44th Parl. 1st Sess.
January 30, 2024 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, the member puts out the bumper sticker of “broken Canada”, and nothing could be further from the truth. If that was anywhere near the truth, one would have to say that we have a broken world.
When we look at how Canada has performed in comparison to others in the G20, such as the United States, England, France or Germany, Canada comes out quite well, whether it is the creation of jobs, interest rates, inflation or on the issue of affordability, and it continues on.
Maybe the member could step away from the Conservative spin and take a dip into reality. Can the member at least acknowledge one fact, that investment from abroad coming into Canada on a per capita, dollar amount is the best in the world? Would the member not acknowledge that that is a good thing?
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Mr. Speaker, the challenges that are facing my riding include an increase in food bank usage. People are absolutely shocked. They do not know where their spending power is going. They do not know where their money is going.
It is insidious. The carbon tax and the inflation that the Liberal government has imposed on people are a train coming at us. People are going to be renewing their mortgages and going from 2.55% up to 6%. It is going to be a big shock, and it is impacting a lot of constituents in my riding.
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Mr. Speaker, first of all, we plan to axe Liberal members of Parliament from right across the country, so that is a simple one. We also plan to axe interest rates because Canadians deserve affordability. As well, we plan to axe inflation so Canadians can keep more of the money they have worked hard to earn.
Frankly, it is very hypocritical for a member from Atlantic Canada who got a carve-out on the carbon tax and does not have to pay the tax on their home heating this winter to tell me that somehow people in the Prairies deserve to continue paying carbon tax on home heating in -50°C weather.
I will not take any lessons from that side.
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- Jan/30/24 2:18:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the Prime Minister says that he had no choice but to double the national debt and drive up inflation and interest rates because every penny he spent was absolutely necessary.
Today, however, we learned that 76% of the contractors paid from the $54 million spent on the ArriveCAN app did no work.
Will the Prime Minister get our money back and stop wasting it?
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- Jan/30/24 2:21:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, when the Prime Minister doubled the debt and drove inflation and interest rates to their highest levels in a generation, he said he had no choice, that every penny he spent was necessary. Along came ArriveCAN, a $54-million app that we did not need, that did not work, and that could have been done for $200,000 or $300,000. Now, we have learned, based on the ombudsman's audit, that 76% of the contractors did absolutely no work for the money they received.
Will the Prime Minister get back this stolen money for taxpayers and stop the waste that is not worth the cost?
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- Jan/30/24 3:03:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are great at breaking things. They have broken the bank. They have broken the law, and they have broken the budget.
It turns out that budgets do not balance themselves. Record government spending leads to record inflation and soaring interest rates. Canadians need the budget fixed. A dollar of new spending must be met with a dollar of savings. It is a simple concept; even children can understand it.
Will the Liberals finally end their inflationary spending, or will they keep breaking the budget?
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my Conservative colleagues who said that the information I shared about the strength and position of the Canadian economy was so great that they wanted me, like an encore in music, to come back and continue the show. I am very happy to be back here to share some of the news and information.
I was sharing that Canada's economy's position in the world is at the top. These are some of the facts the Conservatives need to share and to talk about. Canadians have created one million jobs since COVID and 1.4 million before. That is 2.4 million in total. The unemployment rate, when we came into power in 2015, was almost 7%. Today it is 5.7%, which is very impressive. Inflation, which was at 2% but because of COVID went to 8.1%, is now down to 3.4% and heading downward as we speak. We have a AAA rating once again, which shows Canada's strength.
Members should not believe me, but believe the facts. The International Monetary Fund said it is predicting this year that Canada will have the strongest economy in the G7. They said it; I did not say it. The OECD indicated a few months ago that Canada received the third most foreign direct investment in the world. They said it; I did not say it.
Because of our position, we are able to continue to support Canadians. Let us not forget that we have already lifted, since 2015, 2.3 million Canadians out of poverty. That is very important information. Canadians appreciate that work but know we have more work to do.
As I was sharing about the housing investments, there are four major components of course. The first one is the investments we are bringing forward in housing, which are crucial in ensuring that we are able to fill the demand because when we construct more houses, we have more labour needs.
Therefore, we have two approaches to labour. One is internal mobility, which means construction workers can move from province to province and territory to territory. We also have express entry for immigrants coming in to fill some of the jobs in the labour force with education in construction, etcetera.
The third piece of this is short-term rentals in provinces and territories where municipalities have prohibited short-term rentals. We will deny the income reduction, of course, on the building and construction of those. Finally, we will support more Canadians with the mortgages. Understanding that the interest rate is up and that there are many challenges Canadians are facing today, we will provide, if they want, tailor-made relief that will allow for a temporary extension of their mortgages and will waive some of the fees. Those who have qualified and want to change banks do not have to requalify, which is very important. Of course, the banks need to communicate with Canadians four to six months prior to the end of their mortgages.
