44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 28, 2023 10:00AM
- Nov/28/23 1:44:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the reason I am standing today is that last week, we had an opportunity to debate a common-sense Conservative bill that would remove the carbon tax from all farm fuel. That debate took place in the House, then moved to the Senate and then it stalled. The reason it stalled is that the members opposite from the Liberal Party of Canada asked the Senate to stall it, to delay, to use every tactic in the book to try to prevent the legislation from going through. That is incredibly sad. What that means is farmers will not benefit from a carbon tax being taken off of such things as drying grain, harvesting their fields or heating their barns. Those are common functions for farmers, the people who produce food in our communities.
I am here to advocate for those individuals who produce our food, but I am also here to advocate for Canadians at large, those who buy food.
I was first elected about eight years ago. Shortly after I came into this place, I had a conversation with a member opposite. That member took an interest in my riding which, of course, is in Lethbridge, Alberta. It is a beautiful mix of a small city of about 105,000 people and a county, which consists of a lot of farmland and those who know how to make that land produce something incredible that is called food. The member asked me questions about my riding. He said to me, “That farmland that you have there, they are just growing for fuel, right?” I said, “Excuse me?” He said, “Yes, they are just growing for fuel, right?” I said, “No, they are growing food.” He said, “Oh. Normally we just go to the grocery store now for food. We do not really need that.”
It is interesting. In that moment, I realized just how out of touch Canadians at large are with where their food comes from, how it is produced and how important it is that we support those who produce it. It is easy to think that food just arrives on the grocery store shelves in a pretty package and maybe some nice marketing tools are used. We get to pick up that food, bring it home and consume it. We forget the process or maybe we never knew the process that it underwent in order to get there.
In my riding, I have the privilege of being able to see that process from start to finish. I watch as those farmers actually take the seed off their field. I watch as they actually process that seed and prepare it for use in next year's field. Then I watch as they till the ground and put that seed into it. I watch as they use water to care for it. I then watch as that seed produces plants which continue to flourish and eventually are harvested. Eventually, that harvest is taken, dried and processed. It is either shipped out like that or it goes for further processing locally. Eventually, it becomes food that is sold in our grocery stores. Much of that is sold right here in Canada in our grocery stores, but sometimes it goes to other places around the world.
Canada has this incredible gift called land. We have this second incredible gift called farmers. They are the individuals who work incredibly hard and with great innovation to make sure that Canadians are fed.
I will talk a little bit about these people in my riding, because if we care to learn, we can. These are individuals who are incredibly community-minded, who work collaboratively together. These are individuals who are incredibly hard working. These are individuals who care deeply about animal health and welfare.
These are individuals who are the original environmental stewards. They are the ones who take care of the water, land and air. They have done that from the beginning, because they know that to take care of those things is to take care of the food they produce and to be good at what they are doing. They are the folks who thrive in spurring on innovation, in bringing forward new technologies and great business practices. These are the individuals who are incredibly generous.
In my riding, it is these folks who have funded community swimming pools and community recreation centres. It is these individuals who have paved park pathways and created parkways. It is these individuals who have invested in our local hospital. It is these individuals who have given tremendous amounts of money to the underprivileged, especially those who are homeless.
It is these individuals who have helped to fund programs through our college and through our university. It is these individuals who are making a tremendous difference in our community day in and day out. These are the individuals the government insists on punishing through a punitive carbon tax. It is these individuals who feed Canada and feed those around the world.
To those in my community and to those who like to eat, we celebrate these men and women. We look at them as the individuals they are: people who are doing something wonderful, not only for my local community but for the nation and even the planet.
The member's opposite see these individuals as if they are the enemy. It is a mystery to me. Again, we are talking about women and men who are not only caring for us by producing food but taking care of the environment by sequestering carbon, by making sure soil health is good, by making sure the air quality is excellent and by making sure water is stewarded. These are the folks who get zero credit for those actions and instead are frowned upon for what they do and how tremendously wonderfully they contribute to society.
The government has decided to apply a punitive carbon tax, and yes, it is applied to farmers from the moment they put the seed into the ground to the moment they harvest to the moment food goes on to the grocery store. The carbon tax does not stop. It keeps going on and on, until finally it is picked up by the consumer at the store. The truth is that even then it does not stop, because the consumer pays the carbon tax at the till and pays the carbon tax again when they put the food in their trunk and drive it home. They then pay the carbon tax again when they turn on their stove and make that food. It just keeps going.
