Further debate? The member from Guelph.

You should use it for speech writing.

Further debate?

I’m sorry; the member opposite said “lollipops.” I’m talking about solutions to the climate crisis that are being implemented across the world, helping people save money, benefiting their local economies, attracting the $1.8 trillion in global investment that’s going to these solutions. Why not have that in Ontario? Why lose that investment to the EU and US and other jurisdictions?

Let’s make those investments right here in Ontario, address the climate crisis, address the affordability crisis and improve our economy at the same time. Those are the kinds of solutions that are going to address people’s affordability concerns, improve their quality of life and ensure their children have a better future. Speaker, that’s what I’m hoping we can deliver on in this Legislature and in this province.

Before I get into my prepared remarks here, the member from Guelph spurred me to do a little bit of research. We can’t correct anybody’s record here in the Legislature, but I just want to put this on the record for myself: A 2023 report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer says the average Ontario family is set to lose $478 based on the carbon tax. So I thought I’d just put that out there for everybody who’s watching or who might be listening, and to make sure that the member from Guelph is aware that that indeed is the case. That’s right from the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report this year, 2023.

Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise in the House this afternoon and join the debate on motion 69, the motion introduced by my friend the member from Chatham-Kent–Leamington. I just want to go back to the premise of the motion, and that is, “That, in the opinion of this House, the government of Canada should take immediate steps to eliminate the carbon tax on grocery items.” This is a motion that I wholeheartedly support.

During my remarks today, I’ll focus on initiatives aimed at lowering the cost of the carbon tax on food, how skyrocketing food costs won’t come down if you add another tax to producers and consumers, and a historic look at how this House has tried to protect Ontarians from these taxes in the past.

We know the federal carbon tax is driving food costs higher than they already are, and what is shocking is that we may not actually know how much it is truly adding to grocery bills.

Thankfully, there is some good news coming out of Ottawa, if you can believe that, colleagues. A Conservative bill, Bill C-234, would remove the federal carbon tax from on-farm uses of natural gas and propane, which I’m going to talk a little bit about here, because it’s very important as to why these items need to be exempt from the carbon tax. Farmers use these fuels for processes such as grain drying or heating their barns. These uses are not currently exempt from carbon tax laws. This bill, which is now before the Senate, was supported by the entire House of Commons—colleagues, if you can guess, who didn’t support it, though? The Liberals. I know it’s hard to believe.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer, who we’ve talked a little bit about here today, analyzed Bill C-234, and what they found is that farmers would save—this is a staggering amount, colleagues. Having natural gas and other heating fuels exempt from the carbon tax for on-farm use would save farmers $978 million between now and 2030—almost a billion dollars back into the pockets of farmers. And we all know that hard-working farmers reinvest that money into their businesses; it’s no surprise. Anybody who has had an opportunity to travel the province and speak with farmers knows this.

In the words of Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, the senior director of the agri-food analytics lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Bill C-234 is just a start. The professor shared an op-ed titled, “The Hidden Cost of Carbon Taxes and How it Will Impact Food Retail in Canada.” The article begins with a very concerning point, and this is the point that I was getting to make earlier: We may not have an idea how much carbon tax increases will impact food security. That’s really what we’re talking about here today—food security and food affordability. The professor wrote, “On April 1, the carbon tax will be set at $65 per metric tonne. We are slowly marching towards a carbon tax of $170 per metric tonne, by 2030”—which is just around the corner, whether we like it or not—"which is more than double what it is today. Yet so far, not one study has looked at how the carbon tax will be impacting food affordability in Canada. Not one.” So we know that it’s going to drive up the price of essential goods like food. We know that this will impact vulnerable people the hardest, but we do not know how big the impact will be. Quite frankly, that’s a recipe for disaster. The Liberals’ approach to feeding Canadians has been all stick and no carrot.

To quote Professor Charlebois again, “According to a report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), more than $8 billion will be collected from small business through the carbon tax by the end of fiscal 2023, and as little as $35 million will be given back as credit in the form of programs. Many small businesses, especially family businesses, are in the food industry.”

So what will happen if the federal government goes with the status quo? And to quote the professor one more time, “Food processors, artisan shops, and restaurant owners need more and better support or else, by 2030, the carbon tax will have the potential to become a ... more significant driver of food inflation than climate change itself. That’s right, the policy to penalize polluters could hurt citizens more than climate change, the very thing we are all trying to mitigate.”

