- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Lakeland
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 65%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $228,013.82
- Government Page
- Sep/29/22 12:06:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will split my time with the member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord.
Canadians cannot afford the current Liberal government. The NDP-Liberals have made the cost of living so expensive that people are being forced to choose between heating their homes, putting gas in their cars and feeding their families. That is why the Conservative motion today calls on the government to immediately stop new taxes on gas, groceries, heating and paycheques. That would mean cancelling its planned carbon tax increase and their planned tax hikes on paycheques, which are all defined on the Liberal government's own website as taxes.
The numbers are stark. A Canadian making $60,000 a year went from paying $3,400 a year in taxes under the previous Conservative government to $4,169 in taxes today. The average Canadian family now spends more of their income on taxes than they do on food, clothing and shelter combined, and this share is going to keep escalating under the current Liberal government. That is morally wrong, and it is all a consequence of bad policy.
The cost of everything is skyrocketing. Families are spending $1,200 more a year to put food on the table. Housing prices have spiralled out of control, and rising interest rates mean that half of young Canadians, 56%, who are looking to buy their first home have put their plans on pause or given up altogether.
Rent for a one-bedroom home in Toronto is over $2,300 a month, and post-secondary students are living in homeless shelters. One in six small businesses are considering closing permanently, while almost two-thirds are still carrying debt from the last two years, in large part because of decisions made by governments. Of course, there is also the ever-increasing carbon tax that the Liberals promised would stay at a certain level, but it is going to blow way past that and way past what they claimed.
The Liberals keep saying this tax gives Canadians more back than they spend on it, but of course, the Parliamentary Budget Officer completely debunked that claim. The reality is that 60% of Canadians will not get back more than they put into it, and of course, courtesy of this particular Liberal government, Albertans are the hardest hit, paying $2,282 more than they get back.
However, the carbon tax rebate is effectively the Liberal government using working-class Canadians as a 0%-interest loan. Proceeds are not returned, and it costs Canadians the exact cost of inflation for every month that they do not have their money, plus the cost of lost potential investment income.
For example, using what we all now know is actually a conservative inflation number of 3.4%, which was inflation in 2021 and has more than doubled this year, plus a conservative 2% rate of return on investments, and adding that to the average 2021 carbon tax cost for an Albertan of $1,585, it is almost $86 that has just disappeared, money that these Canadians will never get back and money these Canadians could have used to pay for their grocery bill that week or fill up their gas tanks. The Liberals are going to make these losses worse and keep taking more and more away from Canadians.
Conservatives are focused on Canadians who are struggling with this Liberal-manufactured cost of living crisis.
Coralea from Elk Point wrote to me. Her son has ADD and several other learning difficulties. To deal with these challenges, she sent him to a school about half an hour away from where her family lives. They were able to carpool with other families, and her husband had a well-paying job in the oil patch, but the Liberals’ war on the oil and gas sector changed all of that.
Drilling rigs shut down, companies closed, investment dried up and projects were cancelled, all because of the risk and uncertainty created by the Liberal government, and unfortunately, like tens of thousands of other workers directly employed by the energy sector, Coralea’s husband lost his job. He did find another job local to their home, but it paid him a third of what he was making. Coralea started a housekeeping business so their family could make ends meet, but that business was wiped out during the last two years.
A few months ago, Coralea's son’s school called with a plan for the next four years that would actually see her son graduate with a diploma and his first-year apprenticeship, but she had to tell them that her son is not returning next year, because the skyrocketing cost of gas to drive an hour back and forth twice a day, is no longer feasible on their reduced income.
Coralea is not a Canadian who can afford to buy a fancy $60,000 Tesla. She cannot even afford to rewire her home to accommodate the charge. She cannot afford to have an electric car that does not work in the snowstorms and in -40°C weather that people in Lakeland often experience. She cannot afford the taxes the Liberal government keeps imposing and hiking on Canadians.
