44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 17, 2023 10:00AM
- Oct/17/23 4:15:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I always enjoy the member's passion, if not the substance, of his remarks.
Let us look at history and the facts. Every year prior to the pandemic, the Liberal government had a deficit. The government is now spending $120 billion more than prior to the pandemic. In addition to that, there was $200 billion of non-COVID-related expenditures during the pandemic. These monies were spent on things like arrive scam. There was millions of dollars for fridges for Loblaws and millions of dollars for Mastercard. These are not proper ways to spend money.
Yes, we will debate this, and if we are skeptical of some of your solutions, forgive us since you have doubled household costs and put us into poverty.
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- Oct/17/23 4:24:11 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians are facing an affordability crisis. Everything costs more, from the grocery store to the gas pumps. Mortgages have doubled, rents have doubled and down payments have doubled. The dream of home ownership is dead for nine out of 10 Canadians. Liberal inflationary spending has caused food prices to skyrocket, and one in five Canadians is skipping meals because they cannot afford to eat.
Families are struggling to make ends meet. Food banks are overwhelmed. In my community, food banks are at risk of bankruptcy because of a surge in demand, and 33%, or one-third, of food bank users are children. Overdose deaths have increased 300% in B.C. The leading cause of death among 10- to 18-year-olds is drug overdose.
This is heartbreaking, and the people in my province need some good news. Unfortunately, StatsCan reported today that inflation remains high. After eight years of reckless spending, Canada's national debt sits at $1.2 trillion. Think about that for a second. That means debt servicing costs will be almost $44 billion this year alone. These are tax dollars that could have been used to invest in addiction recovery services or to help address the housing crisis. Instead, those tax dollars will go to rich bondholders.
At a time when everything feels broken, the Prime Minister has spent the cupboards bare and has no plan to bring the nation's finances into a better position to respond to the real needs of Canadians. This is because of years of blatant disregard for fiscal prudence and monetary policy. We now have a tired, desperate NDP-Liberal government that is out of ideas. It has resorted to recycling broken campaign promises and adopting Conservative policy, albeit watered down.
Its housing accelerator fund has not built a single home. It is nothing more than a housing hoax. The Prime Minister has added more debt than all other prime ministers combined. There is no plan to balance the budget and no plan to get his inflationary deficits under control.
This is the Prime Minister who thinks budgets balance themselves and asks Canadians to forgive him for not thinking about monetary policy. His laissez-faire attitude toward public finance has put the well-being of far too many Canadians in crisis. Government spending has driven up inflation rates, and those rates have put Canada at the brink of a mortgage default crisis.
That is why the leader of the Conservative opposition brought a common-sense motion to the House today. Our motion calls on the Prime Minister to table a fiscal plan that includes a pathway back to a balanced budget. He must do so before the Bank of Canada announces its next rate decision later this month. This motion is urgent and necessary. The government must start spending within its means, something that Canadian families do every day to balance their own household budgets.
In June, the Minister of Finance took to social media to declare victory over inflation. She told Canadians the Liberal plan to tackle inflation is “working” and that the Liberals were making “real progress”. Since then, inflation has gone up 43%. She fails to learn the lesson that excessive government spending and cruel tax hikes are the reason she is losing the war against inflation. After eight years, it is clear that the Liberal fiscal plan is not working and that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
Common-sense Conservatives have a plan to reverse these deficits so we can bring down inflation, bring home lower prices and bring homes that people can afford. We will cap government spending, cut waste and bring in a dollar-for-dollar law that requires the government to find a dollar of savings for any new dollar of spending. That is common sense.
We will also axe the punitive carbon tax. When we tax the farmer who grows the food, the trucker who ships the food and the store that sells the food, we are taxing the hard-working Canadian family struggling to pay for that food. The Liberal government has failed to reach any of its emission reduction targets, so all of this financial pain is for no environmental gain.
Liberals and their enablers in the NDP justify their position by suggesting that the carbon tax is not high enough. Speaking about the carbon tax, the Liberal member for Halifax said, “Ultimately they don't want to pay for it, but that's what changes behaviour, so if we rebate them everything they've paid for the pollution price, it defeats the whole purpose. There needs to be a bit of pain there. That's the point of it.”
How out of touch can they be? Other Liberals, such as the member for Avalon, finally admitted that the carbon tax is causing harm to Canadians. When asked about the political consequences the Liberals will face because of the carbon tax, the member for Avalon said:
I think it's hurting them a fair bit. Everywhere I go, people come up to me and say, “We're losing faith in the Liberal Party”.
