44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 30, 2023 11:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Carleton, our next prime minister, for sharing his time with me on proposing his important private member's bill.
Those watching at home today will probably be familiar with our interventions during question period. Every day, our Conservative team stands up on behalf of everyday Canadians who are suffering after eight years of the Liberal-NDP government. Our job, of course, is to hold ministers to account and try—
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Mr. Speaker, our job here in the House of Commons is to hold ministers to account and to try to get answers to why so many things have gone wrong here in Canada. However, every day, members on the other side of the House get up and insist that Canadians have never had it so good, and that things are going so well in this country. It is as if they do not talk to anyone at home. To make their point, they bring meaningless, manufactured statistics that are supposed to show how great they really are. In fact, the statistics show how out of touch and clueless they truly are.
One of Liberals' favourite tactics is to talk about the global forces, other countries and wars in distant lands, to pass the buck from Ottawa to someone else, to somewhere else and to something else. We are talking about housing today, like we have been for many months and even years, but the Liberals still do not seem to get the message that the cost of a home in this country is just too high for anyone. Therefore, I am going to try to put it in terms that they would understand, showing exactly how out of control our housing crisis has become. I am going to take some prices and see what someone can buy here and what they can buy elsewhere, which has the added benefit of showing Canadians that this is a uniquely Canadian problem, at least in scope.
I will start in Toronto. A two-bedroom house covered in graffiti, in the Kensington Market neighbourhood, is on the market for $2.8 million. The very same amount of money can buy a 20-bedroom castle on five acres in Scotland. It has 45 rooms, a movie theatre, a botanical garden, a pond and even a private beach, and it has the added bonus of being in a country with no carbon tax. If someone does not want to live in the big smoke, I can understand. In fact, I do not really understand why people do not want to live there, but I can understand why they would have their preferences. In Kitchener, there is another two-bedroom home up for a steal, $1.8 million. Here is a spoiler alert: It is not a steal at all. It is a tiny property with a little backyard and hardly enough room to raise a family. It costs $1.8 million, and if someone wants a bit more breathing room, maybe they could consider spending that $1.8 million on a lake-facing castle on a four-acre property in Sweden. There would be much more space for everyone.
If people are still not convinced, let us go to Vancouver, where the member opposite is from, where a three-bedroom house sells for $4.6 million. A buyer would also get to pay the highest gas prices in Canada and some of the highest taxes. They would get to drive to work in an open-air, government-supplied drug market, which the NDP-Liberal government supports. It is absolutely stunning. If they prefer more peace and quiet or maybe want a bit of a deal, there is an 11th-century castle in England up for sale for $4.4 million. It comes with 32 acres of land and 22,000 square feet of living space, including 17 bedrooms. It is “an idyllic retreat” with farmland and even its own creek, with fishing rights included.
I could go on and on: France, Honduras, Argentina or Wisconsin. The fact of the matter is that Canada's housing market is so broken, and the Liberals are the ones who broke it, with the help of the NDP, of course. Housing prices have doubled in just eight years. A mortgage payment has doubled. The average income needed to buy a home in Ontario is over $175,000, which is much more than the average salary, as we all know. No amount of partisan spin can minimize the fact that it is now cheaper to buy a castle in Europe than a family home in Canada. If that does not convince the Liberals that home prices are unattainable to the average Canadian, I do not know what would. We have to ask, what are people supposed to do?
Nine in 10 of the young people looking to break into the market, pay off their student loans, start a job and maybe start a family do not believe they will ever own a home in this country. There are newcomers looking to Canada for opportunity and a life better than the one they left, like my parents did 48 years ago. Everyone else is struggling under repeated, double-digit increases in the cost of rent; it has doubled too in just eight years. It used to take 25 years to pay off a mortgage. In Toronto, it now takes 25 year to save up for a down payment on a single-family home.
The answer, of course, is that they cannot do anything, because affordability is too far out of reach. Despite working 50, 60 or 70 hours a week at multiple jobs and cutting back on the things they want, people are getting left behind. They are losing hope and giving up on the Canadian dream that was on offer even eight years ago. Things were not like this eight years ago, and they are not going to be like this when the Liberals are gone.
Our mission is to bring that back: to ensure that one can get a good home in a safe neighbourhood through hard work, dedication and savings, which is the way it always was in Canada, and to make Canada the place where we do not have to compare the price of an average home to that of a luxurious castle in Europe to make the point.
It is going to take a new government with a new vision to do that. We cannot and should not trust the same people who got us into this mess to get us out of it. Specifically, we should not trust the same people who paid $54 million for a useless border app to companies that did not even do the work on the app, who lost track of nearly a million people, who have students living under bridges and in tents, who cannot bring themselves to put repeat violent offenders behind bars and who cannot do anything close to competently. Our party is the only one with a common-sense plan to put Canadians back in control of their own lives and return the promise of Canada that always was—
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- Oct/30/23 2:32:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberal-NDP government is finally saying the quiet part out loud. It admitted that its carbon tax makes life more unaffordable and does nothing to help the environment. However, only certain people get relief: those who happen to live in places where Liberal polling numbers are the worst. Everyone else gets told that their vote does not matter and that the Liberals do not care.
If the Liberals can take the carbon tax off for some Canadians, why can they not take it off for all Canadians?
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- Oct/30/23 2:33:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the minister can rely on his prepared talking points all he wants, but that was not quite how the Minister of Rural Economic Development spun it yesterday. She told Canadians that if they wanted to be exempted from Liberal carbon taxes, they had to vote Liberal. My neighbours in the GTA have a question for the minister. There are 24 Liberal MPs in Toronto, 11 in Peel, seven in York and 10 of them are cabinet ministers.
If this is the largest concentration of Liberal ridings in Canada, why are they still paying a carbon tax?
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