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Hon. Pierre Poilievre (Leader of the Opposition, CPC)

Jun/7/23 8:07:37 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am rising today to speak, and to speak and to speak, for the people who have no voice, the people who have been silenced for too long, the quiet ones, the ones who toil away to pay their bills but have no means to pay any longer. They are the ones who cannot hire lobbyists to make their voices heard in the halls of power and they have no connections to get their concerns into the headlines of the newspapers, but they are the quiet ones who do the nation's work, who carry the country on their back. They are the ones who rise when it is still dark and work until it is dark again, but lately, for them, it has felt like nothing but darkness. In this period of difficulty, everything feels broken, and the government is broke. These are the people who skip meals because they cannot afford the price of food. These are the people who quietly go to food banks because they know it is the only way they will have a chance to feed their children. These are the 33-year-old men and women who did everything we asked them to do, worked hard, paid off their bills, had a job or two or three right through university, and yet still cannot afford a home and have calculated that they will never be able to afford a home, because prices are too high and rates are too burdensome for them ever to do so. When the Prime Minister rose today to complain that I would be on my feet for hours and hours at a time to block his latest assault on the paycheques of these quiet, patriotic working people, let me inform him that I was not deterred. I will speak for those people who cannot speak for themselves because they are too busy carrying the nation on their backs. I am rising in the House today to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves because they are carrying the weight of the nation on their backs. I am speaking on behalf of single mothers who are skipping meals because that is the only way they can afford to buy groceries for their children. I am rising in the House today to speak on behalf of truckers who work seven days a week and do not even see their children anymore because that is what it takes for them to pay the bills. I am rising for the nine out of 10 Canadians who say that they will never be able to afford a house after eight years under this Prime Minister. I am rising in the House to speak for taxpayers who cannot afford to pay the carbon tax that the government wants to increase to 61¢ a litre. I am speaking for all those who cannot afford to pay any more and who need a voice in the House of Commons, who need us to take action so that they can earn a decent living, have a home and have financial security, which security is threatened day after day because of this inflationary deficit budget. We will work and fight to prevent this budget from being passed. In order to understand where we go from here, we have to understand how we arrived here in the first place. To understand the future, we have to understand the past. To know tomorrow, we have to know yesterday. This is not a unique concept. In fact, I learned it from the great Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was probably the most prescient statesman of the 20th century. We know that he predicted the ravages of the evil Hitlerian regime in the early 1930s, before many of his own countrymen had realized the risk that was gathering. In a 1931 essay that he wrote in Maclean's magazine, “Fifty Years Hence”, he predicted the iPad, which he described as a device that one would hold in one's hand and use to talk to a friend on the other side of the world as though they were just sticking their head out the window to talk to a neighbour. He predicted that we would have wireless modems in houses. He used other words to describe them, but he described them with incredible precision. He described the fierce power of the atom. He even wrote back then, at the beginning of the 1930s, about how we would one day unlock the force of hydrogen as a fuel source, which is something that the government is celebrating as being a completely new concept, almost a century later. He said, at Westminster College in Missouri, that an iron curtain was descending across Europe, and at that moment described what would become known as the Cold War before anyone else was able to predict such a thing. How was he able to see so far into the future? Of course, he was able to because he had been so capable of seeing into the past. I see there has been an improvement on the government side, by the way. It is a big improvement, if only the cameras could see the very impressive people sitting there. He predicted all of these matters into the future because he had so completely understood the past. He wrote 58 volumes of Nobel prize-winning literature, almost all of it historical in nature. Because he understood history, he could tell where the future was going. He understood that our imagination is really just fragments of memory put together and that we can have no imagination of what is to come without those fragments from the past, and that is how he was able to see forward. Today I will use the methodology that he gave in kind of an IKEA instruction manual on how to tell the future. It would be like a pocketbook for every fortune teller. What he said is that there are two ways you can predict the future. One is to look at where you are and where you were, and you can project to where you will be. It is obvious that this method is based on trajectory. The second way is that there is something called the “cycle of history”: The things that have gone around and around again will come around and around in the future. I am going to use both of these methods to foretell where we are headed and, unfortunately, to deliver some dark warnings about the perils that accumulate in front of our eyes if we do not change course and do so very quickly. Let us start with where we were, where we are and where we are headed. I start by pointing out that only eight years ago, the average cost for a house in Canada was $450,000. The average mortgage payment was a mere $1,300 or $1,400. The average rent was $900. Unfortunately, because the government has unleashed a torrent of government spending, it has doubled the national debt, increased the size and cost of government and delivered to us 40-year high inflation, all of which have doubled housing prices, doubled rent, doubled monthly mortgage payments and doubled the necessary down payment needed to buy a home. How did we get here? Some hon. members: Oh, oh! Hon. Pierre Poilievre: Madam Speaker, I know that the members across the way would like to continue to talk me down and to silence my voice because they do not want— Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 8:16:40 p.m.
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Order. Order. I seem to have one of the official opposition members heckling him as well. I would ask members to please not interrupt. I want to remind members that while someone has the floor, it is not very respectful for others to be speaking. If they wish to have conversations, they should take them outside and allow the hon. member to have the floor to be able to do his speech, because I know they will have questions and comments.

