44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 3, 2022 10:00AM
- Nov/3/22 4:41:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when we learned that the costly coalition would be introducing this economic update today, we had two demands: no new taxes on workers and seniors and no new spending unless matched by equal savings. Today, this inflationary scheme triples the tax on home heating, gas and groceries, and adds $20 billion of inflationary spending that will drive up the cost of living.
The Conservatives will stand up for Canadians, their paycheques, their homes and their savings, and we will vote against this inflationary scheme.
How did we get here? Well, the cost of government is driving up the cost of living. Half a trillion dollars of inflationary deficits have bid up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay. Inflationary taxes have increased the costs for businesses, farmers and workers to produce those very same goods.
The Liberals will pretend that they had no choice but to double the debt. The Prime Minister will claim that it is not his fault that he added more debt than all previous prime ministers combined.
Let us start with the fact that he added $100 billion of debt before the very first COVID case was ever discovered here in Canada. He cannot blame COVID for that. In fact, he blew through his promise that the deficit would never exceed $10 billion. It was already $100 billion in total before the first case of COVID.
Then when COVID came, 40% of all the new spending measures had nothing to do with COVID, according to the Prime Minister's own named Parliamentary Budget Officer. There was $200 billion of spending unrelated to COVID, and even among the COVID spending, there was an “all you can eat” buffet of waste and mismanagement.
The Liberals sent CERB cheques to prisoners. They sent them to public servants who were simultaneously drawing public salaries. They gave wage subsidies to wealthy corporations that were rich enough to pay out dividends and bonuses to their executives, even after I warned that they should ban that hideous practice. They tried to give half a billion dollars to the WE Charity, an organization that had given half a million dollars to the Prime Minister's own family.
The Liberals then spent $54 million on app we did not need, that did not work and that could have been designed in a weekend for $250,000. The previous Conservative government had successfully delivered apps that were necessary, useful and of a similar complexity for $200,000 to $300,000, but somehow this one went up to $54 million.
Many of the recipients of the money admit they did not do any work. They just hired other people to do work. The Liberals gave the money to people who did not do anything other than delegate the work to someone else. Do we not have public servants getting paid within the government to deliver that type of contracting? The government will not even tell us the identities of all the recipients of that money.
Do not tell me the government had to double the size of the national debt. Do not tell me that every dollar of inflationary spending was necessary. The Liberals were irresponsible and unnecessarily profligate with the dollars of Canadians, and now people are paying the price.
The Prime Minister will now say that Russia caused the inflation in Canada. Of course, we do less than 0.3% of our trade with Russia and Ukraine combined, beyond which the stuff they make is the stuff we have here already. They have energy and food. We have energy and food. If only the Prime Minister would get out of the way of our farmers and energy workers and let them produce those things.
Beyond that, under the previous Conservative government, there were wars. There was a massive war in Afghanistan, and there were others in Iraq and Syria, but we never had inflation anywhere over 4%. In fact, we were able to successfully contribute to defeating terrorists and tyrants in those conflicts while keeping the inflation level low here in Canada. We were able to get our spending under control and our budget back into balance.
By contrast, the government's spending today is 30% higher than in the pre-COVID year 2019. Why? The Liberals said all the deficits were the result of COVID. COVID is now behind us and spending is still 30% higher because we know it is not COVID that has caused the costs to rise. It is a costly coalition and an irresponsible Prime Minister who put these burdens on Canadians' shoulders.
This is a Prime Minister who has no control and no respect for Canadians' money. Canadians are the ones paying the bills here in Canada. The more the government spends, the more Canadians pay. That is why we have the highest inflation rate in 40 years. It is “justinflation”.
The Prime Minister also loves to blame all the cost of living rises on other people. Why is it, then, that house prices in this country are the second most inflated anywhere on planet earth? Why is it that land costs have gone through the roof? Land is not imported from Ukraine or Russia; land is right beneath our feet. We have the second biggest supply of it anywhere on earth, yet Vancouver is the third most overpriced housing market on planet earth and Toronto is the 10th.
Can members imagine that? Two of our biggest cities have more inflated housing prices than New York City; London, England; and countless other big metropolises that have more people, more money and less land. In fact, Vancouver's house prices are more inflated than Singapore's. Singapore is an island. It is out of land. Canada has more land where there is no one than it has land where there is anyone, so why is it that we cannot find a place to house everyone?
The first reason is that local government gatekeepers prevent housing construction by piling on massive delays that drive up costs and drive down the supply of housing. The Prime Minister has had seven years to stand up to the municipal and provincial gatekeepers who stand in the way of housing construction, but he would never do that because he does not want to confront the Liberal and NDP radical left in city halls across the country that has made this problem worse. What he has done instead is continue to shovel money into their local bureaucracies to reward them for blocking the poor, our immigrants and our working-class kids from ever owning a home.
