Millennials, Gen Z, need government help ‘now more than ever’: treasury board president

Last Tuesday, the Liberals tabled their eighth budget in the House of Commons, one that includes more than $52 billion in new spending over five years, with measures meant to help younger Canadians, millennials and Gen. Zed with big spending on housing initiatives and some tax increases for Canada’s most wealthy. Anita Onond is the president of the Treasury Board, and she joins me now live from Ottawa. Nice to see you again, Minister. Great to be here with you, Rosie. So the budget is I, I don’t think it’s a secret to anyone. It’s tailored to target millennials and Gen. Z Canadians. What are the measures there that will make the most difference for those young people to try and get them back supporting Liberals? Well, just starting from square one. This is an attempt to make sure that we are rebuilding. We are rebuilding supports for millennials and Gen. Z across a number of different areas. Foremost among those is, of course, affordable housing, but making sure that we are there with supports for students, for families with young children who need school food programs. So, Rosie, this is very much about supporting our country, different demographic groups in this country and especially millennials and Gen. Z. And, and why is that minister? Is it because the, the government did not do enough for them in the 1st place? What? How should we understand that over the course of the last number of years we have increased supports, for example, for seniors with increases in the OAS and the GIS, and those supports take up a large proportion of the federal budget or the federal spend every year. We want to go back to the drawing board and say, look, there is a sector of the Canadian population that needs us now more than ever, especially because everyone deserves the right to be able to rent or own a home. And So what we’re coming forward with our extensive supports for renters and homeowners, including increasing the amortization period from 25 to 30 years, repurposing federal lands, making sure we have a mortgage charter and a renter’s Bill of Rights. These are significant changes to the landscape. They build on the fall economic statement where we remove the GST on purpose built rentals, Rosie. And So what we’re doing is staying across the board, how can we help this generation with affordable housing? Just on housing, this is not a new problem. This is a, it has been a crisis problem for, you could argue decades since the federal government got out of the business of housing. What would you say to Canadians, Minister, who say, well, this is a little bit too late, You’re getting to this too late. You you’re only getting to this now because you know that there’s an election maybe 18 months away. Actually, that’s not the case. We have had a National Housing strategy before this budget. We’ve seen Minister Fraser go across the country signing in an unprecedented way agreements for building affordable housing across municipalities, bypassing the province in some cases. The efforts that we are making now are building on previous efforts, and indeed, there have been decades of underfunding in the housing market by successive governments. And what we’re doing, it was we’re grabbing the bull by the horns and we’re saying how can we make sure that every generation has a chance to succeed and that millennials and Gen. C in particular can afford a place to call home? Let I want to talk to you about the capital gains tax increase because entrepreneurs, particularly those in the tech sector, have been raising red flags about it. They say it’s actually going to stall economic growth, that it will not help with productivity, that it will cause people to not want to move to Canada. How do you respond to that? And why, why did that tax increase have to happen? Because we are being so ambitious with supports to numerous demographic groups in our population, we need to make sure we maintain our fiscal prudence. We have the lowest debt to GDP ratio in the G7 that is set to decline, We have a AAA credit rating and we have historically low unemployment. The IMF just last week said that we have the best managed budget in the world. And so in order to maintain those fiscal guardrails, we do need to ensure that we have some revenue coming in. This is a very limited way of ensuring that that occurs. And in terms of the capital gains tax itself, we are not taxing the principal residence. We are allowing it to kick in only after $250,000 of capital gains at the lower percentage which is 50% and it doesn’t kick in until June 24th. So it gives people time to examine their particular portfolios, speak with their advisors and decide what is best for them. Another criticism has been about the disability benefits. Put it forward in this budget. It was, of course your government that put the the disability legislation in place. And so I think there was an expectation in that community that the benefits would be significant. But many advocates say it is it is not enough, $2400 a year. Why was the government not able to really fulfill its promise to to Canadians with disabilities to make sure they are out of poverty? It is a very good and worthwhile point and discussion to have. I will say that we are the first government to put a disability benefit like this in place and this is just the beginning. We are being aspirational in the budget when we are talking about the disability benefit, it is the largest line item in the budget itself. We are going to continue to listen to advocacy groups to make sure that we can do more going forward. But remember this is a benefit that is going to carry on in perpetuity. This is not time limited like other measures in our budget maybe. And so you can see that we will continue to be there for the community. And I will say in terms of poverty, generally speaking, our government has reduced poverty by 22%. We have a number of other measures in place to address poverty, the Canada Child Benefit being one of them, which has lifted over 500,000 children out of poverty, Rosie. And of course, we will always be there for vulnerable Canadians. And so we look forward to working with the community of persons with disabilities more and more in the future. You, you, you said that, you know, in order to put forward some of these programs, you had to find a, a source of revenue. And that’s part of the capital gains example here. But you were also tasked with finding reductions in departments and spending. Why, why was that not a bigger source of, of revenue for the federal government? Or is that an exercise you were going to continue so that spending doesn’t continue to increase? I’m so glad you mentioned that, Rosie. Phase one of our spending review concluded with the tabling of the main estimates where I exemplified that we are on track to reallocate $15.4 billion / 5 years and about $4 billion every year thereafter. This budget indicates the second phase of the spending review and part of that review is ensuring that we reduce the size of the public service and we approximate that that is going to occur by natural attrition in the amount of about 5000 public servants. But again, this is going to be an examination and conversation with ministers and ministries to ensure that we are being nuanced about it. We do need to grow the public sector in certain areas, cyber security, for example. We need more experts in that area. Procurement, we need to ensure that procurements get out the door and so we need more procurement specialists. So we are going to be very nuanced about this Rosie, but again, we need to ensure and that we are being prudent across the board in how we do so. OK Minister on and thank you for coming in live this morning. Appreciate it very much. Thank you so much. Take good care, have a good Sunday.