44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 23, 2023 10:00AM
- Nov/23/23 4:00:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, after eight long years of the Liberal Prime Minister, costs have shot up and millions of Canadians are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs have doubled, rent has doubled, mortgage rates have doubled, grocery prices are soaring and the lineups for food banks are shocking.
I received an email from Tyler, who bought a home a couple of years ago. His mortgage has gone up from $1,600 to $4,000 a month. He says he has no other choice but to sell his home and downgrade to make his life livable.
Candis is from Maple Ridge, and she has seen her payments double also. She can no longer afford new clothes for her children and needs to take them out of sports to try to make ends meet.
Then there is Shaffy. I met him at Seaspan Shipyards in North Vancouver. He is a welder. He showed me on an app that his mortgage is $7,528 a month. He told me that he is not living in a palace. It is a 40-year-old four-bedroom home in one of Vancouver's suburbs. He is being forced to work 10-hour shifts seven days a week and has no freedom. He said he cannot give his body a rest or he is going to lose his home.
These are not just stories. These are real lives, and the same thing is happening across Canada.
The blame rests fully on the members of the Liberal-NDP coalition for their incompetence and ultimately, I would say, their lack of concern for Canadians. They have shown they lack a basic understanding of economics or how to run a country. I will take that back. They are good at running a country into the ground.
It was not that long ago that our nation was one of the richest in the world, but under the Prime Minister, our rankings have been dropping. Country after country is passing us in GDP and per capita ranking.
I met a tourist on the way to Vancouver Island about a month or so ago. He has come to Canada numerous times over the past 40 years. He asked me what has happened to Canada. From his perspective, it just seems to be in decline. Unfortunately, he is right. What has happened to Canada is eight years of being run by an incompetent Liberal government that is joined at the hip with the socialist NDP and Bloc.
Why has everything become so unaffordable? The Liberals went on a crazy spending orgy, doling out hundreds of billions of dollars. The definition of that word is “excessive and indiscriminate indulgence in a specified activity”. We will call that spending.
The Prime Minister has added more debt to Canada than all the prime ministers before him, for 150 years. The Liberals have been absolutely careless with finances and have been racking up, for all intents and purposes, the credit card debt. This has caused great problems and chaos, but they have made sure that their friends, buddies and insiders have gotten their share.
I think of the ArriveCAN app scam, where millions of dollars were spent, essentially given to a two-person company in the basement of a house for no work, other than sending a few emails out. Something that should have cost a few thousand dollars has cost millions of dollars. There has been scandal after scandal. It has almost become part of the narrative.
Last week, we heard about the billion-dollar green slush fund. The chair of Sustainable Development Technology Canada had to resign and is under investigation by the RCMP because money was going directly to her company and to her.
These are some of the buddies we are seeing. This is happening, and I do not have time to talk about all the different situations and the people who have become rich off the Liberals. The Conservatives will turn over these stones. That is our objective here in Parliament, as it will be if we are elected to government.
The message from the Liberals for a long time was essentially that interest rates were low so what was the danger of borrowing. With this borrow and borrow and spend and spend, what has happened? For one thing, interest costs have escalated. We are now spending $51 billion on interest payments alone this year. That is more than we spend in health transfers. It is twice as much as we are spending on the Canadian military. One of the very few things the Liberals decided to cut back on is the Canadian military, at a time of great danger. Look at what happened with Russia attacking Ukraine and the situation with China. With all sorts of threats, the Liberals decided to cut the one important piece they should be increasing, but that is typical for them.
Canadians are suffering by the Liberals' indulgence in spending, their addiction. We keep hearing the word “investing” and that the Liberals are investing in this and that. It is not their money; it is taxpayers' money. Their actions have led not just to increased interest charges but to a significant rise in inflation. Anybody who goes to the grocery store can attest to that. People are not eating as nutritiously as before because of this.
I met with a number of university students last week, and they said they are having a hard time making ends meet. They are using food banks. I talked to the president of a university, who said there are lineups and that the use of food banks has gone up dramatically. Two million Canadians a month are going to food banks. This is not good, and the Liberals and the NDP need to be accountable for this. They can try to blame Harper from eight years ago, but it rests fully square on their shoulders.
