Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to thank the committee for the invitation to speak today. I would refer members to our 2022 alternative federal budget, which lays out in much more detail the items I’ll speak on today and provides you with other costed proposals for your consideration.

Finance committee  This is really an ideal time, when we look at the cost, to take out new debt to pay for the things that we need to move away from reliance on fossil fuels, not only to get around in terms of transportation but also in terms of key industries in particular provinces. This is the time to start to develop just transition strategies, so that workers who did work in oil and gas, who made good money working in oil and gas and flew in to work in that sector, can find someplace else where they can also make good money.

Finance committee  Thanks, Mr. Julian, for the question. Certainly, the tax system can play the role of equalizing or creating a more equal society in an after-tax sense, which is to say taking that money and redistributing it, but also restricting the maximum gains you get at the top end. In terms of raising the revenue, of course, what this does is it provides us with fiscal room for additional programs.

Finance committee  Certainly, in the context of the pandemic, many Canadians are receiving drug insurance through their employers. With the big disruption in employment over the course of the pandemic, in particular in the sectors where there are often more women than men, not only are you seeing a certain sector of the population that is just not covered for drug insurance, but you are also seeing another section of the population whose drug coverage may well have been interrupted during the pandemic.

Finance committee  I have indeed. Thanks so much for the invitation to come back to speak to you today about Bill C-30 and Budget 2021. The last time I was at the committee, I presented you with the results of our 2020 child care fee survey in the context of the fall economic update. I was pleased to see those child care figures appear in Budget 2021 as the starting point for the government's ambitious national child care plan.

Finance committee  We're concerned about Canada's federal debt-to-GDP ratio at 50%, but the Japanese debt-to-GDP ratio is at 260%, and they're desperate for more inflation. They've been encountering deflation since real estate crashed there in the 1990s, and so that is exactly a problem that we should hope to have.

Finance committee  In the short run those are exactly the three choices that governments face. They can raise taxes, they can cut programs or they can run deficits, or some mix of the three. The decline in federal government revenues at $60 billion is so substantial that there would really be no way for you to cut government programs to anywhere near balance the budget.

Finance committee  I certainly think that there will be a time to come in the next couple of years to start to examine new revenue measures. Broadly, when we start to look at new revenue measures, I think one of the things to understand is that this pandemic has not been bad for everyone. Financially, there are certain firms in certain sectors that just happened to be on the right side of the pandemic and have made record profits as a result.

Finance committee  There was a Financial Post story looking at CEO bonuses at the big banks despite the fact that revenues were off from last year, although they were still making profits. Despite the fact that revenues were down in the banking sector, CEOs' benefits and their bonuses seem almost entirely unaffected.

Finance committee  I think some of the programs could have been better targeted. We think of top-ups to old age security, for instance, which goes across a large spectrum of seniors. It might have been better to devote that money purely to the guaranteed income supplement. There were broad top-ups across the entirety of people receiving the Canada child benefit, which goes quite a ways up into the income spectrum.

Finance committee  Thanks so much for the question. Certainly, when it comes to debt and deficits, the federal government does not exist alone. It exists within the Canadian economy, across from other large sectors in the economy, and deficits and debt are fungible. In essence, they can move between sectors.

Finance committee  I think it is a fair statement. The debt could have occurred someplace else. Certainly even in the corporate sector, despite the businesses being the primary beneficiaries of the federal government's COVID-19 efforts, the debt-to-GDP ratio for the corporate sector has risen 15 percentage points in two quarters.

Finance committee  Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Easter. I hope everyone can hear me. Thanks so much to the committee for the invitation today. Certainly, the economic response to COVID-19 from the government has been unprecedented in Canadian history. We'd need to look back at the World Wars to see government expenditures on this scale, although we'd also have to look back to the 1930s, almost a century ago, to see unemployment at this scale, particularly in the early months.

Finance committee  Certainly in terms of international tax havens, they exist because we allow them to exist. We allow them to exist in the sense that we don't require corporate entities operating in Canada to disclose where they declare profits, where they make revenue or where they employ people in this country.

Finance committee  I don't think we're at the stage yet of discussing increases in taxation, but I think we will soon be at the stage of discussing cuts in programs in order to reduce deficits, particularly provincially but also potentially federally. You can balance the books two ways. You can increase taxes or you can decrease expenditures.