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Madam Speaker, that is a very important question because throughout the summer months and in the fall session, I had lots of opportunities to meet many constituents in my riding. I can tell the House that there are a number of areas they are really focused on.
One area is seniors. Seniors are looking for support, and they were extremely happy to hear that we had indexed to inflation the OAS and GIS, which is extremely important. Canadians were telling me how proud they were that we had moved forward on indexing the CPP as well. Let us not forget the young families, for whom we have indexed the CCB. Those are very important investments. Nova Scotians were also telling me that up to 300,000 of them benefited from the doubling of the GST and the grocery rebate.
Those are very important investments that Canadians have experienced and benefited from, including Nova Scotians such as my constituents in the riding of Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook.
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Madam Speaker, it is very important for our government to help Canadians across the country deal with the affordability issues caused by rising prices.
However, we see prices coming down and relief on the inflation front, which is important. We put in place prime measures, whether it is the Canada child benefit, early learning and day care, the Canada workers benefit, middle-income tax cuts, work on the housing front, the $4-billion housing accelerator program or the $4 billion for housing in rural and indigenous communities in the north or northern Quebec and those areas. Those funds are directed specifically to those areas.
I hope I answered the member's question.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for King—Vaughan.
After eight years of this Prime Minister, two million Canadians are visiting food banks in a single month. After eight years of this Prime Minister, housing costs have doubled. After eight years of this Prime Minister, people are struggling to keep their homes, because their mortgage payments have doubled. After eight years, violent crime is up 39%. Tent cities exist in almost every major city, and over 50% of Canadians are $200 or less away from going broke. After eight years, this Prime Minister is simply not worth the cost.
Just last week, the Prime Minister said that the Conservative Party wants to “take Canada backwards”. If that means taking Canada back to a time when inflation was at historic lows or taking Canada back to a time when young people could afford to buy homes or back to a time when rent and groceries were actually affordable or back to a time when people felt safe in their own neighbourhoods, if this is what taking Canada backward looks like, then I am all in.
People rightfully wonder how it got like this. Let me explain.
In 2020 the Bank of Canada made a decision to increase the money supply in order to buy government bonds. The bank said it did this to keep interest rates low, but the reality was that the Liberals needed money, and lots of it. That money was ostensibly to pay for pandemic emergency programs, but soon after the pandemic, the Parliamentary Budget Officer found that $204.5 billion in new spending had absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic.
What happens when the central bank prints money? It means we have more dollars chasing fewer goods. Each dollar is worth less. Imagine that, in the whole economy, there were only $10, and that $1 was the price of a loaf of bread. Now imagine that, all of a sudden, there are $20 in the economy but still only 10 loaves of bread. Each dollar is now worth half, its value diluted by the creation of a new dollar. That is what caused inflation, not supply chains, not the war in Ukraine, not so-called “greedflation”, but money printing. That is the cause: money printed to feed the Prime Minister's reckless and inflationary spending.
From 1867 to 2015, the total federal debt was $600 billion. Today it is $1.2 trillion. The Prime Minister has doubled the national debt. He has borrowed more money than all other prime ministers who came before him.
What happens when we have inflation? How does a country get it back under control? It is forced to raise interest rates; that is how.
This is the monetary policy part, by the way, that the Prime Minister says he does not want to think about. He did not think that his out-of-control spending might cause a vicious cycle of inflation that would force the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates, but it did.
He now likes to call this spending “investments”, but what does he have to show for these investments? Our economic growth has flatlined. The OECD predicts that Canada will have the worst per capita GDP growth in the OECD for the next 30 years. Per capita GDP has actually declined. The Bank of Canada said in its monetary policy report just last week that it expects economic growth to be flat.
What do you call spending $600 billion for zero economic benefit? Economic malpractice is what you call it.
What about the high interest Canadians pay on all this debt? The Prime Minister likes to say that he took on debt so Canadians would not have to, but Canadians are stuck with the bill. Canadians are about to spend more money on interest on the Prime Minister's debt than on health care, on child care, on EI or on national defence.
The Bank of Nova Scotia economists have said that government deficits are adding two full percentage points to interest rates on the backs of Canadians.
The bank governor just confirmed in committee that the GST is adding 0.6% onto inflation.
Common-sense conservatives keep telling the government that Liberal spending is making life more expensive for Canadians. Did the Liberals listen? No. They just added another $20 billion of additional inflationary spending. At the same time, we have a housing crisis and out-of-control crime in this country.