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Mrs. Stephanie Kusie

Jun/7/23 8:17:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. It is not respectful to leave no one in the room on the government side when the Leader of the Opposition—

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Respectful

The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 8:17:34 p.m.
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There are individuals in the room, and that is not a point of order at this point. I do not think that the hon. member could even call for quorum. There is quorum, so I will recognize the hon. leader of the official opposition. Some hon. members: Oh, oh! The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes): It is still happening. I think we can have it quiet as a mouse. Is that possible? Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

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Quorum
Quiet

The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 8:17:56 p.m.
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Order. If hon. members want their own members to speak, I think they should be quiet. The hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.

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Quiet

Mr. Charlie Angus

Jun/7/23 8:18:20 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have been in the House many years and I have always enjoyed the leader of Stornoway's stunts. Are we actually saying that there is going to be historical precedence and they are upset that nobody bothers to listen to him? Is that literally a point—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 8:18:36 p.m.
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That is not a point of order; it is a point of debate. The hon. leader of the official opposition.

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Point

Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Jun/7/23 8:18:50 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it was good to hear from the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay. He does make a lot of noise, but that is because an empty wagon rattles the loudest. The people of Timmins keep telling me, as I have been there four times in a year, that they have seen more of me in the last year than they have seen of him in the last decade, and they are happy about that. Over the last eight years, we have seen a massive, possibly unprecedented, mounting of both public and private debt. We have to understand where we were and where we are in order to understand where we are going. In the last four years, the government has doubled our national debt. That is more than half a trillion dollars of new debt. The Prime Minister has added more debt than all previous prime ministers combined. He will be quick to point to many different excuses that have caused this run-up in our national debt. I will point out that while there was a COVID pandemic, this is not the first crisis we have ever seen in the history of the world. While there has been a war between Russia and Ukraine, this is not the first war ever fought in the history of the world. We had the great global recession under the previous Conservative government. We had two wars: one in Afghanistan, and another in Iraq and Syria. We managed to do so while keeping the debt the lowest in the G7 and balancing the budget. Other countries faced similar challenges without adding as much debt. For example, the Swiss, who are right in the centre of Europe, closer to the conflict in Ukraine, and more dependent on global supply chains than we are because they are a landlocked nation surrounded by the European Union, were able to balance their budget, pay down their deficit, pay down their debt and keep interest rates, inflation and unemployment lower than all of the other OECD countries. That proves that just because there is a pandemic or a war in one part of the world, it does not force a government to completely bankrupt itself. Let us recall that the Prime Minister added $100 billion of debt before there was a single case of COVID. He has added roughly $100 billion since COVID came to an end. During the COVID pandemic, 40%, or $200 billion of the new debt that he added, had nothing to do with COVID whatsoever according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. The idea that we can blame all of this new debt on factors out of his control is provably false. The Prime Minister had a choice and his decision was to spend without any thought for future generations or for the financial viability of the country. In order to enable his spending, he unleashed nearly unprecedented printing of cash. This was done through something called quantitative easing where the central bank purchased government debt at exceptionally high prices, driving down yields on that debt, and ultimately pumping $400 billion of new cash into the economy in less than two years. Many will say the Liberals had no choice. There was a pandemic after all. Let us review that excuse. The pandemic did not bring a liquidity crunch. In fact, the economic phenomenon of the pandemic was that people had more cash than ever before, but they were banned from spending it. The problem was not the lack of cash, as had been the case in the previous great global recession. The problem was that people and businesses had bank accounts that were overflowing with cash with nowhere they were allowed to spend it. In that kind of environment, the worst possible thing one could do is to print more cash and further overflow bank accounts with that money, which, in the end, we knew would ultimately have led to inflation. During that run-up of the size of our monetary base that kept money printing, the Minister of Finance, always looking for the trendiest new slogan that would win her applause in Davos or Brussels or at some other international symposium, said that all this cash that was filling up bank accounts was like a “pre-loaded stimulus”, something that could be unleashed to revive a dead economy. Of course the economy was only dead because governments had shut it down, not because there was a lack of cash with which to facilitate commerce. When the economy opened, all of that excess cash was unleashed, and the goods we buy and the interest we pay were automatically and predictably bid up. We do not fault the government for having created programs to pay people's bills while governments locked them down and prevented them from paying their own. Where we did object was with the government giving out $2,000-a-month payments to prisoners, to dead people, to teenagers who did not have that kind of money before the crisis occurred, and in many cases had no jobs at all. We objected to the government continuing to pay out these benefits well after there were more than a million vacant jobs. In other words, we were paying people not to work while there were a million vacant jobs they could have been filling. Simultaneously driving up unemployment and job vacancies, an unusual coincidence of achievement or, in reality, negative achievement in the use of this policy. The reality is that we warned the Liberals at the time that if they did not restrain themselves this would lead to a crisis. It would start with inflation and be followed up by an interest rate increase. This was not based on some invention—