We are asking for the carbon tax to be taken off farmers. We are asking that this House exercise some common sense and make the determination that farmers are incredible people who deserve to be celebrated, not punished. It just makes sense.
When farmers have this punitive carbon tax attached to them, the carbon tax eventually makes its way to the consumer. When the consumer has to pick it up, they are detrimentally impacted too. There are more Canadians than ever before lining up at food banks. In my community of Lethbridge, since 2019 the number of people going to a food bank and relying on it as their primary source of food has doubled. The biggest group of people there, which is growing, is those who are working a consistent job. They are not able to make ends meet anymore, because under the government, things have become too expensive. They are desperate for help. They are desperate for a government to listen to them. They are desperate for a government to understand their concerns.
A woman recently reached out to me. She is in her sixties and has a disability, so she lives on a very small amount month to month. It is $1,700. We can imagine what it might be like to live on $1,700 a month and pay rent. She cannot just live anywhere because she is in a wheelchair. She has to pay extra because she needs to make sure it is wheelchair accessible. This an individual who then has to pay for her food, transportation and her phone. Then she might even want to engage in the human dignity of buying a birthday gift for someone once in a while. This is an individual who has to cut back on even the essential things of life.
The reason people are having to make these difficult choices among medication, healthy food, paying rent and paying their heating bill is that the government has made life so unaffordable. The ask on the table today is very simple, very straightforward and very tangible. It is to axe the tax on farmers. When we axe it there, we bring it down everywhere else and all Canadians benefit. That is what we are asking for today. It is common sense for the common people.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour to speak today to such an important motion. I represent the great riding of Oxford, a farming community with a long, proud farming legacy. It is home to nearly 1,900 farms that feed our families from coast to coast to coast. Our farmers are doing extremely hard work. They are doing God's work. Generations are helping out on the farms, making sure our food goes from the farm to our dinner table.
However, the Prime Minister's carbon tax coalition with the NDP is making that task nearly impossible. To feed families, we need need energy. Farmers need to dry their grain, run their operations and heat and cool their barns for their livestock, but the carbon tax makes everything more expensive for farmers to produce the food that we eat.
The Prime Minister’s appointed senators are delaying the passage of Bill C-234. This costly, unnecessary delay is hurting our farmers this harvest season. Corn moisture in Oxford was up to 30% this year. A lot of farmers are still harvesting, which means the corn has to be dried. Farmers are firing up their dryers to bring down moisture levels, and that is driving up the input costs. Winter is also on its way. There was snow today in southwestern Ontario, and farmers across Canada are turning on the heat in their barns for their livestock. They are again being punished by the carbon tax that is driving up their input costs.
The numbers do not lie. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was very clear that Bill C-234 would save farmers $1 billion by 2030. That is not small change. Throughout today’s debate, I heard stories from my colleagues that I have heard in my riding, stories of farmers getting bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars thanks to the carbon tax. Before I stood to speak today, I spoke with a farmer in my riding, who is still out harvesting, by the way, and who said that the carbon tax is more than just a kick to the shin; it is a drop kick to the face.
Let me share the story of another farmer in my riding, just south of Highway 401 in Salford He is an asparagus farmer, a great farmer whom I visit regularly at the local farmers' market on Saturday mornings. Thanks to the carbon tax, he has seen the cost of his asparagus become triple that of what Mexicans sell in grocery stores. Let me get this straight: It is now cheaper to buy Mexican asparagus shipped 3,800 kilometres than it is to buy locally grown asparagus here in Canada, driven to a local market a few kilometres away. How do we expect our farmers to compete? How do we expect them to survive? Because of the carbon tax, we continue to see more food produced by foreign farmers in countries with horrendous environmental standards. The message the government wants to send is to go ahead and buy foreign-grown food from a country with lower environmental standards and that burns fossil fuels to ship it across a continent. That is complete nonsense.
We also have to look at the compounding effect of the carbon tax, which affects the supply chain and the cost of our groceries. When we tax the farmer who grows the food, the trucker who ships the food, the processor who manufacturers the food and the retailer who sells the food, guess who pays for that? It is the Canadians who buy the food. That is why one in five Canadians is now skipping meals. There are a record number of Canadians at food banks, two million in a single month. Just yesterday, Feed Ontario released its report, stating that over 800,000 people in Ontario accessed a food bank in Ontario just last year. These are not just numbers and statistics; these are our friends, neighbours and family members. They are veterans, seniors, students, working-class Canadians and now, more commonly, professionals who never had to do so in the past but are now being forced by the government's reckless policies to go to a food bank. This past week—
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