When I am prime minister, we will impose conditions so that if cities want more federal infrastructure money, they will have to remove the gatekeepers. We will connect their infrastructure dollars to the number of houses that actually get built so that young people can find a place to live. We will also sell off 15% of the 37,000 federal buildings we have so they can be converted into housing and our young people can have affordable homes.
The second reason we have such expensive housing and such expensive everything is the Prime Minister has engaged in a massive orgy of money printing over the last two years. He said money printing would not cause inflation, even though that is exactly what it has done every single time it has been tried over the last roughly 3,000 years.
Here is how it worked. The Prime Minister wanted to be able to claim that he was borrowing all this money on the cheap. He loved to stand in the House and say his debt was not costing any money, because interest rates were so low.
The only reason he could borrow for next to nothing was that his central bank was creating the cash out of thin air. If it had been a real lender, it would have demanded a real rate of return on the loans. What happened was that they created something called “quantitative easing”. Whenever they invent new, incomprehensible terminology, we can be sure that there is something sinister behind it.
Here is how it works. It is very simple. The government sells bonds to lenders. The Bank of Canada buys back those bonds at a higher price. The lenders love it. That is why the banks thoroughly endorse this strategy, because they made the money on the difference. It is simple arbitrage. The government sells them something on a Monday and buys it back from them at a higher price on a Wednesday. Who would not go for that deal?
Unfortunately, only about 100 financial institutions are eligible to participate in it. The rest of the ordinary, hard-working Canadians who pay for it are not, but the banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions profited off of this transaction.
The Bank of Canada pays for those bonds by depositing money in the accounts of those large financial institutions held on reserve at the Bank of Canada. Those reserves skyrocketed over the last two years as the bank bought up to $400 billion of new debt.
What happened? That exploded the money supply, and more dollars chasing fewer goods caused higher prices. Much of the money then funnelled into the financial system and was lent out in mortgages to wealthy investors, who saw a massive expansion in the number of real estate holdings they could accumulate. Thus, housing prices went up 50% in two years, creating the biggest housing bubble in Canadian history.
Now that the central bank is forced to raise interest rates, it risks bursting that bubble. All of the people who got on the balloon when it was on the ground floor and went up into the sky now risk coming crashing down as that balloon is bursting.
Worse than that, the Bank of Canada now has hundreds of billions of dollars of deposits that it made into the accounts of those large financial institutions that it has on its reserves. What has happened to those deposits? They now bear more interest, because interest rates have gone up. The wealthy bankers who participated in this arbitrage transaction at the beginning and were paid for it by having more money deposited into their accounts at the Bank of Canada now collect 3.75%, because that is the policy rate that the bank pays.
What does that mean? It means that the central bank is now losing money for the first time in its history and Canadian taxpayers are forced to bail them out to a tune of $4 billion every year. This entire wretched scheme, of which I warned two years ago, will, maybe in the end, amount to the single biggest wealth transfer from working-class people to ultrawealthy insiders, from the have-nots to the have-yachts, at any time in our history.
Now we see the painful consequences. It is not just about numbers on a ledger. It is about 1.5 million people forced to go to a food bank in a single month. It is about one in five people skipping meals or cutting portions because they cannot afford their food. It is about the forthcoming winter, of which the minister spoke in metaphorical terms. People are now not going to be able to heat their homes, as the cost of home heating is expected to double or even more for those people who are on home heating oil.
It is about the 35-year-old living in his parents' basement, despite the fact that he did everything we asked him to do. He got a job. He got an education. He worked hard every day, and now he cannot afford a home, which means he cannot build up collateral, cannot build a credit history, cannot build savings for his future and, therefore, cannot start a family. In Canada, a country with among the most abundant supply of land on earth, we cannot find places for people to live.
These are the real-world consequences of irresponsible decisions. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister sits and smirks at the fact that he took a $6,000-a-night vacation to sleep in the fanciest hotel on planet Earth, staying up in opulent hotel lobbies and jazzing it up with his friends while people back home cannot pay the rent. Canadians are out of money and the Prime Minister is out of touch.
We are going to inherit this mess, all of us, and we are going to have to fix the problem. We have a big job ahead of us; do we not? We have a very big job ahead of us. He will leave a big mess just like his dad left. He will be off on a beach somewhere surfing, and the rest of us will be busy working to clean up the mess he left behind. The sooner that happens, the better it is. Only then he will have to pay for his own hotels. We will not be paying for them anymore. He will have to pay his own way like Canadians are today.
How are we going to clean up this mess? For one, we are going to bring in a pay-as-you-go law so that every time we bring in a new dollar of spending, we will find the savings to pay for it. Do members know who does that? Everybody in the real world.