What is happening here? The Liberal brain trust, as we see in the bill, has begun to panic. To the Liberals, this is about politics, power and money. As inflation has gone up and costs have gone up, guess what has gone down. It is their poll numbers, and that is causing a bit of panic on the government benches.
What have they been forced to do? They have raised interest rates, which is a time-tested way to lower inflation. However, what they have succeeded in doing is escalating the cost of carrying a mortgage. Half of mortgage owners will be renewing their mortgages in the next two years, 70,000 per month, and it is hitting them hard. This is happening everywhere in Canada, especially in areas with the biggest mortgages, such as metropolitan Vancouver, Toronto, Victoria and other large centres. People are losing their homes and losing their quality of life. This is real and it is painful.
One of the Liberals' solutions is to extend mortgages to 90 years or 100 years so their great-great-great-grandchildren can pay off the mortgage and people can keep their homes. That is not a solution.
The Liberals have realized the big mess they have created and the political urgency, and what they have done is taken a piece of Conservative Party policy, put on their superhero outfits and told people not to fear because they are here to help with solutions. They took one of our solutions, which was to take away the GST from purpose-built rental housing, but there is a lot more they need to do.
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- Nov/23/23 9:32:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member talked a lot about housing. The government, of course, purports that it wants to see more housing built faster, yet in the fall economic statement, it has slow-walked the rollout of money that would actually build housing Canadians could afford. That does not make any sense.
Now, on this particular bill, another thing that does not make sense is that the government is not making the GST exemption available to existing co-op and social housing projects. If they do not get access to that funding, some of these projects may actually become unviable.
If the member truly supports housing and seeing social and co-op housing being developed in this country, will he call on his own government to allow the exemption for existing projects?
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- Nov/23/23 10:05:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, here are a few numbers that show just how empty the Liberal rhetoric is.
When the member for Carleton was minister, the average cost of rent in Canada was $950 a month. It is now over $2,000. The average mortgage payment on a new home was just $1,400. Now it is $3,500. When he was housing minister, housing was not just affordable, it was cheap. Canadians could still afford to buy a home. Young people could still dream of owning a home.
The Liberals have completely killed the dream of young Canadians who had one day hoped to be homeowners. That is the sad reality after eight years of this Liberal government.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Port Moody—Coquitlam.
I am here today to talk about the affordability act. We know that right now Canadians across the country are facing a huge financial challenge. It has been a hard period of time. We lived through the pandemic and then we moved on to a high inflation reality. Things are just starting to cost more and more.
One of the things this bill does is remove GST for builds of rental housing. In my riding, these are the average rents in just a few of my communities: in Campbell River, it is over $1,500; in Powell River it is close to $1,500; and then in Comox, it is a whopping $1,849. Those are just the average rents. If someone lives on a fixed income or has a low income, it is just a huge challenge to pay for the things they desperately need.
I am the spokesperson for seniors in my party. Just last week, a 77-year-old gentleman walk into my office, almost an octogenarian. He shared with me that he has been living in the same location for 40 years. It recently was purchased and he is going to be renovicted. That is appalling. He needs to have a stable home to age in. I think we all know that we cannot just build houses by yelling out abracadabra and there will be a house. They do not just build themselves. Although I support this movement, we know from what we are seeing done by the government that the Liberals are just continuing to delay the process. That means that housing will be delayed up to seven years or more.
This is a crisis point. The urgency in the communities that I serve is profound. They need to see money on the ground, supports for municipalities and regional districts, to get that money out the door in the most efficient way possible.
I read an article yesterday from Oxfam. It talked about how the richest people in the world are emitting as much as the bottom 66% of income earners on the planet. Now, I love a French rosé, but when I look at what I see happening with the ultrarich, I swear they are bathing in it. They are bathing in it at the expense of everyday Canadians, who desperately need this support. What we have not seen from the government, or from Conservative governments in the past, is a willingness to actually say to the ultrawealthy that they have to pay their fair share. In my riding, people are paying their fair share. They pay their taxes. They work hard every day and they are being punished for doing that when the ultrawealthy are getting away with bigger and bigger profits.
We know the reality is that Canada has the lowest tax rate for corporations, at 15%. Ultrawealthy corporations in this country like oil and gas have seen an increase to their profits in the last year or so that is higher than the 30 years previous. We cannot say that it is just inflation, when we can see how much they are taking home of profit after inflation is accounted for.