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Mr. Jasraj Singh Hallan

Jun/7/23 8:25:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have a point of order. The members on the other side are speaking even louder than he is. I would ask that they show us—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 8:25:58 p.m.
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I do want to remind members, if they want to have conversations, to please take them out to allow the speaker to be heard, so that MPs could be ready for questions and comments. The hon. Leader of the Opposition.

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Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Jun/7/23 8:26:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I know that the Liberals across the way would love to silence my voice. They want to silence Canadians by censoring the Internet. They want to bring their woke censorship ideology to university campuses—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 8:26:32 p.m.
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Order. The hon. parliamentary secretary knows full well that he should be a role model to other members and should not be making any disturbance while someone else has the floor. I would ask him to put his eyeglass piece away as well. Some hon. members: Oh, oh! The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes): Order, order, order. I am sure we can get through this evening. It would be beautiful if we could run through this evening smoothly. I have a feeling that is not quite going to happen, but I am going to try. Again, I want to remind all members, if they want to have conversations, to take them out. Some hon. members: Oh, oh! The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes): Order. Even when I am speaking, I think I deserve the respect of this House. The hon. Leader of the Opposition.

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Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Jun/7/23 8:27:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think we can all agree that if the member from Kingston is our role model, that is a good reason why we are in so much trouble today. This spending that has led to the inflation was utterly predictable, but its consequences have been utterly devastating. It is obvious by looking at the lineups at food banks across the country, which, in many cases, actually go many blocks down the street and around the corner. There are the cases of the young people who now estimate that they will be in their fifties before they will be able to move out of their parents' homes. These are not anecdotes. Just the other day, one prominent financial institution estimated that if a family was earning a quarter of a million dollars, it would take them 25 years in Toronto to save up for a down payment. It used to be that 25 years was the term it took to pay down a mortgage, now it takes that long just to get a mortgage, which illustrates the immense contortion that our economy has suffered. This is not without notice around the world. The IMF now says that Canada has the economy that is most at risk of default crisis out of all the countries in the advanced and developed world. Right now, household debt is 107% of GDP, which is to say that the combined debt of Canadian families is 7% bigger than the entire GDP of our country, and we have the worst household debt of any G7 country. This debt was not an accident. When governments create cash, they are sloppy about it. They do not simply print the money and hand it over to the Prime Minister to spend, although I think he might prefer that kind of efficiency, rather they have a central bank purchase government bonds on what is called the “secondary market”. In other words, the government sells the bonds to the financial institutions and the central bank buys them back. This creates an artificial private-sector demand for government debt, which makes it very easy for government to borrow money. After all, if I say to members that I will sell them a bond today for $1.00 and buy it back tomorrow for a $1.10, it is pretty easy to imagine that members would accept that transaction so that they could arbitrage the 10¢ profit on the back and forth. This allows government to spend cash very easily and it also increases the money supply. It balloons government and the financial industries. It is why, when the Federal Reserve is engaged in this practice of so-called quantitative easing, it has been wildly popular in both Washington and on Wall Street among Democrats who like big government and among Republicans who like big banks, because both of them actually profit when government creates cash to inflate financial assets and to inflate the spending capacity of itself. Therefore, what ends up happening is that those who benefit off government expenditures profit, those who benefit off the financial sector profit—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 8:31:12 p.m.
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I will interrupt for a second. I am made aware that there is someone who is taking pictures from the lobby into the chamber. I will ask one of the clerks to go over there and ask anybody who has been taking pictures from the lobby into the chamber here to delete those pictures. I would remind members that they are not to be taking pictures in the House whether they are in the House or in the lobby looking into the House. If they want to take pictures, they can take pictures from the TV. I am hoping someone will take care of it. The hon. member for Mégantic—L'Érable on a point of order.

