44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 28, 2022 11:00AM
- Mar/28/22 2:25:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the PBO released a report that literally blows the doors off the environment minister's talking points on the carbon tax. The tax will cost Canadians, and it is not neutral when we include the cost to the economy. Six in 10 Canadian families are actually now going to be losing money.
Will the minister admit the carbon tax is just voodoo economics, or is he going to say the PBO experts got it wrong?
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- Mar/28/22 2:26:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we thank the Parliamentary Budget Officer for his work, which confirms that the price on pollution has a progressive impact and gives eight out of 10 families more back through the climate action rebate than they pay. Putting a price on carbon pollution is recognized as one of the most efficient ways to drive down emissions and fight climate change.
Again, let me point out that the Conservative member for New Brunswick Southwest is on the record as saying that his province should go back to using the federal carbon price. We agree with him.
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- Mar/28/22 2:26:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we know this is question period, not answer period, but perhaps the member and the government should actually read the report before they give a statement in the House. The PBO analysis is absolutely clear. I am not surprised that the government does not do the hard work of the complicated calculations, because it has a Prime Minister who says, “I don't think about monetary policy”.
Either the minister or the government is incompetent because they did not do a full analysis of the carbon tax, or they knew it and were just hiding it from Canadians. Which one is it?
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- Mar/28/22 2:45:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, our government put a price on carbon pollution, which is ensuring cleaner air, fewer emissions and more money in the pockets of people. As the carbon price increases, these payments also increase, leaving most Canadians with more money in their pocket. This year, as I mentioned before, a family of four will receive up to $745 in rebates in Ontario, $830 in Manitoba and $1,100 in Saskatchewan and Alberta. The quarterly cheques that people will receive are real. Climate change is real.
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- Mar/28/22 2:47:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am not sure my hon. colleague heard me the first time, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer confirms that the price on pollution is a progressive price on pollution and gives eight out of 10 families more back through the climate action rebate than they pay. Putting a price on carbon pollution is recognized as one of the most efficient ways to drive down emissions and fight climate change. By maintaining a fair price on pollution across the country, we are ensuring that carbon pricing remains affordable for Canadians no matter where they live.
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- Mar/28/22 2:59:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the minister often presents carbon capture and storage as the miracle solution. However, investing in that area is not the same as leaving fossil fuels behind but, rather, subsidizing the industry's operations for longer. There are 400 scientists who have written to the minister about this wrong approach. It is expensive, it is not fully effective, and it takes a long time to put in place. The minister himself said in an interview that we are several years, if not a decade, away from a commercial application.
Tomorrow, the minister could either divest from fossil fuels or artificially extend their life span with carbon capture and storage. What will he choose to do?
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- Mar/28/22 2:59:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, again I would emphasize that we are taking bold action on climate change, from putting a price on pollution to investing in clean energy to retrofitting homes to decarbonizing industry.
We see carbon capture and underground storage as part of the solution. It is part of the $100 billion that we are investing in measures to date. We will be doing more. I look forward to the emissions reduction plan that the minister will table shortly.
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- Mar/28/22 4:35:59 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to talk about Bill C-8, an economic and fiscal update tabled in December of 2021.
Before I get to the crux of my speech, I want to point out that this bill would add an additional $70 billion of new inflationary fuel to the fire we are seeing already with our public finances. Inflation was at 5.7% in February. We are seeing supply chain shortages and labour issues, and the list goes on and on. We are now seeing a jaw-dropping $1.2 trillion of national debt. Housing prices are up 25% from last year. The average typical home, when the Liberals took power, was $435,000. Now it is $810,000. That is having real impacts.
The carbon tax is having a massive impact on people all across my riding. Of course, it is a rural area and a lot of it is cottage country, but it also has agriculture, tourism and manufacturing. The list goes on, but for the most part, people have to drive to get to work. These manufacturers have to import parts to make their components and to make their goods. We have seen continued price increases along the supply chain as a result of the carbon tax, among the other challenges industry is facing right now.
It is not going to get better, unfortunately. Some experts and media sources are saying that the new deal between the Liberals and the NDP could add an additional $15 billion to $20 billion of government spending over three years and upwards of $40 billion in 2026-27, all of this while we have basically printed money, which is causing a lot of this inflation, and there is no end in sight. That has a real impact on people on the ground.
