44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 21, 2023 10:00AM
- Nov/21/23 2:58:33 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to correct the record. The Harper government did not meet any of the environment targets it had. We are on track and are 85% of the way to meeting our 2030 targets. We have six years left to get there, and we will meet the interim 2026 targets. We are meeting our targets when it comes to climate change, protecting nature and phasing out plastic pollution.
Conservatives do not believe in any of this. They want to increase pollution in Canada, but not us on this side of the House. We are working for Canadians, for the health of Canadians, and for the future of our kids and our grandkids.
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- Nov/21/23 4:35:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of this Prime Minister, inflation is at a 40-year high. Work does not pay anymore, and the cost of housing has doubled. Crime, chaos, drugs and disorder are common on our streets. The Prime Minister is trying to divide Canadians and distract them from all his failures.
First, we must acknowledge the country that the Prime Minister inherited when he came to power. I will start with interest rates and the inflation rate.
These rates were low. Taxes were falling faster than at any time in our country's history. The budget was balanced. Crime had fallen 25%, so low that small-town folks often left their doors unlocked. Our borders were secure. Housing cost half what it does today. Take-home pay had risen 10% after inflation and taxes. The New York Times said that, for the first time, Canada's middle class was richer than America's, despite an unprecedented financial crisis in the U.S. as well as wars in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine. It is funny how, when Stephen Harper was around, those wars did not cause inflation in Canada.
Since the current Prime Minister came to power, prices have skyrocketed. Let us look at where we are now, eight years later.
After breaking 40-year records, inflation is once again too high. The economy is shrinking. Yes, the economy is shrinking even as the population is growing. Per capita GDP is smaller today than it was six years ago. For the first time in our history, we have seen the economy and per capita GDP shrink over a six-year period. According to the OECD, Canada's growth is projected to be dead last in the OECD, not just for the next six years, but for the next three decades.
Housing costs have more than doubled in eight years under this government, despite its promises to lower them. It now takes 25 years to save up enough money for a down payment in Toronto. Before this Prime Minister, it took that long to pay off an entire mortgage. Now, some families are having to stretch out the terms of their mortgages to 90 years. That means that a person may have to live to be 120 before their family is mortgage-free. In reality, the children and grandchildren are the ones who will have to pay off their parents' and grandparents' mortgages. Never before has this been seen in Canada, or anywhere else in the world, I imagine. Homes in Canada now cost over 50% more than homes in the United States.
That is the reality after eight years under this Prime Minister, who promised to make life more affordable. What are his solutions today?
First, he wants to increase taxes on fuel, which will increase the cost of everything. Everything that is transported will cost more because of the carbon tax that the government just confirmed. It will increase the price of gas by 17¢ a litre, and by 20¢ a litre if we add the sales tax. This is a tax that the Bloc Québécois wants to radically increase on the backs of Quebeckers.
Furthermore, he is again promising to invest billions in housing construction. These are the same promises he has been making for eight years, but all they do is create more bureaucracy, not build homes.
Finally, he is adding $20 billion in new spending that will cause inflation and interest rates to go up. Scotiabank has already said that two percentage points of the current interest rates are the direct result of the deficits, which the government is proposing to increase.
Let us talk about the debt. Next year, for the first time, we will be spending more on debt interest than on health care. More than $50 billion will be spent on interest. That is more than will be sent to the provinces for our nurses and doctors. Bankers and investors in Manhattan will get the money, but our teachers, nurses and doctors will not. It makes no sense.
Fortunately, we have a common-sense plan. We have a plan to cap spending and cut waste in order to bring down inflation and interest rates. We will eliminate taxes to reduce the cost of living for every Canadian. We will cut taxes to make work pay once again. We will rebuild the Canadian dream, where work enables anyone, anywhere, to have a good life, to own a home and to live a peaceful life in their community.
In the next election, voters will have two choices. The first is to vote for a costly coalition that will take money from taxpayers, raise taxes and enable more crime. The second is to vote for the common-sense Conservatives, who will free people to earn more powerful paycheques that buy food, gas and homes in safe communities. That is the choice, and we will be the only common-sense choice for all Quebeckers and Canadians.
As we stand here today and witness the misery visible across this country, it is hard to forget how good things were only eight years ago when the Prime Minister took office. Let me review the hard facts.
Never before has a prime minister inherited a richer legacy. Inflation and interest rates were rock bottom, taxes were falling faster than at any time in Canadian history and the budget was balanced. It took 25 years to pay off a mortgage, not just to get a mortgage. Crime had fallen by 25%. It was so low that many small-town folks actually left their doors unlocked. Do members remember those good days when we could leave our doors unlocked? No one would do that today.
