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House Hansard - 333

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 17, 2024 11:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 333 - Jun/17/24
Mr. James Bezan (Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, CPC)
  • Jun/17/24 8:26:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to stand today and talk on Bill C-69, the budget implementation act, or as I prefer to call it, “the economic vandalism act”. This is a budget that continues to build upon the inflationary deficits that Canadians are struggling to deal with. The government's spending continues to be out of control. First it was borrowing money, then it was printing money, and now it is going to continue to dip into the pockets of Canadians and raise taxes so it has money to spend on all its crazy ideas and programs. We know the Liberals have gotten no results the entire time they have been in government. For the past nine years, we have witnessed rent double. We have witnessed the cost of a mortgage double and the cost of a down payment double. Our children and grandchildren will not have the opportunity that we did to own a home and to move ahead in life because of the out-of-control spending of the Liberal-NDP government. We have a deficit this year that is going to be over $40 billion. It has been described as the worst budget since 1982. Who said that? The former, Liberal-appointed Bank of Canada Governor, David Dodge. We have witnessed that Canada has the worst living standards in 40 years according to the Fraser Institute. We have also seen, under the Liberal-NDP government, that we have had the worst growth in GDP, or income per person, since the 1930s. Nine in 10 middle-class families are paying more in income tax today than they were nine years ago. We have a situation that is increasing and is hurting everyone. In my riding of Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, it is hitting everybody. Our farmers are struggling with increased carbon taxes that have gone up 23% and they now have to deal with the capital gains tax, and that is really starting to take a bite. We can look at how farms have been structured, family farms, over the last number of years. I come from a farm family. My daughter and son-in-law are grain farmers. I have two brothers who are farmers. They put hard work and effort into growing their properties. They want to make sure that there is something to pass on to the next generation, which is the same thing that my father did for his children, and that is at risk. To make things more manageable, people have formed their family farms into limited corporations. Our doctors, our dentists and our chiropractors, especially in rural areas, have set themselves up into limited liability partnerships and corporations. Those limited corporations pay out capital gains. Of course, now these capital gains are all going to get taxed by the Liberal-NDP coalition by up to 67%. This is not a tax on the wealthy. This is a tax on the hard-working people who feed us, take care of us and take care of our health. All of them are going to be attacked and become either less profitable or be forced to relocate to jurisdictions like the United States where it is easier to make a living without having to work as hard. I have had doctors and dentists tell me that they are going to work fewer hours because of the income tax implications with the capital gains tax grab by the Liberals and the Minister of Finance. This is also hitting cottage owners and those who have secondary residences, whether they bought a property for rental income or they bought a home that they hope to pass on to their children. Now, when they go to sell those properties, they are going to get nailed with this capital gains tax that they did not expect. There is a word for this. When somebody takes something away from another that they never deserved, it is called highway robbery. That is the economic vandalism that we are talking about here by the Liberal-NDP coalition. As the shadow minister for national defence, I do want to switch gears and talk about how this budget does not support, in any way, shape or form, the even less ambitious defence policy update. The defence policy update had some ideas, but all the spending, especially in this budget, has been kicked down the road until after the next federal election. We are talking three, four or five years down the road before we see any increase in spending for national defence to support our troops. At the national defence committee today, we actually had one of our witnesses say that the defence policy update is a national “embarrassment” that fails to recognize the threat environment we are in and that, technically, Canada is already “at war”. We are witnessing what is happening in Ukraine. We have had increased escalation in the conflict in the South China Sea between the PRC and the Philippines, plus what we are seeing in Taiwan. This defence policy update fails to recognize those threats. All the money that has supposedly been promised is kicked down the road. As a case in point, we have a retention and recruitment crisis happening in the Canadian Armed Forces. One thing that we identified is the lack of housing. The Minister of National Defence even said that we are short 6,700 residential housing units for our troops. We have troops who are living homeless and actually couch surfing. They are living in campers or in their cars. Worse yet, they are stuck in these tent cities that have sprung up across the country over the last nine years under the Liberal government. Even though the government recognizes that we need more homes for our current serving members of the Canadian Armed Forces, the budget has zero dollars for new housing for our troops. It has zero dollars next year. There is only $8 million in the budget in three years' time, which does not build 6,700 housing units. Eight million dollars will not build, in today's dollars, 24 homes. Again, that is a national embarrassment. We have people who are serving this country but cannot house themselves properly, and the government and the defence minister fail to recognize that we have to support our troops. Therefore, we have a retention and recruitment crisis, and the defence policy update gives no idea of how we are going to increase our troop strength. We are 17,000 troops short today, and it could get worse if this is not rectified soon. We have a housing shortage and, of course, we have no money to put into new houses. As we heard today again at committee, we have an army that the government has no plan to get new kit for so that it can become the expeditionary force we have come to rely on as Canadians. A case in point on how the government does not take our forces seriously and puts them in awkward positions is the news we heard just this weekend that the Canadian Armed Forces, through the Royal Canadian Navy, positioned one of our Arctic offshore patrol vessels in Havana, Cuba, for a celebration of the Communist dictatorship there. It is docked alongside Russian navy destroyers. Why would we want to use the Royal Canadian Navy to liaise with a hostile dictatorship in Cuba and an aggressive country that is invading Ukraine today? We know that Cubans are serving in the Russian armed forces today and fighting in Ukraine. Cuba has actually sent troops to Belarus to train alongside Russian and Belarusian soldiers so that they can invade Ukraine again from the north. This is a national embarrassment and, again, speaks to the fact that the government does not have a plan when it comes to supporting our troops. Instead, it uses them for photo ops with Communist dictatorships rather than supporting our allies in fighting back against the evil that is occurring around the world. We have frigates that cannot be deployed on as frequent a basis. We no longer have destroyers. We no longer have any of our own supply ships. They are slowly coming, and we have the Asterix out there, of course, which we ordered when we were in government. However, we do not have the same reach in the navy that we used to. When we look at Ukraine, our government, again, continues to dither and delay in delivering. It announced 18 months ago that NASAMS was going to be sent to Ukraine, and it is still not there. The Liberals finally announced that we were sending 2,000 CRV7 rockets, but guess what, Mr. Speaker? We asked back in February to send the 83,000 we had, not 2,000. We will continue to put pressure on the government to do the right thing for Ukraine, for the Canadian Armed Forces and for rural Canadians from coast to coast to coast.
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