Mr. Speaker, I have been listening very closely and it seems to me the member is saying there is an inflation tax, so whenever inflation goes up or down it should be brought to the House so that members can say no to inflation by way of a vote. That is the best I can tell. If the member could just move on so that you can make a decision on the issue, because I do not see this—
View Charlie Angus Profile
NDP (ON)
View Charlie Angus Profile
2021-06-16 17:11 [p.8555]
Mr. Speaker, I am getting frustrated as well. I am not really sure where the inflationary tax element comes in, but I am very frustrated by the fact that just because the member for Winnipeg North does not understand something the House has to stop and change direction. I would ask him to let the member finish so we could actually understand whether we agree with him or not. I think it is unfair that whenever the member for Winnipeg North is confused he is always interrupting.
View Mark Gerretsen Profile
Lib. (ON)
Mr. Speaker, I am getting a real kick out of the fact that the NDP is now on the floor of the House of Commons supporting these antics by the Conservatives. It looks as though the New Democrats have decided they are interested in doing this. I would suggest that you rule that the previous comment by the member from the NDP is out of order because, quite frankly, it was not a point of order.
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
CPC (ON)
View Pierre Poilievre Profile
2021-06-16 17:13 [p.8555]
Mr. Speaker, as I pointed out before the interruption, according to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, the government had been coordinating with the central bank to produce these funds and these funds had been used to spend.
The massive dollar figures involved that I mentioned earlier are not only staggering and unprecedented, they may be illegal. In fact, I stumbled on a section of the Bank of Canada Act, section 18(j), only hours before I was originally planning to make this question of privilege. Having read that section and looked at the numbers, I came to the conclusion that there very well might be a breach of law involved in what the bank and the government have colluded to do.
Allow me to read the section in question, section 18, which states that the bank may:
(j) make loans to the Government of Canada or the government of any province, but such loans outstanding at any one time shall not, in the case of the Government of Canada, exceed one-third of the estimated revenue of the Government of Canada for its fiscal year...
I turn your attention, Mr. Speaker, to table A1.4, “Summary Statement of Transactions”, budget 2021, projected revenues $355.1 billion. To respect section 18(j) of the Bank of Canada Act, which limits the bank's ability to lend money to the government to no more than one-third of projected budgetary revenues, the bank would be effectively capped in its loans to the government at $118 billion, $118 billion being one-third of the $355 billion of projected revenues. In fact, the Bank of Canada balance sheet shows that it now holds $415 billion, almost $300 billion more than the legal cap provided in the act.
When I discovered this apparent breach, I immediately delayed my introduction of this question of privilege to spend the time to verify and re-verify my calculations. I had never seen a government body quite so flagrantly violate limits that Parliament has placed upon it in statutory law, so I thought there must be some mistake. However, as I crunched the numbers, I realized that no, in fact, the one-third limit was breached.
I then reached out to the Library of Parliament to conduct a full review of all the legislation passed to approve emergency COVID spending since the spring of 2020 to find out if maybe the section was temporarily suspended or a special exemption to it was created to allow this kind of dollar figure to be lent from the bank to the government. Sure enough, the Library of Parliament said that there was no such exemption or suspension of the section; it is still in place.
In other words, this research shows, and I ask that you, Mr. Speaker, and your trusted advisers and the officials at the Library of Parliament to verify my claim here, that the Bank of Canada has breached limits that Parliament has imposed on its ability to lend money to the government.
These limits do not exist without reason. There is a reason why Parliament chose deliberately to write a section into the Bank of Canada Act limiting the amount of debt the bank could buy. The reason is this: Parliament foresaw that future governments might try to use the printing presses over at the bank to pay for spending that it could not raise through the more normal process of taxation.
With the limits Parliament placed on the Bank of Canada's purchase of government debt, Parliament effectively banned the government from raising taxes by inflationary money creation instead of by legal and legitimate taxation. That the government and the bank have circumvented that ban and broken a law of Parliament breaches the privileges of every member of the House to vote on laws that are made and repealed.
In the process, the government has breached the principle of the independence of the central bank. This breach is not the result of the independent action of the bank.
The parliamentary secretary to the finance minister, during the appearance of the Governor of the Bank of Canada before the finance committee on June 16, 2020, said, “There's been an enormous coordination between OSFI, the bank and the federal government.”
I have given the fiscal and mathematical evidence to show that this coordination has occurred. In fact, not only did it occur last year when the bank bought effectively 85% of the government's deficit, and wherein the bank increased the money supply by exactly the same amount that the government borrowed in the previous fiscal year, but that “enormous coordination” has continued into this fiscal year.
On April 19, the Minister of Finance introduced a budget in the House projecting a $154 billion deficit, or borrowing effectively $3 billion a week. Two days later, the Governor of the Bank of Canada held a press conference, announcing that his bank would be buying $3 billion a week of government debt. In other words, the government is borrowing $3 billion a week and the central bank is buying $3 billion a week. The government is running roughly a $155 billion deficit and the bank is lending roughly $155 billion throughout the year. In other words, this coordination is not just in words—
View Mark Gerretsen Profile
Lib. (ON)
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. How much longer are you going to let this go on? When I rise on a point of order or the member for Winnipeg North rises on a point of order, you are very quick to shut us down if we are not addressing the point of order. The member has been going for almost 30 minutes on what is obviously not a question of privilege.
View Gérard Deltell Profile
CPC (QC)
View Gérard Deltell Profile
2021-06-16 17:20 [p.8556]
Mr. Speaker, we shall listen to the member who has raised the question of privilege. It is the basis of the House of Commons to respect the will and thinking of each and every member. We could disagree with what the member is saying, but at least we shall listen to him, especially on a privilege question, which is not easy to address; we recognize that. It is so important for the Canadian taxpayer that we listen to the member.
View Charlie Angus Profile
NDP (ON)
View Charlie Angus Profile
2021-06-16 17:21 [p.8556]
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The member for Kingston and the Islands can attack me all he wants but he cannot attack the role of the Speaker. He should offer you an apology. You were doing your role, and you were doing it in an impartial, non-partisan manner.
I would ask the member to withdraw those comments and apologize to you, Mr. Speaker. for trying to interrupt the work of the House.
View Mark Gerretsen Profile
Lib. (ON)
Mr. Speaker, I do apologize if I by any means challenged your authority. You do an excellent job as Speaker. However, I certainly did not do that, I do not believe. I merely asked a question as to how long you were going to allow this to go on.
To the point made by the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent, let us just be honest about what is going on here. The Conservatives—
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