Another constituent, Steve, who is a senior living in Vermilion, told me he received both CPP and OAS, both payments are indexed to inflation. The Liberals will tell us that seniors living on these programs are protected from cost of living increases and inflationary pressures, but that is just not the case. Under half of Steve’s monthly gas bill is for the actual gas he uses. A full quarter of his bill goes to taxes, over $50 a month.
For the first two quarters of the year, single adults received just over $250 in carbon tax rebates. Steve would pay $300 in taxes on his gas bill alone at the same time. He pays carbon taxes on his electricity bill, carbon taxes on his groceries and carbon taxes on the fuel he needs to fill up his truck. Steve is going to be taxed out of his retirement at this rate. He told me, “This carbon tax is killing me””, and asked me to keep fighting against this “nonsensical and needless taxation.”
Then there is 25-year-old Austin from Vegreville, who should have a bright future ahead of him. He should be ready to start his life, buy a home and plan a family if he wants. Instead, he has to decide on what bills he pays every month and whether he can afford groceries at the same time. His car ran into some issues, costing him $850, $850 that he cannot afford when gas prices have doubled and his gas and electricity bills are costing him $400 a month. Austin works two jobs, at Walmart and at a local indoor arena. His girlfriend is 21 and works in early learning and child care. He is really worried about their future and he stood up. He told me to, “Scrap the carbon tax...Stop the spending, soften the blow of inflation, and actually make the middle class pay less tax and actually help us get ahead, not send us backwards.”
We could all go on about this from our constituents: from Jason, who runs a small public golf course in New Brunswick, who paid an extra $6,000 in fuel from 2020 to 2021 and is anticipating another $7,500 increase this year; to Linda, a widowed senior, who is still working as a school bus driver because she cannot afford to heat her home and put gas in her car; to Fred, who told me of a young family he sits beside every week at hockey practice that now has to choose which of their kids can play this coming season because the cost of travelling to games has become too much.
The cost of living crisis imposed by the Liberals is not “transitory”, it is not “Vladimir Putin’s inflation” and it is not “a supply chain issue.” It is inflation created because the government has consistently spent well beyond its means and ignored all Conservative warnings that its out-of-control spending would lead to higher prices of basic necessities for all Canadians.
The cost of living crisis driven by the government’s spending and tax increases on gas, groceries, home heating and paycheques is forcing the Canadians who I represent to choose between heating and eating, to choose which of their kids can go into sports or if they can at all, to choose whether they can afford to see their grandchildren, to jeopardize their children’s future because they cannot afford the costs anymore. This has to stop. The government’s reckless spending, its attacks on working Canadians and its continued tax hikes are ruining lives. That is why the motion today is so important. Canadians literally cannot afford the Liberals anymore.
As our new leader, the member for Carleton, has urged them for years, the Liberals must reverse course, find savings in government spending and balance the budget so all that debt is not passed on to future generations with nothing to show for it. It needs to stop fining, demonizing and firing Canadians whose personal medical decisions were not acceptable to the Prime Minister; stop destroying lives and livelihoods of Canadians by driving away investment, handcuffing the development of Canada’s natural resources in agriculture sectors, anchors to our economy, with its anti-business, anti-private sector, high-taxing red tape agenda; and commit today to no new taxes on gas, groceries, home heating and paycheques.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo.
Bill C-11 is yet another attempt by the Liberals to regulate what Canadians can say and see on the Internet by granting unprecedented powers to the CRTC with, importantly, no clear guidelines or limits on how that power would be used.
The minister has made many claims about Bill C-11. He says that it would protect Canadian identity and culture, that it would help promote diversity and marginalized groups in Canada, and that it would tell Canada's story to the world. These objectives are commendable, but the big problem is that Bill C-11 would actually accomplish none of them. Instead, it would threaten the viability of Canadian digital content creators, stifle innovation and grant unprecedented new powers to the CRTC to dictate what Canadians can read, what they can listen to, and what they can say and see on the Internet.
