44th Parl. 1st Sess.
September 23, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Red Deer—Lacombe.
This summer, I spoke with thousands of constituents from Kelowna—Lake Country in person, over the phone, on their doorsteps and at community events. I met with small businesses, farmers and not-for-profits. The struggles I heard from people and small businesses are real and extensive.
I heard about the unmanageable cost of living, which includes costs on housing, fuel and food, overall inflation, labour shortages, travel restrictions such as the ArriveCAN app, ongoing federal mandates, crushing debt for small business, supply chain issues, and delays in every federal government department, whether it be immigration and citizenship, CRA, benefits or passports.
It is evident that the legislation before us, Bill C-31, does nothing to address any of those issues and nothing to address the cost of 40-year-high inflation. For the Liberals to introduce this thrown-together legislation that will only boost inflation, and which will see its benefits evaporate with the ever-rising cost of food and gas, demonstrates the government's detachment from working families, small businesses and seniors.
I remember as a kid those tough times 40 years ago at the end of the last Trudeau government. History is repeating itself. I remember eating lots of wieners, white bread and Spam. What got us through were two sets of grandparents who had big gardens. Families are suffering today.
I mailed out a survey to residents of Kelowna—Lake Country to get their feedback about the cost of groceries and gas prices. I received thousands of responses. Food costs can vary regionally, and most people said their food bills had actually gone up more than 20%. To fill their vehicles was over $50 more per fill than last year.
Many people gave specific examples of their personal situations. I will give just a small sampling. John, who needs his pickup truck for work and who says he has good mileage on his truck, will be paying $513 a month more for gas than last year. Jeff in Lake Country wrote to me that he is getting close to having to choose between gas or food, saying that is “not a good spot to be in.”
Lea in Kelowna says she is forced to go to food banks for the first time in her life. Ken wrote that his family is presently helping a person who is living in his car because he cannot afford rent. This person works as a delivery driver, but gas prices may now prevent him from working entirely.
Paulette wrote to me and said, “I am a recently retired as a nurse. I am pretty tight with my budget. I have been able to keep my bank account at the same float number. Since March of this year, I have noticed incremental decline in my bank balance to the tune of $400 a month. It doesn't take long on a fixed income to be alarmed in seeing consistent decline.”
How is a retiree like Paulette supposed to deal with a $400 loss each month? How is a new family or a young worker supposed to deal with it? They will not if we maintain the government's high-spend, high-cost NDP-Liberal approach. We need to stop the money printing, stop the spending and stop increasing taxes, all of which are creating inflation.
Legislation like Bill C-31 will not reverse the ever-increasing costs of our basic necessities. While the government says this legislation will tackle the real issues of Canadians in need of relief, the value of these supports on people's budgets will rapidly proceed to nothing. They will evaporate quickly if the government does nothing to rein in its own costs.
Conservatives have been talking about precisely where the government could reduce costs, which would directly help to reduce the inflation that is shredding the value of people's paycheques and household budgets. It could cancel its $35-billion Canada Infrastructure Bank, which has yet to build a single road, bridge or rail line. It could drop the ArriveCAN app entirely today. It could save $25 million right now and scrap what I call the “ArriveCAN'T” app.
The government could use a one-for-one rule: For every dollar spent, find a dollar in savings. It could cancel all planned tax increases, including payroll tax hikes scheduled for January 1 and tax hikes on groceries, gas and home heating scheduled for April 1. It could cancel the escalator excise tax, which is also scheduled for April 1.
Leaving those scheduled increases on the books will be catastrophic to Canadian and small business bank accounts. Let us change course today. The NDP-Liberal bill would only raise Canadian costs, and this is obvious.
Economists are in agreement on this as well. Robert Kavcic, senior economist at the Bank of Montreal, was quoted recently on the government's proposal as saying, “We all know that sending out money as an inflation-support measure is inherently…inflationary.”
Andrey Pavlov at Simon Fraser University's Beedie School of Business said, “If we have high inflation and that inflation continues, that assistance isn’t going to do very much to help anyone, including the recipients of that assistance. It’s just not going to be enough.”
Derek Holt, vice president and head of capital markets economics at Scotiabank, could not have been clearer: “Any belief that the government's proposals will ease inflationary pressures must have studied different economics textbooks.”