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Mr. Luc Berthold

Jun/7/23 8:32:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we just heard a government member say that she took a picture in the House. I would ask her to delete the photo from her device, since everyone saw it happen.

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 8:32:18 p.m.
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If members have taken pictures, I would ask them to make sure they delete those pictures. Members know that taking pictures in the House is not permitted. If they cannot help but take pictures, I would ask them to leave their phones in the lobby. I will also remind members not to be talking across the chamber. They can take their conversations into the lobby.

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Hon. Pierre Poilievre

Jun/7/23 8:33:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, as I was pointing out, this practice of so-called quantitative easing was not invented in Canada. In fact, it started long ago in Japan, which caused a massive gap to appear between the rich and the poor, because the Japanese government printed cash, inflated asset values, left the working class behind and inflated the wealth of the super-rich. This led to a long-standing slump in Japanese economic growth, because investors no longer had to invest in productive assets that would generate wealth for the Japanese economy. Rather, they could just sit on their property, their stocks or their bonds and allow the Japanese central bank to inflate the values. The Americans then replicated this idea of quantitative easing in the U.S. financial crisis. The result was a disaster. It was a decade of very slow economic growth. Furthermore, there was a major expansion in the gap between rich and poor. While the working class in America was losing its jobs to automation and outsourcing, it was not enjoying any of the lower prices that those competitive forces should have provided because the central bank was neutralizing cost savings by inflating the cost of living by printing cash. We saw a massive explosion in the wealth of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, while the working poor in industrial states, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and others, found themselves more and more disenfranchised. Their wages were going down, yet their prices were going up. They looked around and saw incompetent CEOs and other financial sector insiders, the same ones who had caused the U.S. financial crisis, not going to jail where they belonged. Rather, they were getting richer and richer. Therefore, the working poor came to believe that the system had ultimately been rigged against them. Now I bring this to the present, because the government claims that because all central banks were engaging in quantitative easing, we had to do it as well. The American federal reserve is our big, friendly neighbour to the south. The argument goes that if it does something, we have to do it too. However, that is provably false. In the 2008-09 financial crisis, the American government printed cash to buy government debt. They did something called quantitative easing. In Canada, we did not do that. Our government signalled to the central bank that it would not be authorized to participate in fiscal policy by printing cash to buy government bonds. Yes, we ran small, temporary deficits to get through that financial crisis, but we did it by borrowing real money, not by printing cash. That is why we rebounded faster than the Americans did. We had lower unemployment. We were the last in and the first out of the recession, and we never had inflation above 4%. We were back to our inflation target in a year. This proves that we did not need to do what the Americans did, just as our mothers taught us. Just because our friends are jumping off a bridge, does not mean we should do the same. We know that the Swiss did not print cash during the COVID crisis. Rather, they used real money; when they ran deficits, they borrowed real money. They quickly returned to a balanced budget, and the result was the lowest unemployment, the lowest interest rates and the lowest inflation. This was despite the fact that their European neighbours all had massive inflation crises because their central bank on that continent had behaved differently. All these experiences were laboratories to demonstrate the folly of the government's actions. I called this folly out on the floor of the House of Commons as early as the fall of 2020, when all that cash was moving into our economy and already beginning to inflate the cost of living. Core inflation was already rising and starting to break above the 2% target, yet they continued when it was clear that there was—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Jun/7/23 8:37:42 p.m.
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I have a point of order. The hon. Minister of Seniors.

