44th Parl. 1st Sess.
January 30, 2024 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Winnipeg North is right about one thing. Conservatives are going to axe that tax.
Let us talk about that tax, although I suspect he is not going to answer my question. The Prime Minister said his most important relationship was with our first nations, yet he is discriminating against the first nations in my riding based on geography.
Let us talk about that carbon tax rebate. The Prime Minister made an announcement out east. I know the member for Avalon is here. His riding got rolled back with its data from the census so that it stayed rural. My riding of York—Simcoe is now considered to be a part of Toronto so that no one gets the 20% rural top-up. The member for Winnipeg North knows that it would take 14 hours to walk to the Finch subway station from my riding. The Deputy Prime Minister likes to say that she does not even need to own a car as she can just walk out of her house and get on a subway. We do not have subways, we do not have streetcars; we do not have transit.
I would like him to comment on that. The answer will be astounding, I am sure.
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- Jan/30/24 2:06:17 p.m.
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The hon. member for Toronto—Danforth.
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- Jan/30/24 2:29:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the out-of-touch Liberals continue to let down Toronto.
Yesterday, the Minister of Industry made me laugh. He said he was disappointed in the big grocery stores. He asked people to read the flyers and failed to stabilize prices, and now he says that we need another investigation. We know what the problem is: People are getting taken for a ride as the CEOs fill their pockets.
When will the Liberals stop protecting the big grocers' profits?
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- Jan/30/24 2:31:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let me tell members what is really out of touch. What is out of touch is for a Toronto MP, like the one sitting opposite, to be saying to the people of Ontario, to the hard-working families of Ontario, “We are going to take away the $974 you are getting back thanks to the price on pollution. We are going to cut that money that goes directly to your family budget. Oh, and by the way, we are going to cut day care and dental care along the way too.”
That is not going to help anyone is Canada.
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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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Mr. Speaker, it was an interesting presentation. I am sure that the Canadians out there who are $200 away from insolvency every month were absolutely riveted by that information, telling them how great their lives are, when we know that violent crime in and around Toronto is up around 15%.
We know that Toronto has one of the worst housing bubbles in the entire world. We know that rent has gone up, doubled. We know that mortgages have doubled and that it is almost unaffordable for anybody to live in Toronto, certainly for newcomers to Canada wanting to move there.
I would like the member to rectify for all of us here, and for all of the Canadians watching, the incredibly boring and non-enlightening way the rosy picture of Canada was presented, when Canadians know that, every month, two million of them are visiting a food bank. As I said at the start, they are $200 away from insolvency.
Could the member tell us how this equates to this great job that his government is doing?
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