Let us not forget that this legislation is before us only because of the summer rush that the members of the costly NDP-Liberal coalition put on themselves, once again trying to make a parliamentary body of law-making into a short-order kitchen of quick fixes.
The legislation bears all the hallmarks of a bill not thoroughly thought through. If the government members even took the time to glance at most rental listings in British Columbia, they would know that a $500 cheque would represent not much more than a single week's worth of rent.
According to rentals.ca, British Columbia had the highest average rental rate, at $2,578 per month in August 2022. Even if the bill passes, six out of every 10 renters will not qualify for it. In Kelowna—Lake Country, the government's record on rent is clear. According to the CMHC, the average one-bedroom apartment was roughly $900 a month in 2015, when this government was elected. Fast-forward to 2022 and the rental prices have increased 61%, to $1,475.
Instead of a bill that would expand the rental market or offer my constituents an affordable path to home ownership, the government chooses to raise costs even further.
For the government to call the other half of this legislation a dental program is not quite accurate. A program would typically feature an application process. It might coordinate with many provincial, low-income dental care programs. It would actually be a program. Instead, what the government offers is an attestation.
We have seen this attestation process with no verification or cross-referencing before. We have not been told how the CRA will administer this program or what extra staff they will need to administer it. All the government has said is to remember to keep one's dental receipts.
Will people be subject to having the value of this benefit clawed back if the government or the CRA deems them not applicable? My constituency office was inundated with people being told they had to pay back CERB. The government just has not learned.
Once again, the Liberal-NDP coalition is clear on how it wants the government to run: Allow inflation to rise unchecked, take more from Canadians' pockets, circulate it through the government's bureaucracy, and then write cheques that will give only a fraction of it back. It is like a family's financial situation is a sinking boat, and the Liberals throw them a teacup to bail out the boat instead of patching the holes.
We need to put people first.
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Mr. Speaker, I guess the better question is this: Why can people not afford to spend money on certain things? The reason is that their paycheques are evaporating. The reason is that we have 40-year high inflation, which means people cannot even afford to buy food, they cannot buy medicine, and they cannot put gas in their vehicles. It is the policies of the government that are leaving people short every month. I gave several examples in my statement today. People are hurting because of the policies of the government.
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Mr. Speaker, we have given a number of suggestions. One suggestion is that we have a lot of federal buildings that are empty, and we could use those to build housing. We have a capacity problem. We have one of the lowest numbers of houses in the world when we look at it percentage-wise. We absolutely need to build more supply.
The other part is that costs are going up. When we have supply chain issues and when we have inflation the way it is, it makes it a lot more difficult for construction and for builders to build affordable housing. If we do not get this inflation crisis under control, it is not going to help with the affordability of building houses either.
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Mr. Speaker, first, I will address the comments the member made about the senior in his riding. I hear stories like that as well. Seniors are among some of the hardest hit, because they are on fixed incomes. As this inflation continues to be at record levels, they, as I mentioned in my intervention with examples, are some of the hardest hit, because they are not able to have more income. That is the first thing.
The second thing, regarding people's paycheques, is that what the CPP and EI increases will do is reduce the paycheques they are taking home. It is also going to be more costly for businesses. A time like this, when we have record-breaking inflation, is not the time to be increasing any costs on people.
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- Sep/23/22 11:12:58 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the new Conservative leader will put people first: their retirements, their paycheques, their homes and their country.
This summer, a nurse went public at Kelowna General Hospital to say that she has never seen morale and conditions at KGH as bad as they are now. Hospitals have been at overcapacity for years. People do not have a family doctor. One in four new Canadians have named their international education not being recognized as the top barrier to employment.
Conservatives will bring hope to those who are blocked from working in their professions for no reason other than that they come from another country. We will team up with provinces to guarantee that, within 60 days, immigrants applying to work in their profession will get a yes or no based on their tested abilities and get help should they need additional training. We will back up 30,000 small study loans for those needing time off work to study up to the Canadian standard.
Canadians deserve better. Our health care workers need help. Enough talking. Remove the gatekeepers to get more doctors, nurses and engineers, and more inflation-proof paycheques for our brilliant and valuable immigrants.
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