I want to start now by reading some of the emails I have been receiving from my constituents who are just struggling beyond belief to deal with the increased cost of living.
This one comes from Colin. It reads, “Prime Minister, now is not the time to hike the carbon tax again. Canadians like me are already getting hammered by the highest inflation in decades, which drives up the cost of everything. The crisis in Ukraine has increased the price of oil and gas, driving up anything that requires oil and gas to produce or transport, which is basically everything, and now the carbon tax is going up again on April 1.” He says, “It is the worst April Fool's Day joke ever, and Canadians simply cannot afford this one-two punch.”
Clayton's email reads, “Thank you for taking the time to read this email. Question: Have there been any thoughts or talks of reducing the carbon tax that is skyrocketing on fuel used to heat our homes? We use propane as our main source of heat, and the price of filling our tanks is getting out of control.”
This one is from Colin: “My landlady and I are both on a fixed income. She is 81 years of age. We use heating oil, and the current bill, including GST and carbon tax, makes the price of heating oil $1.65 per litre, which is more than the price of a litre of gasoline.” Their bill is now $250 per month more than last year. That will total about $1,250 more for the season, and that is if they are lucky. Colin writes,“We have to start cutting back on groceries to cover our heating bill. This is unsustainable and, to be frank, downright”, and we can insert an unparliamentary word here. He continues, “There should be some support for folks like us in this situation, and we have not drawn any support from the COVID payouts. Please help.”
This one is from Brad: “I am very concerned about what my family and I are going to do with the current cost increases. I make a fair wage and I work hard for it, as does my wife. Seeing fuel prices today reaching $1.84 per litre in Peterborough, we are unsure how we are going to choose between getting to work every day and putting food on the table for our family. I can't even imagine how people working two or three minimum wage jobs are going to cope. I beg of you to do your best to get us some relief. With gas taxes and carbon tax, it is making it impossible to stay afloat. The current carbon tax rebate is a joke. We have spent that already on propane and heating costs and fuel since January 1. This winter, our propane heating costs have increased at a tremendous cost due to the carbon tax.”
His latest propane fill is $600, and $120 of that $600 was a tax. Then we have the tax on the tax. He writes that food prices are going up and he does not see how he can possibly keep up with this.
I will keep going. I will read a message from Shawn. He said, “Here in the city of Kawartha Lakes, we are looking at a housing crisis. We are seeing, in my area, a lot of people moving up from the city now that a lot of people are working remotely and seeing the advantage of working from paradise.” I do not blame them; it is paradise. However, it is causing a major problem with the supply and demand equation, not to mention the $400 billion that I talked about earlier. Allowing all this money to be put in the atmosphere is helping to cause this unfortunate situation. He writes about different methods that he could talk about to get housing built. Not only that, they are talking about whether it is sustainable for their kids and whether their kids will be able to afford a house going forward.
I will read two more, because these are really important. I really did not get to my speech, but that is okay; these are important.
I am going to talk about Steve. He does construction, excavating and landscape work in Haliburton. Their company will have to increase their rates 27% just to stay afloat. Also, he is concerned about the larger jobs that he has not completed. Some he started last season; he got about 75% of the way last year, and now he estimates that the costs for material, wages, fuel, etc., will be up over $5,000. Now Steve has to eat that cost, because that is not what the quote read. The customer might not pay it. Sadly, he writes, it is not even worth his fuel, but he has to finish the job and lose money just to save his reputation.
I will read this last one because it is actually quite moving. It is from David, who wrote, “I am a 69-year-old Canadian retiree living in Highlands East, finding it more difficult to live week by week in the amount of ridiculous inflation caused by reckless Liberal spending.” That is all the more reason to stop funding some of the priorities that the Liberals have decided are priorities and to take a look at how seniors are struggling to get by. David continues to write, “This scares my wife and I to death, perhaps having to live in a 200- to 300-square-foot box in a hospital-like setting and paying approximately $4,000 rent a month, and that's not even reasonable.”
That is just a small number of the sad and very real stories I am hearing from constituents right across this constituency. We have heard struggling stories like that all day from constituents, regular Canadians, who are struggling to get by.
