44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 27, 2024 11:00AM
- May/27/24 2:18:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, this Prime Minister is not worth the cost of mortgages, 76% of which will require higher monthly payments in the next three years, according to the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, which monitors Canada's banks. This comes after the Prime Minister promised that interest rates would stay low for Canadians. Against this backdrop, the Bloc Québécois is voting in favour of a $500-billion bureaucratic, inflationary and centralist budget that is causing interest rates to balloon.
Why does the Prime Minister not cap spending and reduce the waste in order to lower interest rates?
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- May/27/24 2:21:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost of mortgages, 76% of which will become more expensive over the next three years, according to the federal banking regulator, OSFI. This, after the Prime Minister said rates would stay low for long. We know that his massive government deficits have driven rates up two percentage points higher than they otherwise would be, according to Scotiabank.
Will he accept my common-sense, dollar-for-dollar plan to cap spending and cut waste to bring down interest rates so Canadians can keep their homes?
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- May/27/24 2:58:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, this Liberal-Bloc Prime Minister is simply not worth the cost.
The Bloc Québécois voted in favour of $500 billion in spending because it wants to keep the Liberal government in power. Quebeckers are homeless, starving and sleeping in dumpsters, and the Bloc Québécois supports the Liberals, who are responsible for this suffering.
Will this Liberal-Bloc Prime Minister stop his reckless spending and let Quebeckers live in dignity?
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- May/27/24 7:17:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the budget impacts people, as do the decisions being made here by the Liberals and the NDP. They impact everyone in this nation, and it is not for the great, at all. The Governor of the Bank of Canada, who was appointed by the Liberals, said that this is “the worst budget since...1982”. Why would he say that?
I can tell members that the people I am talking to on the streets, in their homes and at their businesses are having a tough time. I think of Tyler. He bought a place and was paying $1,600 a month for his mortgage. Now that he has had to renew, it is costing him $4,000. He has no choice but to sell his home.
I think of Candice, who told me that she cannot afford to buy new clothes for her kids. Even signing up for sports is a challenge. That is just because of how much more difficult things have become financially for millions of Canadians.
I think of Shafi, who showed me on his app what his payments are now. He is a worker at Seaspan in North Vancouver. He told me that his mortgage has gone up astronomically. It is now $7,528. He says he has no freedom. He is working seven days a week, 10 hours a day and cannot give his body a rest, or he will lose his home. He said that it is not a fancy home, about 30 or 40 years old. However, the consequences of the Liberals' out-of-control spending is being felt.
It was not that long ago that the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance asked what the problem was with borrowing money as it is pretty much free. The interest rate was at 0.25%. Now it has gone up to 5% or 6%, and the Bank of Canada rates are being passed on to the people who are renewing their mortgages. Those who were first affected, immediately affected, were those who had variable rates, but those who now have to renew their mortgage are having to make really tough decisions as to what to do.
I know in British Columbia, 37,000 people moved to Alberta because of the cost of living, the cost of housing, the cost of gas and the cost of everything. They are finding it very hard. That has a lot to do with the Liberals, supported by the federal NDP, and the decisions of the B.C. NDP government under David Eby. It is tough. People only have so much disposable income and only so many hours of the day to be able to work.
I talked to one lady, who has a business, at an event with the Rotary last week. She said that she has never seen it so bad. Her clientele is shrinking, and it is much worse now than it was even under COVID, as people do not have that income.
Conservatives have brought forward a motion to axe the tax and give Canadians a break over the summertime. The NDP and the Liberals have voted that down. In B.C., gas is hovering about or just below $2 a litre. That is money that is a very scarce commodity at this point with the cost of housing and everything else.
Let us not forget the tremendous increases we have seen over the past few years with inflation in the cost of food. As well, people are not going to restaurants like they used to. A restaurant near where I live here in Ottawa just closed. It has been there for many years and it just does not have the clientele anymore. It is because people do not have the disposable income that they used to have.
I have gone on a number of visits to work sites throughout British Columbia where the leader of the Conservative Party has spoken. There are blue-collar workers there. The response from them is that they are very attentive because of the Conservative plan. Our leader is aware of and is speaking to the issues they are facing.