That is how single mothers pay their bills. When they want to send their children on vacation, they find a way to save money in other areas. The same goes for small businesses. When they want to increase their advertising spending, they find ways to save money in other areas of the business. It is normal. It is the reality of every person living in the real world.
In fact, scarcity is the condition that faces every creature in the universe as there is only so much to go around, every one except for the Prime Minister, who just takes everyone else's money to pay for his own wants and desires. In the real world, if a family wants a new deck, they might pass up on their vacation, or find a deal on the vacation and maybe pick up some used lumber at a local construction yard to save some money so that they can do it all within the same budget. Imagine if instead of just piling on new spending all the time, the government actually had to find savings to pay for it. That would force the same real-world trade-offs—
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- Nov/3/22 4:58:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am not allowed to mention the presence or absence of the Prime Minister, but I will just say that some people bring happiness wherever they go and others bring happiness whenever they go.
Conservatives are going to cap government spending. We are going to get the Bank of Canada back to its core mandate. For 25 years, the Bank of Canada had a very simple mandate of 2% inflation, brought in by the Mulroney government. It was to stick to 2%. Interest rates and money supply were all governed to that purpose, and it worked. It worked until the current Prime Minister came along and pushed the bank to print cash to pay for his spending. We are going to have no more of that.
Conservatives will fund our programs with real money, rather than printed cash, because we know that there are no freebies in this world and we know that, ultimately, the taxpayer and the consumer pay for everything. We will reinstate that mandate and we will audit the central bank through the Auditor General to make sure that never again is there such a horrendous abuse of our money as we have seen over the last couple of years.
Instead of creating more cash, we are going to create more of what cash buys. We are going to grow more food, build more houses and produce more resources right here in Canada, and here is how we will do it. We will incentivize our municipalities to remove their gatekeepers so that we can build more houses. We will remove the gatekeepers off the backs of our farmers by cancelling the tariffs and taxes on their fertilizers and fuel so they can produce more in this country. We will remove the government gatekeepers that stand in the way of our resource sector.
Do members know that Canada today has the second-slowest time for building permits of any country in the OECD? The only other country that is worse is the Slovak Republic. In Canada, if we take all the types of building permits that exist, everything from a renovation permit on a house all the way up to a full uranium mine, and we average it out, the average permit time is 250 days. In South Korea, it is 28 days.
We wonder why investors are taking their money to places like South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland. It is because they can actually get things built in those countries. That is what Conservatives are going to do in this country. We are going to compress the timelines and speed up approvals. We are going to challenge all levels of government to meet the goal of Canada being the fastest place to deliver a building permit anywhere in the developed world.
The minister said today she is going to pitch the world on our critical minerals. The problem is that she cannot get them out of the ground. She is going to tell everyone that they exist. Out there in that field there is some lithium, copper and nickel, but companies have to wait seven years for us to give a permit for anyone to dig that mine. She says she is going to give out a bunch of corporate welfare to mining companies, which can fill their bank accounts with taxpayers' cash. If they cannot get a permit to dig the mine, they will not be able to turn it into anything other than big, fat boondoggles for taxpayers.
Conservatives will repeal the anti-energy law, Bill C-69, so that we can build Canadian pipelines with Canadian steel to take Canadian energy to Canadian marketplaces and around the world. We are going to eliminate the anti-investment taxes that pile on the backs of our entrepreneurs so that it is actually rewarding to build things in this country. We are going to axe the carbon tax so that it is possible for our industries to compete and for our people to afford energy in this country.
As for energy, there are two very different approaches. Across the aisle, they believe that we should tackle climate change by making traditional energy that Canadians rely on more expensive. Conservatives believe in tackling climate change by making new alternatives more affordable. We will do that by incentivizing and speeding up permits to mine lithium, copper, cobalt, graphite and other necessary minerals that will eventually go into Canadian-made electric cars and other forms of renewable energy. We will incentivize the production of these energies here in Canada. We will incentivize nuclear energy here on Canadian soil so that we can power our economy emissions-free.
We will also get rid of the red tape to get dams built in Quebec. We know that in Quebec, there will not be enough electricity in the future to charge electric cars and to meet all the needs of a green future.
Their solution is to build dams. However, the Prime Minister wants to prevent or delay the construction of those dams with duplicate processes.
We agree with the Government of Quebec. It is not necessary to add three or four years to the time frame for these projects since the Government of Quebec already has processes in place to protect the environment. Quebeckers are capable of protecting the environment, and we are going to help them by approving the construction of hydroelectric dams.
Finally, we will make this a country where work pays again. It does not pay to work for a lot of people. Let us look at someone on disability who recovers to a point or arrives at a point in their life where they realize they can work 10 or 15 hours and they want to get out into the world and contribute. The clawbacks right now mean many people on disability lose more than a dollar for every extra dollar they earn.