So this is very concerning. The price of food has already increased dramatically over the last few years, and you don’t need to look far to see the impact of food inflation. Kim Wilhelm, the interim CEO of the Food Bank of Waterloo Region, said in a recent article that over 1,000 students used the food bank just this August. That is, roughly, a 150% increase since last year.

Another telling stat is how much they are spending on food at the food bank. Pre-pandemic, the food bank would spend about $200,000 on very specific food purchases. Now they estimate, by the end of this year, they will spend about $2 million on those same purchases. So what happens when that $2-million bill goes up by another unknown amount, Madam Speaker?

I want to go back in time a little bit to 2008. The Dark Knight had recently been released in theatres; a young Justin Trudeau still had a political future. Prior to the federal election, the McGuinty Liberals moved a motion calling on federal party leaders to commit to treating Ontario fairly. For context, this was during the time that Stéphane Dion’s Liberal Party was championing a carbon tax, back in 2008. The federal member from Thornhill moved a motion to amend that as following: “fairness in Ontario’s taxation policies so that people already overburdened by taxes in this province are not subjected to the proposed carbon tax.” That was a motion on the carbon tax that was being introduced in Ottawa. And the Liberals, of course—can you guess, colleagues? What did they do? They voted down the amendment.

Of course.

It was only one member that’s still here.

Further debate?

Sadly, my eyes require a little bit of guidance here today.

I wanted to spend some time today talking about this motion, but mostly not just to repeat a phrase that our Premier has made but to expand on the why. The Premier said last month, “The delivery of every product we have in the province is being affected by the worst tax this country has ever seen—it’s a useless tax—and that’s the carbon tax.” I couldn’t agree with the Premier more on this one, and there are lots of reasons why.

I listened very carefully to the earlier discussion, and there are some things that I appreciated and agreed with, and there are some things that I just patently don’t agree with. I think that when you put a carbon tax in the country, and here in Ontario, you really are putting a tax right from the beginning, right from the farm to the table.

When you put a carbon tax on the fertilizer that’s going in the ground to grow the food that we eat, when you put a tax on the fuel that that farm is going to consume to pick the food and the fruits off the farm—then you put the fuel to transport that food. Then you need to put the fuel to refrigerate that food in the warehouses, who are all adding the carbon tax at every step of the way from in the ground all the way—now we’re at the distribution centre with the refrigerators or freezers in that case that have a carbon tax on top of everything that they are buying. Then you transport that around the province or around the country and you’re consuming gas with a carbon tax on it. Then it gets to the grocery store who have to refrigerate—again, you’re adding a carbon tax on that fuel. Every single step of the way, from the farm to the business to the family’s table, you have taxed. You have put a tax, and you wonder why we have inflation today, why we have the high cost of food.

We stood in this Legislature—I’ve been here 12 years and three weeks, and we’ve talked about lowering the cost on every item. That’s what we on this side stand for: lowering costs. Lower costs create more wealth in the communities. Taxing never—never—creates jobs, never creates any help for families, and I’m going to give some examples about what we did to lower costs and what that resulted in. So it’s a little bit of a storyline that I’ll take you on, but you’ll see that, by lowering costs, we have had huge benefits to families in Ontario.

By putting a carbon tax, you have increased the burden on every single family. Now, the price of gasoline alone is 14 cents per litre—right now, today, at the pump, the carbon tax is costing an extra 14 cents a litre. As the member from Renfrew–Nipissing–Pembroke said earlier, we live in rural Ontario. We don’t have many options. It is a vast land that we have to travel by vehicle, and in many cases, larger vehicles, as well, for our own safety on those back roads.

You have this carbon tax that is adversely affecting especially smaller and rural communities, but it’s 14 cents today. If we think we have pain, it’s on its way to reaching 37 cents a litre. We can see that everything we’re consuming, every single thing we’re consuming, whether it’s the clothes you’re wearing that were shipped to the stores to the food on your table to the shoes, your vehicles themselves—every single thing that you buy has an inflation built into it now because of this carbon tax. It can all be tracked back to this carbon tax. You need to support this bill to scrap that tax to give our hard-working families this needed relief.