Our borders were secure, housing costs were half of what they are today and take-home pay had gone up 10% after tax and inflation. The New York Times had calculated that Canada's middle class was, for the first time ever, richer than America's middle class. All of this was despite a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis in the U.S. and wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and, yes, Ukraine. It is funny how those wars did not cause inflation when Prime Minister Harper was leading our economy. It is true that when the Prime Minister took office, Canada was rich, affordable and safe.
It is also true that the very wealthy had not done particularly well. In fact, their share of the economy had shrunk during the Harper years. Now the wealth concentrates among the very, very rich, and that is because inflationary policies always help the richest people. When government concentrates wealth in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, it is given to the most politically influential people. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Now we are seeing the biggest gap ever between the rich and the poor. The Prime Minister promised to help the middle class, but he has demolished the middle class. That is the reality.
Inflation, after hitting 40-year highs, is back on the move. The economy is now shrinking. If we add in per capita terms, it is plummeting. In fact, the GDP per person is smaller than it was six years ago. This has never happened. Canada's growth is now projected to be the worst in the OECD between now and 2030, and the worst for the next four decades, according to the OECD. That is out of 40 countries.
It now takes 25 years to save up for a down payment in Toronto. It used to be that one could pay off a mortgage in that time. Since the Prime Minister has taken office, families have stretched out the terms of their mortgages to 90 years. Today the minister bragged that she is going to create a charter that will allow them to stretch out their mortgages longer so they can now have a 100-year mortgage. People are supposed to thank the government. What wonderful news. I imagine she will send it out in the mail so people can open their mailbox and find out that their great-great-grandchildren will still be paying off the mortgage on their home.
Canadian homes now cost 50% more than in the United States of America. In fact, one can now buy a 20-bedroom castle in Scotland for a lower price than a two bedroom in Kitchener. Vancouver is now the third most unaffordable housing market in the world when we compare median income to median house prices. It is worse than New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and London, England. Even Singapore, a tiny island with 2,000 times more people per square kilometre than Canada, has more affordable housing. Toronto is rated by UBS to be the worst housing bubble in the world. If we had even imagined to say such a thing out loud eight years ago, people would have laughed. Today it is the reality and people are not laughing. They are actually crying.
All of a sudden, after eights years, we should believe in the government's multi-billion dollar promise to build homes. The Liberals built fewer homes last year than were built in 1972, 50 years ago. That was at a time when our population was half of what it is today. We are building fewer homes now that we have 40 million people than we built when we had 22 million people.
It is no wonder we have this new phenomenon of middle-class working homeless people. We have never seen this before, but now we have nurses, electricians and carpenters living in parking lots, something they could not even imagine. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Speaker's province and ironically the province of the housing minister, there are 30 homeless encampments in one city. This would have been unimaginable. Now the Liberals expect us to believe that this time, they mean it, that their billions of dollars of new spending are going to change what the billions of dollars they spent over the last decade have caused, and that is the worst housing crisis in Canadian history, perhaps the worst in the world today.
The Prime Minister has doubled our national debt, adding more debt than all of the previous 22 prime ministers combined. He continually tells us that there are no consequences for that debt. The consequences are now becoming clear. Next year the government will spend more on dead interest than it does on health care. Instead of the money going to doctors and nurses, it will go to bankers and bondholders in Manhattan and in London, England. It is another transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthiest people, from the working class to the smirking class.
We see the social breakdown this has brought in our communities with crime raging out of control. Shootings are up 101% across Canada over the last eight years. There have been 30,000 drug overdoses. Social breakdown is the obvious consequence of the economic breakdown the Prime Minister has caused.
What has he spent all of this on? He spent $54 million on the ArriveCAN app, which we did not need, which did not work and could have been done in a weekend by a couple of IT workers. We know that because they did. A couple of IT workers, as a lark, bought a few boxes of pizza and a case of beer and redesigned the entire ArriveCAN app in a weekend. It did not cost them $54 million. Maybe we should send that app to the Prime Minister and call it the “ResignCAN” app.