I've had people tell me they can't afford to buy groceries. They can't afford to heat their homes....
It is too little too late. That member voted to implement the carbon tax, and his party continues to punish Canadians with it.
On housing, the Prime Minister does not think it is his responsibility, but the buck stops with him. It used to take 25 years to pay off a mortgage. Now it takes 25 years to save for a down payment.
Vancouver is the third most unaffordable housing market on the planet. In my community, mortgages now cost thousands of dollars more per month, forcing people out of home ownership. We are not building homes quick enough to keep up with demand because big city gatekeepers impose unnecessary delays and red tape.
A C.D. Howe study determined that gatekeepers and regulations add nearly $1.3 million to the cost of an average home in Vancouver. Meanwhile, CMHC bureaucrats in Ottawa are rewarded with millions of dollars in bonuses for a lackluster performance.
Conservatives know we need to build homes, not bureaucracy. We will reward cities that are getting homes built with additional infrastructure dollars and a building bonus, and we will withhold transit and infrastructure funding from cities until sufficient high density housing around transit stations is built and occupied. We will cut the bonuses and salaries for ineffective bureaucrats, and if needed, we will fire the gatekeepers at CMHC if they are unable to speed up approvals for housing programs to an average of 60 days. We will list 15% of the federal government's 37,000 buildings and all appropriate federal land to be turned into homes people can afford.
Conservatives will turn the hurt the government has inflicted into the hope Canadians deserve. Canada should be a place where our citizens can afford to buy a home, put food on the table and save for the future. This is common sense. Only Conservatives will bring it home.
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- Oct/17/23 4:34:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am always happy to see when members of the House from other parties are able to come together with the Conservatives and agree on something. That is always a pleasure.
With respect to timelines, the government has had eight years to get this right. It certainly has been many years that we have been telling the government that the way it is going about things, with its unnecessary flagrant spending, is going to result in inflation, and what we have now is rampant inflation. The PBO agreed with us that 40% of its spending during COVID was not COVID related. The government also drove up debt before COVID even happened. It cannot run with that cover anymore.
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- Oct/17/23 4:54:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise to represent my constituents, because cost of living, affordability, is a major issue for many of them.
I hesitate to say that it is an honour to rise to speak to this motion. I want to start by saying that I find the opposition day motions put forward by the official opposition are, for the most part, very repetitive. They do not add to the debate. They do not add to trying to solve these problems for Canadians. Rather they seem to be yet another platform for Conservatives to repeat the gimmicky phrases they have come up with, the cute little phrases.
They really do not seem to be addressing the issues. In fact, when I look at this opposition day motion that addresses the affordability crisis, what the Conservatives put forward as a solution is really not a solution at all. What they say to all those listening, those people who are struggling with the cost of living right now, is to ask for a pathway back to balanced budgets. If anybody thinks that is going to help Canadians who are struggling today, then they are sorely mistaken. People are struggling today in my riding.
On this side of the House, we are working to put forward real programs, many of which my colleague before me has discussed. These motions simply serve to put Canadians down, to insult their intelligence, by putting forward half-truths and hoping that by repeating the same phrases over and over again, as is often done in question period, somehow this misinformation will convince Canadians that these are facts and not simply half-baked truths and beliefs, and political speech that is meant to hurt our country by making people feel badly about Canada itself.
I find the negativity and the lack of true concern about coming up with real solutions for Canadians to be disheartening. I find it a waste of time. For a party that presumably puts a lot of emphasis on using scarce resources wisely, I find the time in question period and in opposition day motions is really an insult to this place and to Canadians. That is why I did not say it was an honour to rise to speak to this motion.
Since I have risen to speak to this motion, I would like to address a few things. We all agree that there are major challenges facing Canadians. Most of the motion put forward referred to these challenges. Where we really differ is when it comes to what the cause of that is and what should be done about it.
The Conservatives like to say, constantly, that the reason we have inflation in Canada is because of our deficits and because we are tackling climate change. However, common-sense Canadians can look around the world and see that inflation is not just a problem in Canada, it is a worldwide problem. In fact, there are many countries that do not have a price on pollution but have been suffering from inflation.
We can also look at the fact that inflation was 8.1% a year ago, and it is now 4%. It has come down drastically. Yet, in that same time period, the price on pollution did not change. If their explanation for why inflation is happening is due to the price on pollution or the carbon tax, they need to look at the numbers. I have mentioned it before, but there seems to be a mistaken belief on that side of the House that, because something happens during the same period of time as something else, it is somehow attributable to that. Anyone who took introductory statistics understands the difference between correlation and causality, and because something occurs over a period of time, it does not mean it is caused by that.