We have called for relief from this carbon tax. We are talking about how the carbon tax is affecting the farmers we are dealing with in my area, and others who are trying to figure out how they are going to manage these increased prices when they are talking about drying and about fuel for other methods. Everything has a cascading effect. If anyone has gone to the grocery store lately, they would have seen that the price of groceries is absolutely out of control. It is absolutely sad to see this.
We saw the same plan here in Ontario. The same thing happened when the Ontario Liberals decided to mess around in the energy sector and started picking winners and losers in the energy market. We saw energy poverty. We saw more people relying on food banks than ever before. They could not afford their electricity bill because the government decided that it would start to allow massive subsidies for energy that did not meet the massive demands for energy that Ontario needed. Even when it did, then the excess energy, because storage capacity is not where it should be, although it will be someday, was sold to various states for pennies on the dollar, especially New York and Michigan. Our businesses would therefore actually be subsidizing their competitors through their lower cost of energy.
We need more sources of energy. We need to stop the spending. We need to look at ways we can grow the economy and start building things, and have low taxes, less government and more freedom.
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- Mar/28/22 5:07:45 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, it is great to be here in the House again today rising on Bill C-8. As members are aware, Bill C-8 is an omnibus bill and a large piece of legislation, so I will spend my time focusing on several elements of it, particularly with respect to the carbon tax. However, before I do that, I think it is important to put down the context for Bill C-8.
From the time it was initially introduced to where we are right now, things have changed dramatically. Canadians are finding it harder and harder to get by. They are challenged to put gas in their tanks, feed their families and get through these cold months of early spring. The reason is that there has been profligate spending by the Liberal Party, and this unnecessary spending is being put right on the backs of Canadians.
What happens when we spend and spend is that the money has to come from somewhere. Either it has been coming from the taxpayer directly or it has been going to our loans. For people who are not aware, through quantitative easing we are actually borrowing money from ourselves, which is challenging because where is that money coming from? Well, the Bank of Canada is printing that money. It is a basic concept of economics that where we have more of something it is worth less, so what we are getting by having our printing press on overdrive through quantitative easing is more and more currency. There is $400 billion of extra currency out there, and we have driven down the value of money in our country. Not surprisingly, shock upon shock, guess what? We have inflation, which means the value of goods is going up and the value of money is going down.
Scotiabank is saying that we may in fact face inflation of up to 8% going forward. Let us put that in context. We call this the “inflation tax” because what it is really doing, just as sure as income tax or sales tax, is taking value from the taxpayer and putting that value into the vaults of government. To give members an idea, at 8% inflation, a Canadian earning $40,000, such as a single mother in Cobourg or Port Hope trying to get by earning a bit more than minimum wage, is going to be paying $3,200 in extra inflation tax just this year. Imagine a couple earning $50,000 each, and let us say they have a family four. That is $100,000 total. As we know, with housing prices and everything else going up, that is not a tremendous amount of money to get by on. They are going to be paying an additional $8,000 in inflation tax at 8% interest. This is robbing Canadians of the value of their labour and they are working so hard. The billionaires and millionaires will get by, but for those folks at the lowest rung of the economic ladder, those who are struggling, this inflation tax is enough to knock them down into poverty.
Then we exacerbate that problem with the carbon tax. I had the opportunity to ask the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, some questions about inflation and about the impact of the carbon tax. Surprisingly, he did not know what the impact was when I asked him. However, he wrote back to the finance committee and said that, at the time, nearly 10% of inflation was caused by one tax: the carbon tax. Imagine that. We have income tax, sales tax and taxes on tax, but just one tax, this carbon tax, is responsible for 10% of the pain being inflicted by the inflation tax.
The reality is that the purpose of the carbon tax is to increase the cost of certain goods and services that emit high amounts of GHG so that people will not want to buy them. We then push those individuals into buying lower GHG-emitting goods and services, which in itself is not a bad thing. The challenge, though, is that it is often a fallacy, because there are no other options available. As I said earlier, a single mother earning $40,000 a year simply cannot afford to buy a $50,000 or $100,000 Tesla. It is the equivalent to saying, “Let them eat cake” when we say to buy an electric vehicle.
For farmers, this problem is particularly acute, and for many of them, at least at this point, there are no alternatives. We are starting technologies for electric tractors, which is great, but they are not there yet, so when we increase the carbon tax on propane, natural gas and other fuels, we are putting that directly on our farmers.
