44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 3, 2022 10:00AM
- Feb/3/22 4:58:34 p.m.
- Watch
- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for his speech. On the topic of cars, I have given him a ride in my car. I do not know if he will ever come again after that, and it was definitely not electric.
I want to go a little more into this whole idea of subsidizing a car, which drives up inflation. I remember back when I was a kid, the government had a program for well drilling and immediately the price of wells doubled. I wonder if the hon. member can comment on that.
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- Feb/3/22 5:00:50 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, it is an honour and a privilege to be confused with the hon. member for Battle River—Crowfoot, who is a great member from that part of the country. I am located a bit north of his riding. Nonetheless, I am happy to share the stage with him. He is a good friend of mine.
Today I am speaking about the fiscal update, Bill C-8. I think the title of this story is “inflation”. We have seen inflation run wild right across the country. I am an auto mechanic and come from the automotive world. I spent most of my life before this place working at a Chrysler dealership in northern Alberta and Abbotsford, B.C., so that is the world I know more significantly. I do not know about others, but I have been driving around Canada noticing that the parking lots of car dealerships are empty. Anyone who has a three-year-old vehicle can trade it in for the same amount of money it was bought for three years ago.
I talked to a fellow during the election campaign who had a 2019 Ford one-ton pickup. He uses it to pull his holiday trailer. The dealership called him to say that since he only uses his truck to pull his holiday trailer, would he consider trading in his 2019 truck in August for a 2022 pickup truck in April of 2022. The man was told the dealership would guarantee him a new truck in April of 2022 if it could have his truck that day with no increase in his payments or the money he owes. It would be a clean swap. He got a pickup that was three years newer. That is a picture inflation. That is a picture of supply chain shortages and life getting more expensive. The fact that pickup trucks are now more expensive today than they were three years ago shows that inflation is happening.
We see it all around us. Now we have major supply chain shortages that are causing some of this inflation, whether it is microchips not making it across the ocean from China to manufacturers or a problem with trucking, but it also has to do with the amount of cash that is being put into the economy in Canada. We are also noticing higher prices in grocery stores of things that we have always relied on. To some degree it is the success of capitalism; when people go to the store, the bread lines up for them. The things we have come to appreciate and take for granted in many cases are not necessarily there today. Because of shortages, we are seeing the prices go up.
Farmers are saying they are getting record prices for their products, but when they buy their inputs, their inputs have increased threefold. They are getting double for their products, but their inputs are threefold higher, so their margins are all in flux. They are not able to predict what they are going to be doing and, in many cases, it does not matter how much money they have, they just cannot get the product. It does not matter whether the product was priced at zero dollars or $100. If they cannot get it, they cannot get it. That is an increasing challenge in this new world.
The point of all of this is that we are driving inflation through flooding the country with cheap cash. Statistics Canada says inflation is currently running at nearly 5%. When people can get money at 2% or 3%, they are basically getting paid to take on debt and we are seeing massive amounts of household debt. People are using the equity in their homes to run their lives, and it is spurring on inflation across the country. All of these things contribute to inflation. Folks continually tell me their groceries have gone up twice the price from a year ago.
There are increased trucking costs associated with this. I spoke to a sawmill owner in Slave Lake, Alberta. Two years ago, it typically cost him $2,000 to get a B-train of lumber down to the coast; today it is costing him anywhere from $5,500 to $6,000. That is a threefold increase in the price of the trucking. The fuel cost is up 50%. A year ago it was hovering around a dollar; now it is running at about $1.50. All of these things are making our lives more expensive.
The other thing I heard from constituents around New Year's was that the December natural gas bill for most people in my riding was the highest bill they have ever had, and a big part of that is due to the carbon tax. Folks were complaining to me that the carbon tax portion of their bill was larger than the actual natural gas costs of the bill. There are the transmission fees and things like that on there, but the actual natural gas they pay for would have been about a third of the bill and then the carbon tax would be about a third of the bill.
That was extremely frustrating to many Canadians, given that they said they had already done everything to reduce their bill. They had upgraded their windows and they had put in more insulation into the ceiling and they had reduced the temperature in their house, all to try to reduce their bill, and yet they had the largest bill in their entire life in December 2021. Again, we are seeing inflation being driven by things like the carbon tax and government policy in this country. They were calling on me to alleviate the carbon tax on home heating or eliminate the carbon tax in its entirety.
The other thing I wanted to talk about is about what it is going to take to get the economy up and running again.
We are seeing the cost of labour going up significantly. There are plentiful jobs. During the election I stopped in at a restaurant, and it was not open. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and they were not open, so a week later when I drove through, I stopped in again, earlier in the day. I had a chat with a waitress and I said I was there last week and they were not open. She said, “Oh, no; we close at four o'clock. We have not been able to get enough staff to stay open all day.” That is something I hear from people all across northern Alberta—that they cannot find enough people to fill the jobs.
Again, that is causing them to offer more pay to attract people to come, and that is also another thing that is driving inflation. Basically, if someone is getting paid more to do the same job but their life costs more on the other side, they have not gained anything. All that happens is that the dollar numbers are higher. That, essentially, is what inflation is. It is the devaluing of our money so that it takes more money to do the same thing, and that is happening in both directions. That is happening in the wages and also in the costs of everything.
We are not necessarily seeing massive increases in production. We are seeing bigger numbers all around, larger numbers, but we are not necessarily seeing the tonnes of coal go up significantly or the barrels of oil go up significantly. All we are seeing is the dollar numbers associated with that going up, and that is, in a nutshell, what inflation is. The government has the levers to make sure that our dollar is worth something in the world, that our lives are affordable and that when we work for our money, we are able to pay for the things we need in order to live our lives. This particular suite of policies the government is proposing would do nothing to alleviate inflation, and for that reason I will not be supporting this bill.
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- Feb/3/22 5:11:53 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, the basic issue that we are dealing with is that the government has pumped a huge amount of cash into the system, and that has inflated the prices that people are receiving for their goods. All that has happened, though, is that everybody has taken advantage of the increased prices that they are getting for their products. Then the folks on the bottom end are saying their costs are going up as well, so they have to increase their prices.
Basically, if my grain is sold for X dollars, and my fertilizer company sees that the farmer who was getting $10 a bushel last year is now getting $20 a bushel, it will probably increase the price of its product and still get paid for it, because it thinks that farmers are now flush with cash. That has a domino effect down the economy.
A host of government policies are driving the costs up in both directions.
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- Feb/3/22 5:13:50 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, I guess I am not a big fan of picking winners and losers. I am a big fan of things that work well and things that do what they are intended to. For that reason, I am excited about the electrification of, for example, the new Ram 1500, which is like a mild hybrid. It gives a 13% increase in fuel economy without sacrificing any of the other capabilities of that pickup truck. I am amazed and impressed by it.
I would just push back a little bit to say that the environmental impact of electrification is not zero. There is an environmental impact of electrification. If someone is getting their power from a hydro dam somewhere, the CO2 emissions might be reduced, but if they are getting their power from a coal-fired power plant, electrification does not help us at all. That does not say anything about mining for the cobalt and the things that go into these batteries, and the copper for all the wiring that we need for these kinds of things.
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- Feb/3/22 5:15:48 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, I am happy to answer this question and I thank the member for asking it.
There is no other industry that is more tied to government spending than the pharmaceutical industry. It is 100% driven by the government pouring money into it. The fact is that they put huge, bold letters on the bottles of pharmaceuticals to show how much these items cost so that the consumer knows what the cost is. That is how they drive down the costs of these things.
Government spending on specific things traditionally raises the price of them and drives inflation, and there is no better example than in the pharmaceutical industry.
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