44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 23, 2023 10:00AM
- Nov/23/23 2:23:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's mini-budget was full of bad news for Canadians. Rent is up, taxes are up, prices are up and interest rates are up to fight the inflation his deficits caused. In fact, Scotiabank said that its mortgage rates would be two full percentage points lower if the government could just control its spending. That would be the difference, for hundreds of thousands of Canadians, between losing their homes and being able to renew their mortgages.
Does the government realize that time is running out? Will it end its deficit spending so that Canadians can keep their homes?
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- Nov/23/23 2:28:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the two million Canadians going to food banks every month see what this government has done. Those who want to own a home are seeing that rent has doubled in the past eight years. They see that mortgage costs are twice as high. They also see that down payments cost twice as much.
What is the Minister of Finance's solution? Believe it or not, it is to be able to borrow for up to 100 years. That is proof that our great-great-great-grandchildren are the ones who will pay.
Does the aspiring prime minister agree with the current Deputy Prime Minister? Does he feel that what is happening in Canada right now really does not make sense?
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- 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 6:36:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am kind of curious. This is basically a bill to address affordability in Canada.
For young families that have a mortgage right now that is coming up for renewal in the next month, and it is going to from 2% to 8%, what is in here that is going to help? What is in any type of Liberal legislation at this point in time that is actually going to help that family renew that mortgage, take the hit on the increase of the mortgage payment, and be able to heat their homes and put food on the table?
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- Nov/23/23 10:48:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when looking at this legislation and looking at the title, we know that here in Canada, inflation is still high and has been high for a long time and that inflation is the cause of high interest rates, which is then causing high mortgage payments.
When we look at the title of this particular legislation, one would think that it would actually, truly be affecting affordability for Canadians, which is the cost of everything that they are buying and then also their mortgage costs.
I am wondering if the member can speak to whether this legislation will actually be affecting inflation, the cause of inflation and also the cause of interest rates.
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