Like its predecessor, Bill C-10, Bill C-11 is not about promoting Canadian content. It is really about censoring views and ideas that the Liberal government does not like, all under the auspices of strengthening Canadian culture. The bill's so-called discoverability provisions would essentially push content in front of Canadians, if that content is considered Canadian enough, whether people want to see it or not. If it fails to pass the government's definition of “Canadian”, it would be pushed down in the queue where it cannot be found. The CRTC would essentially decide which content creators succeed, what content Canadians see and what content Canadians do not see. The minister has recently declared that he alone would develop rules on what content is defined as Canadian. That is a pretty shocking revelation, that he considers himself the single arbiter of national identity.
This is especially disconcerting since the NDP-Liberal government is also currently developing an online harms bill, which has been so shrouded in secrecy that only recently an access to information request uncovered thousands of pages of negative comments by stakeholders. Critics warned that the original Liberal government plan would amount to censorship. I understand that a new proposal is now being put forward, given all the criticism. It would apparently place the onus on digital platforms to deal with harmful content. Based on the Liberals' track record, no one should believe that this proposal would pose less of a threat to individual liberties than their other ideas. I am not sure how they would tackle real online harms, such as non-consensual or child sexual abuse material, which is often not enforced through platforms right now.
On Bill C-11, thousands of Canadian artists, content creators and policy experts have voiced extreme opposition. They point out that pushing content to viewers who are not interested in it would actually harm Canadian creators, because the algorithms will penalize content that viewers do not interact with.
Justin Tomchuk, a Canadian producer who operates two very successful YouTube channels, noted, “Our channels have highlighted Canadian products for the world to see and purchase. Unfortunately, Bill C-11 would make that more difficult and potentially destroy our visibility internationally.”
Dr. Irene Berkowitz, a senior policy fellow at the Toronto Metropolitan University’s Audience Lab, also testified at committee, and Matt Hatfield said that it's “very risky for a small country like Canada to encourage this kind of model of prioritizing our own content. The benefits are pretty meagre if we make it work for our local content. The risk, if a larger country like France were to do the same thing, is enormous to us.”
Morghan Fortier, co-owner and CEO of Skyship Entertainment, creator of Canada's most-watched YouTube channel, said:
Bill C-11 is...a bad piece of legislation. It's been written by those who don't understand the industry they're attempting to regulate, and because of that, they've made it incredibly broad. It mistakes platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Facebook for broadcasters like the CBC, Netflix and Amazon Prime. It doesn't understand how those platforms operate, and it ignores the fundamental importance of global discoverability.
Those same points echo around the Canadian arts scene. Scott Benzie, the managing director of Digital First Canada, which advocates for digital content creators, said, “Most concerning about C-11 is that there is still room in the bill for the government to force platforms to put 'approved' Canadian content ahead of independent Canadian content and artificially manipulate the algorithms. Even in the best-case scenario this bill only has downsides for digital-first creators, while the traditional media industry gets their funding doubled.”
The reality is that traditional broadcasters like the CBC would receive more funding under Bill C-11, while independent innovators driving Canadian digital leadership will be left behind. Not only will Bill C-11 not promote Canadian digital content or strengthen Canadian culture, but its discoverability provisions will stifle innovation and impose severe restrictions on what content Canadians can access.
During committee hearings, the campaigns director of advocacy group OpenMedia, Matt Hatfield, said, “Manipulating our search results and feeds to feature content that the government prefers instead of other content is gross paternalism that doesn't belong in a democratic society.”
There really is no better definition of “censorship” than what the Liberal government is trying to do in Bill C-11. Censorship is at its very core. The Liberals even used censorship to cut off debate and ram through an unprecedented 150 amendments to the bill with no discussion or explanation. Over the last two weeks, the Liberals have effectively censored their own censorship bill.
Canadians will remember the fiasco of Bill C-10, which the Liberals introduced last year. Under Bill C-10, people's everyday expressions, which could include pictures, audio and video, would have been magically turned into broadcasting programs when transmitted by third parties like social media firms over the Internet, unless the CRTC or a cabinet policy directive said otherwise. Almost any individual-generated content would become subject to regulation. That is why Internet law expert Michael Geist called Bill C-10 an unconscionable attack on the online free expression of Canadians. As the Liberals stifled debate and used tactics like closure on Bill C-10, Conservatives did propose amendments to protect individual users and smaller players in the market by exempting streaming services and social media users with lower revenues, but the Liberals rejected that common-sense compromise.