I wish the messaging would stop being so simplistic and based on polling of what slogan resonates with Canadians or gets them angry, and rather would try to address the real facts here. Inflation across Canada and the world has been caused by many things, and we all know that.
It has been caused by the climate crisis, it has been caused by the illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia and it has been caused by the post-COVID economy. In fact, many economists say that this is a different kind of inflation because a lot of it is from the supply side as opposed to the demand side. Of course, as I am sure everyone knows, the inflationary government spending, if we want to call it that, contributes to the demand side, not the supply side. Therefore, much of this inflation has been caused by the contraction of supply as opposed to an increase in demand.
Having hopefully corrected some of that, I also want to talk about the price on pollution. We know on this side of the House that we must battle climate change and that many of the inflationary pressures, the cost increases we are seeing today, have been driven by the climate crisis. I think it was only two weeks ago that many opposition members were quoting the price of lettuce, carrots and onions. The increase in those prices has been mainly driven by droughts in California. Romaine lettuce is mostly grown there. We can look at what experts are saying and they will tell us that this is why prices have gone up as much as they have.
Tiff Macklem, whom the opposition likes to quote when blaming inflation on government spending, has said that the price on pollution is responsible for about a 0.15% increase in inflation. We are talking about inflation that has gone up by 6% or 7% and has come back down to 4%, but experts and economists would tell us that very little of that has been caused by the price on pollution. These same experts and many others would say that our price on pollution is one of the most effective and efficient ways to battle greenhouse gas emissions. Given that we have a climate action incentive rebate, most Canadians get back more than they pay, so when we talk about affordability, households are better off with this program.
If an opposition day motion were to put forward some realistic programs, some plans that could contribute to tackling these problems and helping us improve the programs we have in place, it would be welcome. However, to hear the same rhetoric over and over again is tiresome, insulting and, quite frankly, a waste of time. The Conservatives should contribute to the programs we have in place or give us some ideas. We have, in fact, already incorporated a few ideas that have been put forward. We welcomed them. We want to better things for Canadians. We are fighting for Canadians every day, and we encourage the Conservatives to join us in doing the same.
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- Oct/17/23 5:05:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is very important to support our seniors. I agree wholeheartedly.
I disagree with the opposition that we are causing inflation through government spending. These are investments in people. At the same time, we do need to watch government spending right now, because we have a AAA credit rating and the cost of debt has gone up. We need to be careful with spending, and we are doing that. We are being fiscally responsible.
While I agree with the member opposite, I am not sure this is the time to put in place that policy given the other policy we are putting in place to support seniors and all people. We are trying to be very selective and targeted with our supports at this time.
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- Oct/17/23 5:09:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, off the top, I note that I will be splitting my time with my colleague, the member for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier.
The policies and decisions of government have real-life impacts on Canadians. Unfortunately, in the case of the NDP-Liberal coalition, that impact has been truly devastating. After eight years of the Liberal government, Canadians are now faced with a cost of living crisis that is a direct result of failed policies.
There are moms and dads across this country who, despite going to work every day to earn a paycheque, are still struggling to put gas in their tanks, put food on the table and keep their family housed. Seniors on a fixed income are being forced to choose between groceries or keeping warm during the winter. With housing costs having more than doubled under the government, more and more Canadians are giving up on the dream of home ownership. That is not okay, but that is the record of the Prime Minister and his government, and the out-of-touch NDP-Liberal government has yet to offer Canadians hope that there is a plan to bring down sky-high costs and mounting interest rates.
In fact, not only is this NDP-Liberal coalition failing to bring down inflation and interest rates, but it is actively making it worse, and its high-tax agenda is only further eating away at the paycheques of Canadians. Life is too expensive, and Canadians have never paid so much to bring home so little. This is a difficult time for many Canadians and they simply cannot afford the NDP-Liberal government.
The Prime Minister has added more to the national debt than all previous prime ministers combined, and that half a trillion dollars of inflationary deficits has directly led to record inflation highs and repeated hikes to the interest rate. Instead of acknowledging and reversing course, the Prime Minister and his government continue to pour fuel on the inflationary fire at every turn they take. Expert after expert has warned that the Liberal government's spending is driving up the cost of inflation. Even Liberals have told the government that its deficit spending is driving up inflation.