We know that grocery stores are making more profit now than they were prior to the pandemic. That again is adjusting for inflation. Even with those extra costs, they are still making a huge amount of money and their profits are popping like popcorn everywhere. They cannot justify that when the very basics are not affordable for most Canadians. I think that it is time that we start to address these issues and take them seriously because, really, we need to build a more fair society.
I talk a lot in this place about having a bar of dignity that no one falls below. What we are seeing in this country is more and more people falling below that. I think of people with fixed incomes, people who are single parents; people who are working; and two people with decent jobs who are living out of an RV because they cannot afford even a simple apartment to live in because of how high the cost of living has become.
The other thing I am hearing from my constituents again and again is that they can hardly afford the cost of food. In my riding, there are a lot of small farms that are doing everything they can to grow food in our area and provide as reasonable a cost as they can, because they really believe in food security. I want to thank them. They do that because of what they believe in. It makes a huge difference. We also know that grocery stores are making a huge amount of profit, and they are getting away with it.
I am really relieved that the Liberals have finally listened to our leader, the member for Burnaby South, about making sure that the Competition Bureau has more teeth to crack down on price gouging. It is as though they were looking through the windshield and, suddenly, the windshield wiper moved all the dirt out of the way, and they can now see clearly that they need to do the right thing. I am grateful that they are finally listening to us, and I cannot wait to see this done.
Many Canadians are trying to buy the basic necessities of food to feed their families. We are seeing so many children whose parents care about them desperately, but they do not have enough to send them to school with a good lunch or make sure they have a good breakfast. That is shameful in this country. If we have a Competition Bureau that can do its job, it is going to make the biggest difference; it is about time.
Without having a strong Competition Bureau, having processes where grocery stores can be held to account, we are censuring consumers. We are telling consumers that we will not put anything in place. We had the Liberal government call grocery CEOs and ask them to stabilize prices because they are upsetting people. That is not putting teeth in and telling them this is serious, because our people in this country matter. They matter more than grocery stores bringing home a huge amount of profit.
I am glad the changes that the NDP has made for Bill C-56 will actually help everyday Canadians. It is not as far as we would go. There are a lot of things we would definitely have in the bill, but we got something in there that is going to make a difference.
I have been watching this place for many years, before I even got here in 2015. Sometimes I feel like I am experiencing déjà vu, because what I see happen again and again is the continued betrayal of small businesses by both Conservative and Liberal governments. I know that, in my riding, small businesses make the difference. They are the ones that stand up every day and look after our community. They care about the people they employ, and they work hard to better our communities.
During the pandemic, it was terrifying. I have to say that my community did an amazing job of supporting local businesses the best it could. Community members talked to one another. We talked to communities. We made sure that people were taken care of the best they could be. When that struggle was still there, we fought like heck to have a good loan that was helping people get through that time. The CEBA loan was created.
Now we are in a situation where the government is refusing to listen to these small business owners and make something work for them so that they do not lose their businesses. It was really sad for me to see nothing to deal with this in the financial update. I would have loved to see this in the bill, because small businesses work hard.
I was talking to a business owner in my riding, who said that rural communities have particular challenges, both with the pandemic and then later on with inflation, as well as waiting for more people to come to our small communities for tourism. They are struggling the most. To see the government not take that important connection seriously and to see it really betray those small businesses has been very concerning to me.
I will wrap up, but I just want to say that, in this House, we all have to work collectively to make sure that life is more affordable for Canadians. They deserve it, and it is really our job to maintain a bar of dignity that no one falls below. In this country right now, too many are falling; we need to do better by them.
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- Nov/23/23 11:22:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is such an important question. For eight years, I sat at a city council table and saw that perfectly affordable housing was being bought by large corporations and upzoned for them, and then almost a quarter of the condos they were building were sitting empty for years. The efforts of the development industry to pull profits out of communities at the cost of affordable homes for Canadians of all ages were very difficult to watch, because we could see the profit leaving communities. Those developments were not building communities, and we can see now that we have a lot more work to do in the area of bringing back affordable units. It is 15:1. People cannot afford to live in these communities anymore when they are taken over by real estate trusts and development groups that build luxury condo after luxury condo.
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