I want to talk a little bit about what we’ve done here in our government to illustrate that in order to increase your government’s revenues to be able to do things that we’re doing—like the roads and transportation that we’re building and the subways, our health care system and our education system, all the things that we’ve been adding billions of dollars to—you don’t need to raise taxes to do that. In fact, I’m going to illustrate how lowering taxes actually gives you more revenue. I know that sounds counterintuitive, so let me give you the exact example of what has actually happened here in Ontario in the last five years.

We all have heard our wonderful successes in the electric vehicle business; $27 billion has landed here. That does not happen by accident. That happened because we lowered the cost of doing business. We began by reducing the workplace safety insurance, the WSIB, by 50%—the premiums. The benefits to the workers have not changed; the premiums to the employers have been reduced. There was so much cash in there—stuffed with cash—that it was beyond any financial requirement, beyond any moral requirement. So we have said to the business community, “Enough.” We’ve reduced that by 50%. That is a $2.5-billion annual savings to those businesses that are paying WSIB, especially in the auto sector—129,000 employees, so it really affected them.

You can see, so far, $2.5 billion annually. Then we put in what’s called a capital cost acceleration, where you could write off the cost of your brand new equipment. You could write that off in-year, and that tax savings is $1 billion a year to the businesses. So now we have $2.5 billion and another $1 billion. That’s less revenue for the province.

Then we lowered the cost of industrial and commercial energy by 15%. That’s $1.3 billion. Then, through the great work of our Ministers of Red Tape Reduction, we have seen almost $1 billion in savings. It’s getting close to $1 billion in annual savings.

The Liberal government, before we were elected, had put in a series of tax increases, and one was to come due January 2019, about a half a year after we were elected, but we did not let that go through—$465 million annual savings by not having that tax, and then we stopped any tax increases when we were elected. So not only did we not go ahead with the Liberal $465-million tax; we stopped any tax increases—not even your hunting licence. But then we rolled back the provincial share of local property taxes by $450 million, and that’s a savings to business. Add it all up, and a whole bunch of other savings that we did: We reduced our revenue from the business community by $8 billion annually. So the business community saved $8 billion a year; we had $8 billion a year—temporarily, I’ll say—less revenue.

What did the business community do? They did exactly what we expected them to do: They put 704,000 people to work since we got elected five years ago. Now, those 704,000 people pay income tax. That’s 704,000 more income tax cheques the province had than the day we started. And those companies that hired those 700,000 obviously got bigger. Without increasing the tax rate, our tax revenue increased.

You can see where I’m going with this, Speaker. When we got elected, our tax revenue was $154 billion annually. We rolled back our revenue. We let the business community keep that to hire those 700,000 people. We had a short-term rollback of $8 billion every year, but today our revenue is $194 billion. We started with $154 billion in revenue; by lowering taxes, our revenue went to $194 billion. That is economics 101. That is a very conservative platform, a very conservative way of looking at things.

The other side will say, “You need higher revenue? Raise taxes,” not understanding at all that a carbon tax or other taxes—when you raise those, you punish the families, you punish the business community, you stifle investment, you stop everything, you don’t grow and you just keep increasing taxes, because your revenue keeps falling by increasing taxes.

It works the other way: When you lower taxes, your revenue goes up. That is exactly what happened in Ontario. It is an absolute fact. It is inarguable. You cannot argue against the fact that we rolled back $8 billion in revenue to make $40 billion a year higher revenue, a $22-billion-a-year increase from corporate taxes. That’s where that money came from. That’s the money that we put into health care and education, the $200 billion that we’re investing in infrastructure, buildings, roads and bridges; and 50 hospitals and schools that we’re building. All of that comes from that new revenue, because we lowered taxes.

Somebody has to give that lesson to the Liberal government in Ottawa, that lower taxes create higher revenue. When we’re out selling Ontario, it becomes so much more difficult in the US, because they do not have this punishing carbon tax in the US. It comes up at every meeting: “Yes, but what about that tax you have in Canada?” That’s what they ask; they ask us specifically about that carbon tax, because they know that the fuel they’re going to consume is not a choice.

It’s not a choice for the construction worker who has to get to their worksite in the morning, or the parents who have to drive the kids to the hockey rink. It’s not a choice; it’s a necessity. The federal government has put this burden, and that’s why cutting the gas and fuel tax that we’re doing—we’ve reduced that by—I think the Premier uses the number 10.7 cents. That’s our plan. We reduced the tax of gasoline. The federal government increases the tax by 14 cents on gasoline. We can continue to do things like reduce the licence plate sticker renewal fees, all of these kinds of things. Everything that we’re doing is to put money back in the pockets of families, back in the pockets of that farmer, the business community, the end-users, so they have more money. Everything that that Liberal government in Ottawa is doing with the carbon tax is taking money out of your pockets. It’s just really simple: The more money that you put in the pockets of the families, drivers, the better off our economy is.