We know that Tiff Macklem, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, has said that if governments increase their spending, it makes it more difficult to get inflation on track. Dispelling the often-heard Liberal claim that inflation is a global problem and not a result of the government's own decisions, he has also said that “inflation in Canada increasingly reflects what’s happening in Canada.” We know Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, also said that “inflation is principally a domestic story”. Even former finance minister Bill Morneau has now admitted that his Liberal government put more money into the economy than it needed to.
The inflationary results are crushing. To try to get inflation under control, the Bank of Canada has been forced to increase interest rates 10 times in just 19 months. More than half of Canadians are said to be within $200 of not being able to pay their bills. Half of Canadians are already saying that their mortgages are unaffordable, and Canadians already have the highest household debt in the G7. Also, the International Monetary Fund has said that Canada's housing market is the most at risk of any developed country.
Behind those statistics and troubling findings, there are real Canadians who are trying and who are barely hanging on. Canadian families are set back further and further in their personal finances every time the Bank of Canada raises interest rates. There are families whose dollars are not going nearly as far as they once were and who are desperate for the cost of living crisis in this country to come to an end.
They remember when the Prime Minister told them during the pandemic that the government would take on debt so they would not have to, but there is no comfort in that. It is taxpayers, not the Prime Minister, who took on that debt, and it is that debt that is contributing to high inflation and interest rates.
I have been listening to this debate, so I know that some members across the way will try to justify all of their deficit spending by telling us that it was a result of emergency supports to Canadians and businesses. However, in a 2022 report, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has already exposed the fallacy in that argument. That report confirmed that over $200 billion of new spending introduced by the Liberal government during the pandemic had nothing to do with its COVID response. In fact, I will remind those same members that their dangerous and reckless deficit spending habit began long before the pandemic. In 2015, the Liberal government promised Canadians that there would be a tiny, temporary $10-billion deficit. It immediately broke that promise to Canadians, and after that, it has been broken promise after broken promise. The most honest thing the Prime Minister told Canadians was that he does not think about monetary policy.
Perhaps the finance minister might think about monetary policy herself, but she has failed to take the fiscal steps necessary to put the country’s finances on solid footing. She told Canadians that the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio was her fiscal anchor, that she was committed to ensuring that it continue to be reduced, and that it was a line she would not cross. Then, in budget 2023, she crossed that line. Ahead of that budget, she also acknowledged that bringing down inflation and interest rates was a priority for Canadians and that it was her goal to not pour fuel on the inflationary fire. Then, she introduced $60 billion in new spending, adding fuel to that inflationary fire. Not to be forgotten is that in budget 2023, she also abandoned the government’s path to balanced budgets that she had projected for 2027 just months earlier.
Deficit spending drives up inflation and the costs of goods that Canadians are buying, but let us not forget that Canadians are being squeezed from all sides because of the NDP-Liberal government. The money to pay for its spending has to come from somewhere. Not only has the government printed mountains of cash to pay for its spending, but it has also hiked taxes on Canadians. The increased federal tax burden leaves Canadians with fewer dollars in their pockets to spend on their own families' priorities. Payroll taxes have gone up, directly eating into the paycheques of working Canadians. The government's failed carbon tax is adding to the cost of everything, punishing Canadians for basic necessities like gas, groceries and home heating. Of course, now it has added a second carbon tax that will cost Canadians even more, and the plan is to keep increasing those taxes.
Canadians need a break. Today’s Conservative motion calling on the government to introduce a fiscal plan that includes a pathway to balanced budgets before the Bank of Canada’s next policy interest rate decision is, I believe, perfectly reasonable and is desperately needed by all Canadians, especially those who are barely hanging on. Balancing the budget to keep inflation and interest rates low is common sense, and the NDP-Liberal coalition needs to get its spending under control before it is too late. It is time we restored hope to Canadians.
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Mr. Speaker, I wonder whether the member could provide some clarity to Canadians. When the Conservatives talk about austerity and cutbacks, one of the issues they like to bring up in the House is that of housing. As a government, we are investing literally hundreds of millions of dollars in housing. In fact, we have Bill C-56 before the House now, which would allow for literally hundreds of thousands of new purpose-built rentals to enter Canadian markets over the coming years. On the one hand they say that we should not spend money, and on the other hand they say that we need to do something about the housing crisis.
Not only are we spending money, but we are also working with other levels of government. Does the member believe that the federal government should be spending money to ensure there is housing for Canadians into the future, or does she oppose that expenditure too?
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