Now the minister claims that this new bill, Bill C-11, addresses the concerns about Bill C-10 and that Canadians can be assured that regulating user-generated content on the Internet is now off the table, but that is just not true. In fact, when asked at committee hearings about whether Bill C-11 includes the potential for regulating user content, the CRTC chair, Ian Scott, acknowledged, “As constructed, there is a provision that would allow us to do it as required”.
The Liberals have tried to pull the wool over everyone's eyes with Bill C-11 by apparently reintroducing some original safeguards, while at the same time introducing a new provision that effectively negates the safeguards. I think we all agree with the goal of updating Canada's Broadcasting Act and bringing it in line with the realities of the 21st century. Conservatives have said repeatedly that we support creating a level playing field between large foreign streaming services and Canadian broadcasters, but Conservatives believe we can achieve that reform while also protecting individual rights and without turning the CRTC into an all-powerful censure board with almost no limits to its regulatory authority.
Should Canadians entrust the Prime Minister and the government with the power to regulate what Canadians say and see? Let us look at their track record. There have been many examples of this particular Prime Minister cracking down on those with whom he disagrees, from former senior ministers who defended the principle of judicial independence, like the Hon. Jody Wilson-Raybould, to denigrating and demeaning fellow Canadians who want their freedom back and to end federal mandates, and helping perpetuate misinformation and fake news about them, their motives and their actions. The Prime Minister has actually called Canadians who disagree with him un-Canadian. Therefore, is it any wonder that Canadians would be skeptical about his plans for the cabinet appointments who will define Canadian content for regulation?
This penchant for using the unbridled power of the state against the individual Canadians is embodied in Bill C-11 and in coming legislation the Liberals will claim is necessary. However, stakeholder groups that have been involved in consultations so far have called the Liberals' proposals dangerous, with the possibility of expanding the powers of regulators over time and significantly impacting the free expression and privacy rights of Canadians.
My constituents are clear about their views on the Liberal government's heavy-handed attempts to regulate and control what Canadians are allowed to say and see on the Internet. They have told me they do not agree with the Liberal government's censorship measures. No government agency responsible for broadcasting in a free and democratic society should have the kinds of powers and unchecked discretion as are proposed in Bill C-11. Canadians have fought and died to defend rights to freedom of thought and expression. In a society that cherishes these values, Bill C-11 would leave the door open for real abuses of power against the free expression rights of Canadians.
My Conservative colleagues and I will remain steadfast in working to stop the NDP-Liberal government from taking away the free expression and individual rights of Canadians. In its present form, we oppose Bill C-11, given the potential for it to establish a regime of censorship, control and regulation while not achieving the outcomes its proponents purport.
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- Feb/20/22 4:54:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will split my time with the member for Saskatoon—Grasswood.
Today, I must oppose the Prime Minister's unjustified and draconian invocation of the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canada. Like so many watching from home in Lakeland, I am struggling with the events of the last two days. Seared in my mind are images of fellow Canadians literally and metaphorically trampled, pushed back, struck down, driven out and away by the might, scope and scale of the unrestrained power of the state.
Like many colleagues here, I have lived, worked and walked in the downtown Ottawa core for the past three weeks, and my truth is this: The most violence, obstruction and tension I have witnessed started on Friday. My constituents are asking what is going on here and how the heck did it all come to this?
Canadians have faced emergencies and threats; plane bombings; lengthy armed standoffs; threats of terrorist attacks; 9/11; massive riots; critical infrastructure and mine bombings; prolonged biker gang wars; year-long housing development occupations; mass shootings; churches deliberately burned to the ground over several months; blockades on rail lines, ports, bridges and highways, some which lasted for more than a month; flooding; droughts; wildfires; and even the possibility of foreign invasion. Canadians came through each of these tests—
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