The government published a report showing that if a single mother with three kids who earns $55,000 a year earns another dollar, she loses 80¢ of that dollar. She earns about $25 an hour. She loses in clawbacks of her benefits and taxes on her income 20 of those dollars, so her real wage on that extra hour of work is five dollars an hour. Nobody in Canada should be expected to work for five dollars an hour. That is an outrage. That is why my government will reform the tax and benefit system to ensure that whenever somebody works an extra hour, takes an extra shift, or earns an extra bonus, they are always better off and they always keep more of that dollar.
We will do this to restore the Canadian promise. I look around this chamber and I see many inspiring stories, like my finance critic, who rose today to ask the first question. He is the son of immigrants. He grew up in a tough neighbourhood and had a difficult childhood, but he was able to get a diploma in accounting, which he is putting to very good use in this House. He started a business, built homes and was elected to serve in a G7 Parliament.
I, myself, am the son of a 16-year-old unwed mother who had to put me up for adoption to two school teachers. They always taught me it did not matter where I came from, that it mattered where I was going, and it did not matter who I knew, that it mattered what I could do. That is the country I want my children to inherit, and that is the country we will fight for every single day in this House.
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- Nov/3/22 5:08:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, first of all, the Conservative government created what the Liberal government now changed the name of to the workers benefit. We created that benefit in the first place, because we wanted to allow, along with increasing the personal exemption, more and more Canadians to be off the tax rolls altogether and keep a bigger share of their paycheques.
Furthermore, on the child benefit, the Liberals wanted to take the money from parents and give it to bureaucrats. We were the ones who put the money directly in parents' pockets. There is something very simple to realize. The government cannot give people anything without taking it away. The government does not have any money. First they try taxing it, which makes people worse off. Then they try borrowing it, which means that future generations are worse off. Then when they ran out of those two options, because they ran out of other people's money, they tried printing the money and now we have 40-year highs in inflation.
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Stop the insanity. Stop the inflation.
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- Nov/3/22 5:11:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, yes, the government is out of touch, but we should not be surprised.
The Prime Minister spent $6,000 of taxpayers' money for each night he spent in London. At a time when Canadians cannot pay their bills and are skipping meals, he forced them to pay for a hotel room that costs $6,000 a night. Yesterday, he admitted that he was the one who stayed in the infamous $6,000-a-night room. He told the truth by accident. It happened by chance. That is the only way to get the truth from the Prime Minister.
It is an important fact, not because a $6,000 expense will bankrupt the Government of Canada, but because it shows that this Prime Minister is completely out of touch with the day-to-day reality of Canadians who work hard but cannot pay their bills.
We, the Conservatives, will stand up for the common people, their paycheques, their savings, their homes and their country.
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- Nov/3/22 5:13:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to offer the hon. member my condolences on the loss of his father, who was indeed a wonderful gentleman.
Second, the member is right. We worked together to try and stop the government from giving tax money to companies so they could spend it on bonuses and dividends for their wealthy executives.
Third, on the issue of building permits, it is not true that building permits are exclusively municipal. We have federal permitting for large-scale resource projects. They require federal permits. In fact, there are far too many projects that require federal permits. One of the reasons we cannot get pipelines and many other resource projects built is the immense delays imposed by the federal government on local projects.
When we were in government, we made a rule during the economic action plan of one project, one approval. Prior to that, oftentimes the same consulting firm was hired to do three separate environmental assessments, delaying the project and driving up the costs, so we said it would be one project, one permit. That is what we are going to do when I am the prime minister. That is why we are going to get more dams built in Quebec. We are going to deliver more Canadian clean, low-carbon, upstream oil and gas projects. We are going to deliver civilian grade uranium and we are going to have more nuclear energy. Other major projects are going to happen quickly and effectively.
Finally, yes, I will attach conditions to federal tax dollars that go to municipal governments. These woke left-wing mayors keep telling us they are out of money for housing, yet they are the ones who are driving up the cost of housing. If they want me to burden taxpayers by sending more money to their municipal governments, they need to get out of the way, remove their gatekeepers and build more homes.
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- Nov/3/22 5:16:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do not have to google that, because Jim Flaherty was against quantitative easing. We specifically said we would not do it, and we did not do it, and we proved this nonsense today that the Liberal government had to do quantitative easing because the Americans did it. That is the excuse. The Americans did it in 2008, 2009 and 2010. They printed money like crazy and ballooned income and wealth inequality as a result.
Here in Canada we said no. We banned our Bank of Canada from doing that. As a result, we did not have an inflation crisis. We kept our debts low and we kept income inequality lower than it would have been.
We can have an independent monetary policy. Our mothers taught us that just because all of our friends are jumping off a bridge does not mean we have to.
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