A Conservative government would axe the tax, build more homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. It is time to rein in the NDP-Liberal coalition's inflationary spending and balance the budget to lower inflation and interest rates to ensure that Canadians can afford their lives again. Despite warnings from the Bank of Canada and the Canadian financial sector that government spending is contributing to Canada's high inflation, the Prime Minister ignored their calls for moderation and, yet again, decided to spend on the backs of Canadians, keeping inflation and interest rates high.
What are the ramifications for ordinary Canadians? The IMF warns that Canada is the most at risk in the G7 for a mortgage default crisis. High interest rates risk a mortgage meltdown as billions of dollars in mortgages renew over the next three years. At finance committee, the representative from The Mustard Seed food bank told us that food bank usage has increased 78% since 2018, with a marked increase in double-income families. Many Canadians are having to choose between buying food, heating their homes and paying rent. People's dreams of purchasing their first homes have been crushed. It used to be that Canadians were paying off their mortgage in 25 years. Now it takes that long just to save up for a down payment.
The good news is that it was not like this before this Prime Minister, and it sure will not be like this once he is gone. For the last eight years, all the Liberals have to show for housing are broken promises, half measures and endless photo ops. Their precious national housing program has only completed 106,000 homes. CMHC officials say we need to build over five million homes by 2030. Only in Canada has housing become so unaffordable so quickly. Toronto is ranked as the world's worst housing bubble, and Vancouver is the third most unaffordable housing market on earth. They are worse than New York City; London, England; and Singapore, a tiny island with 2,000 times more people per square kilometre than Canada.
The problem is that we are not building enough homes fast enough. We built fewer homes last year than we did in 1972, when our population was half the size and I was 10 years old. This is happening because the Prime Minister subsidizes government gatekeepers and the red tape that prevents builders from getting shovels in the ground and people into homes they can afford. In Vancouver, regulations add a staggering $1.3 million to the cost of an average home. In Toronto, government adds $350,000. That means that over 60% of the price of a home in Vancouver is due to fees, regulations and taxes.
Conservatives have a plan to fix this. It would be called the building homes not bureaucracy act. It would put keys in doors and people in homes by giving more money to the municipalities that are building homes and taking money away from cities that are not. It would incentivize unaffordable cities to build more homes and speed up the rate at which they build homes every year to meet housing targets. Cities must increase the number of homes built by 15% each year. If targets are missed, a percentage of their federal funding would be withheld, and it would be equivalent to the percentage the target was missed by. We would reward big cities that are getting homes built by providing a building bonus for municipalities that exceed a 15% increase in housing completions.
Also, we would make sure that cities build high-density housing around transit stations. Transit-oriented development is a major solution to our housing crisis. All of this is just common sense. Thanks to the Prime Minister, this is the worst time in Canada's history for Canadian people, and particularly for the middle class. The good news is that we have a common-sense plan that would axe the inflationary carbon tax to bring home lower prices, cap spending, cut waste to bring down inflation and interest rates, and remove bureaucracy to build more homes so that, once again, people could afford to rent or pay their mortgages. Conservatives will work every day to make Canada a country that works for the people who do the work.
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Madam Speaker, the member for Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley talked about the need to focus on affordability, but I did not hear him talk at all about the increased corporate profits that are leading the rising inflation we are seeing. One of those examples is the oil and gas industry. In fact, 18¢ of every dollar at the pump that folks are seeing increases on are going directly toward increased profits of the oil and gas industry, leading to $36 billion for the top five companies in 2022 alone.
Does the member support, at the very least, a windfall profit tax on even just 15% of the profits above a billion so we can invest in affordability measures across the country?
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House on behalf of Canadians. Today, I rise to speak to what I call the “false promise statement” implementation act. Everything is looking up. Prices are up. Rent is up. Debt is up. Taxes are up, and time is up.
When the Prime Minister took office, he inherited a rich legacy. Interest and inflation rates were at record lows. The budget was balanced. Taxes were falling at a record pace, and it took 25 years to pay off a mortgage, not to save up for one.
Our next prime minister, the leader of the official opposition, would not be as fortunate. Today, interest rates are at an all-time high. Inflation is out of control. Taxes are up, and a new measure announced in this false promise statement is a 90-year mortgage. I will let that sink in for a moment: a 90-year mortgage. I have never heard of such a thing.
The Prime Minister has added more debt than that of all our previous prime ministers, combined. Canada’s growth for the next four decades is projected to be the worst of the developed countries. The finance minister told Canadians that the budget would be balanced by the year 2028. Canadians have found that to be an interesting statement, considering her boss believes the budget will balance itself. However, since she made that statement, she has announced another $100 billion of additional debt. This year, the Prime Minister will spend more taxpayer dollars servicing the debt than he will funding our health care.