I was on Vancouver Island, and I was talking to a gentleman. He actually was a cabinet minister under a previous B.C. NDP government. He now has a Conservative membership, and not only does he have a Conservative membership, but he is also on the board. He said that the NDP has totally left the working-class people. It has become so woke on issues, and it is not talking about the bread-and-butter issues Canadians are facing.
Ahmed Yousef was the Liberal candidate I ran against in the last election. He recently told me he will be voting for me in this election. He says the Liberals have just lost it. They have gone so far in their mismanagement, in their spending and in the decisions they are making, that the candidate I just ran against will be voting for me.
A previous president in my riding told me a few days ago that he will be writing a cheque for the riding association. Why is that? He says this is not the Liberal Party of Chrétien or of Martin. This is a Liberal government that has gone right off the rails. It has gone right off the rails economically and right off the rails considering where Canadians are at.
The Canadian standard of living is going down. If we look at the numbers for past years, our per capita income is going down as opposed to going up. We are now at, I believe, two-thirds of what the per capita income is in the United States. Why is this? A lot of this is because of the bad decisions made by Liberal and NDP members, and poor priorities. One example is waste. They have been a tremendous basket case for waste.
I think of the TransCanada pipeline. This was a pipeline going from Alberta to the coast, and it was under the private sector. It was not going to cost taxpayers anything. However, through delays and everything else, Kinder Morgan was going to be paying about $7 billion to have it done. It sold its share, and the Liberals have now spent approaching $35 billion to $40 billion of taxpayers' money to get a pipeline through. It should have cost taxpayers nothing. All of that is taxpayers' money.
This sort of thing impacts us. We are spending as much in interest on servicing the debt as we are on health care. We are spending more than we are on national defence. That waste and that overspending has led to increased deficits and debt, which means we have less money to put toward things that are important to Canadians, and we have to service the debt.
One thing is for sure. Conservatives will be voting against the fall economic statement as well as the budget, and I hope the other parties will as well.
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- May/27/24 7:47:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, because this bill is time allocated, I will use my time to dedicate my opposition to this hot mess of inflationary and ineffective spending to Kelly Pascoe, who was the subject of a Calgary Herald article four days ago with the headline, “'You just can’t afford to be a single parent anymore': Working mom struggles to afford necessities”. In the article, Kelly talks about how her rent has almost doubled and she cannot afford to pay for groceries anymore.
Everybody here is talking in academic terms, but Kelly is living the reality of irresponsible deficit, hot mess, inflationary spending and we have to oppose this. Whenever the Prime Minister and the Liberals get up and talk about actual solutions to Kelly's problems, they talk in academic terms. They do not talk about getting food for her kids, the music lessons she cannot afford anymore or the fact she is trying to find a roommate to potentially live in a basement suite.
This mess that people are actually considering voting for is making the lives of people like Kelly a million times worse. The fact the government has not done anything at all to address their out-of-control waste on things like the arrive scam app, the We Charity scandal and the billions on consultants, and it does not even know how much it is spending on consultants, means that Kelly has to pay for that. I want to say this. The Prime Minister said years ago that the government was taking on all of the spending so that Canadians did not have to. Now Kelly has pay for this.
I think it is atrocious that my time has been curtailed by the Liberals and the NDP on this speech. However, I would say to Kelly that I see her, that everybody on this side of the House sees her and that we will stand up, oppose and do everything we can to ensure that people like her who work hard, and she works hard with her own small business cleaning houses, have that dream of affordability and are able to live a life free and full of prosperity once again. I have hope that we can get there, but this one is for Kelly and I will oppose this bill.
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- May/27/24 10:29:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there is an Ottawa-speak that happens, in which every time somebody spends a tax dollar, the government calls it an investment. Investment is really only when we buy equity in something, and equity generally is ownership of a company, so an investment is that kind of thing. When we spend money that leads to $40 billion deficits and that leads to $800 billion of debt being added, that is called an expenditure with very little result, as we have seen from the government.
We have the poorest productivity in the OECD, thanks to the government's expenditures. There is now a 40% gap between Canada and the United States in per capita income because of the expenditures, which the government calls investments. The purchasing power of our dollar is dropping, and our individual paycheques are dropping dramatically because the government's expenditure investments are producing very little in the way of economic benefit. In fact, they are hurting our economy, because the increased debt and increased spending have increased interest rates, which have increased the cost of everything to everybody and are causing an affordability and housing crisis in Canada.
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