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Hon. Kamal Khera (Minister of Seniors, Lib.)

Jun/7/23 8:37:49 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-33

Madam Speaker, an agreement could not be reached under the provisions of Standing Order 78(1) or 78(2) with respect to the second reading stage of Bill C-33, an act to amend the Customs Act, the Railway Safety Act, the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, the Marine Transportation Security Act, the Canada Transportation Act and the Canada Marine Act and to make a consequential amendment to another act. Under the provisions of Standing Order 78(3), I give notice that a minister of the Crown will propose at the next sitting of the House a motion to allot a specific number of days or hours for the consideration and disposal of proceedings at the said stage.

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C-33, An Act to amend the Customs Act, the Railway Safety Act, the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, the Marine Transportation Security Act, the Canada Transportation Act and the Canada Mar

Hon. Pierre Poilievre (Leader of the Opposition, CPC)

Jun/7/23 8:38:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, now that we know what worked and what did not work, we have to understand the consequences of the fact that the government took the wrong path. I do not need to go on at any length about the ravages of inflation. We have all heard the stories. We can all tell heartbreaking stories. I see a member right now looking at emails on his phone from people who cannot pay their bills. I see a member across the way saying that our member for Barrie—Innisfil is in trouble for looking at an email from a constituent. He should be looking at those emails. Maybe that member would benefit if she looked at emails from her constituents as well. I understand that, if she were to do so, it would be a great burden on her personal guilt to learn of the single mothers who are skipping meals, the families who are now defaulting on their loans from a 16% year over year increase and the number of Canadians who are missing their mortgage payments. She could take a moment to look into the eyes of the 37-year-old who has been working all his adult life and still cannot afford a home. She could talk to the farmer who borrowed so he could expand his farming operation under the government's promise that the interest rates would be low for long. If she looked at their emails, then maybe she would be less arrogant in supporting the very inflationary policies that have caused all this misery. Maybe, if the Liberals would listen to the people who pay the bills in this country, just for once, we would not be in the mess we are in right now. This was all so predictable. The great Nobel Prize laureate and economist Milton Friedman said, “Inflation is taxation without legislation.” He also said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” In Friedman's view, central bankers try to avoid their last big mistake. Every time there is a threat that the economy will contract, they overstimulate it by printing too much money. This results in a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one. Rapid increases in the quantity of money produce inflation. So said the greatest expert on monetary economics in the history of the world, as recognized by the Nobel Committee. Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest economists ever, said that “inflation is a way to take people's wealth from them without having to openly raise taxes. It is the most universal tax of all.” He said that the first lesson of economics is scarcity. That is, “there is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. Meanwhile, the first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” The great Hayek said, “With government in control of monetary policy, the chief threat in this field has become inflation. Governments everywhere and at all times have been the chief cause of the depreciation of the currency. Though there have been occasional prolonged falls in the value of metallic money, the major inflations of the past have been the result of governments either diminishing the coin or issuing excessive quantities of paper money.” He also said, “A great many of the activities which governments have universally undertaken in this field and which fall within the limits described, are those which facilitate the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the facts of general significance. The most important function of this kind is the provision of a reliable and efficient monetary system.” That is something the government has failed to provide. Furthermore, the great French philosopher Frédéric Bastiat said, “Money serves only to facilitate the transmission of these useful things from one to another.... When legislators, having ruined men by war and taxes, persevere in their idea, they say to themselves, ‘If the people suffer, it is because there is not enough money. We must make [more].’” The tactic the Prime Minister deployed was nothing creative or new. It has been the tactic of emperors, kings, presidents, prime ministers, and incompetent and self-indulgent leaders. When they run out of other people's money, they create more cash. I think of the story of Henry VIII, who spent lavishly and without restraint on himself, spoiled his court and, of course, ran out of money. However, there was a difficulty in creating cash in his time. That was because the British pound was actually a pound of silver. When people ran out of silver, they ran out of the ability to make money. Henry VIII had a silver coin. How could he create cash when he had no more silver left? He had already spent it all. What did he do? He had his smelters melt it down and remint it with copper on the inside and a tiny layer of silver on the outside. Then he could multiply the number of coins almost without limit. I know members are anxious to hear the rest of the story.

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