Then the Liberals blew a billion dollars on a so-called green fund. The top bureaucrats who were involved in it say that it is a money-for-nothing scheme with gross incompetence that reminds them of the sponsorship scandal. The chair of the fund gave $200,000 of the money to her own company. Now, we find out that the $15 billion they are giving to a single battery plant is going to pay for 1,600 foreign workers, who do not even have a place to live. There is a housing shortage in Windsor. The Prime Minister's solution is to spend precious tax dollars on paycheques for people on the other side of the world to come here temporarily, collect the money and take it back to South Korea. We all love South Korea, a great country, but there is no reason why Canadian taxpayers should be subsidizing South Koreans' paycheques. Canadian tax dollars should go exclusively to Canadian paycheques; that is common sense.
The Prime Minister, of course, wastes money through missed opportunities. We could develop our resources. For example, we could be breaking dependence on the world's dictators. Let us talk about this for a moment. Today, the Prime Minister's party shamefully voted to impose a carbon tax on the people of Ukraine. Its members voted to amend the existing Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement, which Conservatives negotiated, and which has been a success, to require that both countries have and promote carbon taxes. This is exactly the opposite of what the people of Ukraine need. They do not need a carbon tax when they are trying to fight and win a war. They need the ability to rebuild their economy, which takes energy. That is why Conservatives will oppose any imposition of a carbon tax there, here or anywhere around the world.
Do members know what else they did? They voted against an amendment that would allow Canadians to build the arms that would allow Ukraine to win the war. We proposed an amendment to the update of the agreement, which would have allowed Ukrainians to benefit from our incredible Canadian workers who produce munitions and equipment, and they voted no. Let us get this straight. They believe the best way to counter Putin is with a carbon tax. We believe the best way to do it is by breaking European dependence on his energy sector and by providing and selling great Canadian arms to win the war.
Canadians understand that the way to help a country rebuild is by selling technology for energy. We proposed as well that we would both provide civilian nuclear technology and sell our civilian-grade uranium from Saskatchewan to power nuclear plants that would give emissions-free electricity to Ukrainians, as they have to replace bombed-out electricity plants. The Prime Minister did not include that in his deal, because he does not want affordable energy. He does not want the jobs to come back to our resource sector. All he wanted was to try to save his carbon tax. That is just how desperate he is and, in fact, how sick he is, on this matter. We all know that he was desperate to save his carbon tax, but for him to use the people of Ukraine as a pawn in his scheme to save the carbon tax is a level of cynicism that we did not expect even from the Prime Minister.
When I am prime minister, we will have a free trade agreement with Ukraine, and that agreement will not include a carbon tax. It will include the ability for us to provide clean Canadian nuclear energy and natural gas to have a strong energy superpower status for Canada and a secure Ukraine for the future, absolutely.
There are hypocritical members over there who pretended that they supported Ukraine, but who then supported the Prime Minister's signing off on a turbine to go from Montreal to Putin so he could power his natural gas pipeline and pump that gas into Europe to fund his war.
That is the Prime Minister's priority: to give Putin more money selling natural gas. Our priority and our common-sense plan turns dollars for dictators into paycheques for our people in this country.
I do not think this debate is going how the Liberals expected it to go. Their heads are all looking down and rightfully so. It will be a good moment for them to atone for the cynical approach they have taken on this and everything else and, frankly, for the misery that they have unleashed in this country. This is the worst time in Canada's history for the Canadian people and particularly for the middle class.
The good news is that we have a common-sense plan that would axe the tax to bring home lower prices, cap spending and cut waste to bring down inflation and interest rates, remove bureaucracy to build more homes so that once again people can afford to pay their rent and mortgages. This will be a country that works for the people who do the work, for the common people and for the common sense of the common people united for our common home, their home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.
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- Nov/21/23 6:04:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Vancouver East for all the excellent work that she does on the housing file.
There is no way that Canada can meet the deficit of affordable and social housing that we have if we are going to lose 15 for every one that we build. That is why it is imperative for the government to find a way to stop big corporations from acquiring buildings and kicking out the tenants. It could be done by a moratorium.
The way the government should have done it eight years ago was by renewing the operating grants. The fact that those operating grants were allowed to expire is what put so many affordable units back on the market. The Liberals promised to undo that measure of the Harper government, but they completely failed Canadians. We have seen hundreds of thousands of units pass from the hands of non-profit and co-op operators, who were offering affordable rents, to those of giant corporate landlords, which are more interested in paying big dividends to their shareholders.
We cannot continue like this. It is why we are seeing so many people on the streets in all our communities across the country. It has to stop, or the problem will continue to get worse and the tent cities will continue to grow.
The Conservative leader likes to talk about tent cities, but he does not like to talk about the things that have to be done in order to properly close them and make sure the people there have a place to go. The policies of the government he was a part of built those cities. It is going to take an NDP government to take them down in the right way.
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