Speaker, we’re doing everything that we can in our government to continue to reduce costs for families. The Minister of Energy had a great announcement last week. As of November 1, we’re going to increase the electricity rebate. For the average residential customer, it will decrease their bills by $26 a month. That is the kind of relief that the people of Ontario need to grapple with the increased costs they’re getting from the federal government.

So earlier we talked about this $27 billion in auto EV. The member from Guelph certainly was right: that in itself is going to lower our carbon emissions. The fact that we are seeing this EV revolution, and it’s being led, by the way, in Ontario. It was 2019 that Reuters announced that there would be $300 billion spent on EV production in the next five years and zero of it—zero—was coming to Canada, zero was coming to Ontario. The fact that we turned that ship around—that sinking ship that the Liberals, supported by the NDP, left us in 2018 when we won our first majority—we were able to have an announcement by Bloomberg only a short while ago that from zero to $27 billion in EV investment. We are the number two global supplier of EV parts in all of the world. We are only behind China. We are number one in North America, ahead of all of the US.

Ontario is leading this EV revolution and the fight to get to zero carbon. That is being led here in Ontario and a big part of that is the fact that we are making green steel, not only in Algoma, in Sault Ste. Marie, but at Dofasco in Hamilton. And that green steel—when we make an EV in Ontario, you are buying a car that is assembled with 94% clean energy, you’re buying a battery that is assembled with 100% clean energy and a car that has green steel all around you. You are driving a true, clean electric vehicle. That changed at Dofasco.

To go to an electric arc furnace from burning coal is equivalent to taking one million cars off the road. The same thing can be said for Algoma in northern Ontario. By converting from coal to an electric arc furnace, that’s what we have done. That is part of this EV revolution that we have created—green steel. We’ve created clean energy assembly of vehicles; 100% clean energy batteries. You buy a battery made in Kentucky, it’s 6% clean energy. You buy a battery made in Indiana, it’s 7% clean energy. You buy a battery made in Ontario, and it’s 100% clean energy. You have a true zero-emission goal when you buy products that are made here in Ontario. So we will continue to be laser-focused.

Each and every one of these investments that we see these companies making, they’re all geared here not only because we have this clean energy and not only because we have the mega sites—we have the talent. We have that talent, and that talent in Ontario deserves to be able to get to and from their place of business without having to be punished by this carbon tax that the federal government has continued to place here.

Despite this carbon tax, we have been able to be successful in Ontario. Even though the Liberals and the NDP continue to vote against measures we’ve introduced to make life more affordable, we continue—but now we encourage the federal government to reconsider their approach. Scrap the carbon tax. Give the people the much-needed relief at a time they’re already struggling with the increased cost of living.

Speaker, our government will always work to put more money in the pockets of hard-working people of the province. We encourage the federal government to see what we’ve done here in Ontario. See what lower taxes has done. See the revenue that has been increased because we lowered the taxes. Lower taxes equal higher revenue.

I beg to inform the House that the adjournment debate standing in the name of the member for Orléans scheduled for today has been withdrawn. Consequently, the adjournment debate will not be held today.

Further debate?

Further debate? Further debate? Further debate?

Mr. Jones, Chatham-Kent–Leamington, has moved private member’s notice of motion number 69. Is it the pleasure of the House that the motion carry? I heard a no.

All those in favour of the motion, please say “aye.”

All those opposed, please say “nay.”

In my opinion, the ayes have it.

A recorded vote being required, it will be deferred to the next instance of deferred votes.

Vote deferred.

Report continues in volume B.

I rise today to discuss the impact that the carbon tax has had on grocery items and food in Ontario. Since the implementation of the carbon tax, the people of Ontario have been paying more and more every single day for food, for transportation, for goods and services. They’ve been paying more to heat their homes. They’ve been paying more to fuel their cars. The carbon tax has been making life more expensive for millions of people in Ontario. Living here has become more expensive because the delivery of goods and services has increased, and this is costing people more to live. More of their hard-earned money is going to paying a tax that does nothing for them. This is more money out of their pockets to eat, to get to work, to learn, to buy a home, and to live.