One particular example I have is with respect to propane and natural gas. I had the great privilege and honour of introducing Bill C-206 in the House last Parliament, and what that called for was an exemption for farmers, not just on gasoline and diesel, as that already exists, but on cleaner fuels as well, like natural gas and propane. That gave farmers a full exemption, because they do not have the ability to use other technology right now. It does not exist. We listened to expert after expert at the agriculture committee, and they said there is not a commercially viable alternative to fossil fuels when it comes to drying grain or heating livestock barns. We live in a cold country, as we know. Those who do not know that should walk outside here in Ottawa. We need clean Canadian energy to allow our farmers to be competitive.
Bill C-8 offers a rebate to farmers instead of an exemption, and this rebate is a step in the right direction. However, I remember being in this very House about a year or two ago when the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food said the cost of the carbon tax is not a serious issue for farmers. Well, the farmers disagreed. They rose to the occasion and we were able to bring the discussion to Ottawa. We said that it is an issue and that farmers are paying tens of thousands of dollars. However, as is often the case, the new NDP-Liberal government is up here a day late and a dollar short, because this rebate only covers a very small amount of the cost. It is incredibly inequitable.
Let me explain what I mean by inequitable. Of course, this country is very different climate-wise, region-wise and even farming-wise. The type of farming someone does in Victoria, B.C., is much different from the farming someone does in St. John's, Newfoundland, and all parts in between. The system set up with Bill C-8 is one size fits all. It says that depending on expenses, the government will give a certain amount of a carbon tax rebate. That is a terrible proxy. It makes no sense because the expenses for farming in Victoria, B.C., will be different from those in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Northumberland—Peterborough South. We are just grabbing this one-size-fits-all solution. What I can guarantee will happen is that farmers will have no choice but to be in high carbon-intense areas of farming that will receive minuscule rebates, whereas other areas where carbon is not as important in a particular industry may receive higher rebates. We are creating inequity because the calculation in Bill C-8 makes no sense.
Here is a better idea. My colleague from Huron—Bruce has reintroduced the new and improved Bill C-206 as Bill C-234. It says we should just give them an exemption. That way they get 100% of the dollars they spend on propane and natural gas back in their pockets. It is a broader discussion we need to have. We need to decide whether we can trust Canadians with their own money.
Members will remember that back in the Paul Martin era, the Liberal government, now the Liberal-NDP government, famously said that if we leave Canadians alone, they are going to spend their money on beer and popcorn. This reeks of that. It reeks of this conversation. Why would we not just allow them to exempt that money instead of transporting all of it to Ottawa, since, shocker, some of it gets lost and stays here in Ottawa? Why would we not just leave it in the jeans of our farmers, instead of having that money go to Ottawa, where some of it will be left over, and then having a small portion go back to farmers? I will give an exact equation. A farmer in Manitoba would pay $9,000 in carbon tax and will get $3,000 back, whereas under Bill C-234, they would get all $9,000 back. I believe in the individual—
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- Mar/28/22 6:18:56 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, let us talk realities, as my colleague likes to say. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was very clear. The carbon tax is not revenue-neutral, as the Liberals claimed it was going to be. This is going to cost farmers. Most importantly, let us talk reality. The Parliamentary Budget Officer also said the carbon tax put forward by the Liberals does not reduce emissions. If we are going to base these policy decisions on science and data, the data clearly says it does not reduce emissions. All it does is cost farmers money and increase inflation.
We know what we have put forward will reduce emissions because farmers are already doing it. We have seen a 60-million megatonne reduction in carbon emissions from farmers. Why have they done that? They have done that because it is the right thing to do. They have done that by reinvesting in their farmers with innovation and technology, not by being forced to do so by bad Liberal policy.
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- Mar/28/22 6:21:42 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, I think it is really important, and I agree with my friend from South Okanagan—West Kootenay, that we need to emphasize the carbon sequestration potential of grasslands and the preservation of grasslands. I do not want to get into a full debate on carbon taxes with the hon. member because Bill C-8 does not mention carbon taxes, except for trying to give farmers more of a rebate.
I also support, as does the hon. member who just spoke, the private member's bill to take the carbon tax off grain drying. The carbon tax program that the federal government put forward does exclude farmer's use of fossil fuels in the engines of cars and tractors, but not the grain drying. I think that was an oversight.
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