This mini-budget would do nothing to help Canadians who are struggling to put food on the table. Under the NDP-Liberal government, we are witnessing millions of food bank visits in a single month. According to Food Banks Canada hunger in Canada statistics, seniors are the fastest-growing group of food bank users. The government should be ashamed. Across the country, food bank visits have increased 78% since 2019.
Trevor Moss, the CEO of the Central Okanagan Food Bank, is projecting a 100% increase in the next three to four months. During the last break, I had the opportunity to visit the Sai Dham Food Bank. Co-founders Vishal and Subhra educated me on the crises Canadians are facing. I was shocked to find out that, in one month, the food bank served 3.17 million meals and delivered groceries to 3,000 seniors in the GTA.
Seventy-two-year-old Linda Godin lives on a fixed income in Edmonton and is among those who have had to turn to food banks due to the rising cost of living. She told CBC news that, despite her best budgeting efforts, it is hard to make ends meet. The skyrocketing cost of food and housing is due to the high interest rates, which have been caused by the reckless overspending of the Prime Minister.
The finance minister suggested that cancelling one's Disney+ subscription would fix the issue. She is on the right track, but it is not Disney+ that needs to be cancelled. It is the carbon tax. Since the NDP-Liberal government refuses to do that, it is time it was cancelled.
Let us take a look at the impacts of the carbon tax. Farmers who grow the food are taxed. What is the result? The cost goes up. Truckers that ship the food are taxed. What is the result? The cost goes up. What would be a common-sense way to bring relief? It would be to axe the tax.
I scoured the entire document and found it to be very useful as a paperweight. The Liberal-NDP government has nothing in this budget to help seniors. Its members talk a good talk; they have referenced OAS and GIS, but they have proposed nothing. They have simply reannounced current policies under the Prime Minister. Seniors are worse off than they were eight years ago. If the Liberals continue this trend, things are only going to get worse. There are seniors who are on the brink of homelessness and forced to live in their vehicles or other unsafe places. Working moms cannot afford to feed their families. The NDP-Liberal government is playing politics with their lives while Liberal insiders get rich.
After years of careful financial planning, Maria, a senior in Vaughan, retired. She thought she had the funds to support herself, but after eight years, the Liberal-NDP government has forced her to go back to work. Eight years ago, if someone told me something like this would happen, I probably would have laughed. Today, this is the reality of far too many Canadians, and no one is laughing.
As we witness the misery that the Prime Minister has created, I cannot believe how far we have fallen as a nation. This country deserves better. Sunny ways are not quite so sunny anymore unless, of course, one is the Prime Minister and takes an $84,000 family vacation to Jamaica.
Do the Liberals even listen to what Canadians are telling them? It appeared for a hot second that the member for Avalon heard the voices of Canadians; he told a Radio-Canada reporter that he believed the Liberal Party was in desperate need of a leadership review.
Canadians need financial relief, not billions in more spending, which will only result in more taxes. Instead of listening to common-sense Conservatives, the Prime Minister decided to fund half measures, which will do nothing to resolve the problems that everyday Canadians face.
Under the Liberal-NDP government, housing costs have doubled. Toronto has been rated the worst housing bubble in the world. Canadian homes now cost 50% more compared with homes in the United States. One can buy a 20-bedroom castle in Scotland for less than a two-bedroom home in Kitchener.
Before someone across the aisle jumps up to sing the praise of the $4-billion housing initiative, let us take a look at that program. It is, in its very design, set up to favour projects in Liberal ridings, and the numbers prove it. It has recently been reported that the funds were disproportionately allocated. Let us look at the numbers. Thirty-four per cent of the country is represented by Conservative members of Parliament, but those areas received only 15% of the funding. However, the areas represented by Liberal MPs received 49% of the funding. I guess this just proves the point made by the member for Long Range Mountains that if one wants special treatment, one needs to vote for a Liberal MP.
This document is nothing more than a last-ditch attempt for the finance minister to drum up support. However, 48% of Canadians are within $200 of financial insolvency, and the government expects Canadians to trust it with their tax dollars. Canadians cannot afford any more of the Liberal-NDP government. It is time for my colleagues across the floor to reflect on the approach they have taken and on the misery they have unleashed on this country.
However, there is some good news. Conservatives have a common-sense plan, and we will axe the tax to bring home lower house prices, cut wasteful spending to bring down inflation and interest rates, and remove the bureaucracy to build more homes so people can afford to rent and pay their mortgages again. Under a Conservative government, Canada will once again become a country that rewards hard work rather than penalizing a strong work ethic, a country where Canadians are motivated to work hard. The Conservative Party understands that, as elected officials, we are servants, not masters. We are united under our common home. For members' home, my home and our home, let us bring it home.
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