Our government spoke up at the beginning of 2018 about the carbon tax and said this tax would be a real challenge for the people of Ontario. We fought that tax tooth and nail because we knew it would lead to poorer outcomes for the people in our province.

The carbon tax has contributed to inflation, and as the cost of living rises, the price of food goes up far more than inflation. If we can eliminate this tax, we can help untangle our economy from the grips of inflation and make it easier for the people of Ontario to afford a trip to the grocery store. With the increasing cost of gas, that trickles down into everything that we do.

The Ford government’s gas tax cut has saved the typical Ontario family more than $450 since it was put in place just over a year ago. But while our government is lowering costs at the pumps, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the federal government are doing the exact opposite. The federal carbon tax currently costs 14 cents per litre of gasoline. By 2030, when the fuel regulations are fully implemented, carbon taxes will increase the price of gasoline to about 37 cents per litre—and then HST on top of that. Just imagine how that cost affects families who are having a hard time getting by right now.

Carbon taxes increase the price of food. Farmers are paying more for fertilizer, and it costs them more to harvest food and to transport produce. All of these costs ultimately get passed along to consumers. The cost of bread, milk, eggs, cereal and produce have all increased since the carbon tax was introduced and makes for harder choices at the grocery store today, and in the future.

This unnecessary carbon tax is creating hardships for people in my riding and across the province. More people are turning to food banks to supplement their groceries. Food banks across the country are reporting record numbers of users. Many children and seniors are using food banks as well. Unfortunately, some Ontario families have to choose to heat their home or put food on the table. Seniors are amongst the most vulnerable population in Ontario, and they, too, are struggling with the rising cost of groceries. The cost of delivering food has gone up exponentially, leaving families and seniors in my riding and ridings across Ontario turning to food banks more and more.

Since 2020, the Burlington Food Bank has helped clients over 50,000 times. That’s just one of the food banks in my riding. In addition to the Burlington Food Bank, there is also Food for Life, the Compassion Society of Halton, Food for Thought, St. Christopher’s Church, Wellington Square United Church and many, many more just in my community of Burlington helping to feed people just in my riding.

An even more alarming statistic is that one in seven food bank users in Canada is employed. People are struggling to afford the necessities they need, meaning they are actually able to donate less in order to keep their money for their own means and their own needs.

Our government sees that Ontarians are in need of some relief. A simple place to start would be the carbon tax. With the cost of living going up, our government is committed to putting the money back into the pockets of hard-working Ontarians. Under the leadership of Premier Ford, Ontarians no longer have to renew licence plate stickers. The gas tax has been reduced. College and university tuition fees have been reduced by 10% and then frozen. We’ve increased ODSP. We reduced red tape and brought thousands upon thousands of well-paying jobs back to Ontario.

Unfortunately, the opposition continue to vote against the measures we’ve introduced, measures that would make life more affordable for the people of Ontario.

We live in a first-world country in the amazing province of Ontario. We have a world-class education system with some of the top universities in the world, top research facilities, top-notch manufacturing, and we are attracting businesses from around the world and skilled trades workers as well.

With all of Ontario’s achievements, food security continues to be a growing concern. When your population is going hungry and can’t get to work, or pay their bills or heat their homes because of the rising cost of inflation, the last thing they need is another tax that drives up the cost of food.

The federal government that is increasing the price of moving agricultural products isn’t concerned about with bringing food costs down, but we are, Speaker. The delivery of every product we have in this province is affected by the carbon tax, which again continues to make life more expensive. The carbon tax was originally introduced as an incentive to reduce carbon emissions, but it has only increased the cost of living in our province and continues to burn holes in the pockets of Ontarians.

Speaker, we can fight for the environment, we can fight for Ontarians and we have the solutions. Under the Ministry of Energy, our government is bringing back nuclear power, which is clean energy that doesn’t need a carbon tax. That extra $50 a month of carbon tax for folks in my riding translates to about with $600 more a year that they could be using to buy groceries for their families and subsidize tuition. However, the federal government once again increased the carbon tax this past April.

Instead of helping Ontarians reduce living costs, the people in Ontario and Canada were hit once again. Ontarians need relief. They need relief at the pumps. They need relief on their home heating bills and, most importantly, they need relief on the cost of groceries and food. Ontarians need to be supported, and they need to be heard. We’re hoping that the federal politicians are listening and scrap the carbon tax.