44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 21, 2022 11:00AM
Mr. Speaker, the NDP and the Liberals are patting themselves on the back for this fall economic update. They should not. This is a fall update. Canadians are falling, and the NDP-Liberal government is failing. Canadians are seeing their standards of living erode and the cost of living skyrocket because of inflation.
If one wants to get depressed, they should go grocery shopping. Basic food costs are way up: bread, apples, cereal up 17%; lettuce is up 21%; chicken, 11%; cheese and bacon, 10%; pasta is up 22%. For those who want to cook from scratch because they think they are going to save, flour is up 24%.
The Abacus poll that came out earlier this month said that 50% of Canadians are finding it a lot more difficult and 38% a little more difficult. That means almost nine out of 10 Canadians are feeling the impact of inflation at the grocery store. One in five Canadians are saying they are having to reduce meal sizes or meals altogether in order to save money. This is Canada.
More people are going to the food banks now than in history, 1.5 million in October alone. I know this has been repeated by a number of speakers, but I think we cannot just accept it as just another statistic. These are Canadians who are facing tremendous difficulty. I talked with the local food bank where I live, in Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, and they said they have never seen anything like it.
The Liberals just shrug their shoulders and do not take responsibility for this mess. They blame it on Ukraine, on COVID, on anything but themselves. Going back to the polls, 56% say the Liberal policies on inflation are making things worse, while only 7% say it has helped. The summary of the Abacus poll is this, right here: Inflation is making life difficult for millions and is the number one political issue in Canada. The biggest impacts are felt in food, but millions are finding it difficult to cope with their energy and housing costs.
On the issue of inflation, Liberals are like a deer caught in the headlights, stunned and dangerous. I have seen deer sometimes in traffic. They can bounce around anywhere. What we are seeing are the Liberals making poor decisions that are causing a serious accident in Canada.
I wish I could just say it was an accident. Let me explain. They have printed hundreds of billions of dollars that they put into the economy over the past three years. Nearly half of that money that they have pumped into the economy has had nothing to do with COVID. The money supply has increased by 25%. What does that mean? It means there is a lot more money around for the same goods than there was a few years ago. That just makes everything more expensive. It is like Canadians have had a big pay cut. They may not have seen the number of dollars on their paycheques go down. As a matter of fact, it may have even gone up a little, but because the dollars do not go as far, it is essentially a significant pay cut.
It seems that the Liberals have seen this pandemic as a time to be silly with Canada's economy. That is a nice way of saying stupid. The finance minister said it was no big deal to print money or to borrow money. She said, listen, it is half a percent. It is at only half a percent. Let us just borrow, borrow and borrow and spend, spend and spend. They said it was going to be like this for years to come. In the past few months it has gone up 750%. Yikes. That is how much interest rates have gone up: 750%.
Now there is trouble. The cost of interest rates on the deficit is going to be as much as what the government is spending on health care. In this very dangerous time, when we are seeing war in Ukraine and threats elsewhere, it is going to cost more than the government spends on National Defence, which, I will say, is not a priority for the Liberals at all. This is very significant.
Canadians are very concerned about energy costs to heat their homes and keep fuel in their cars so they can go to work, go to the supermarket and take their kids to sports. Seventy-five per cent of Canadians say this is an important issue. The Liberals are absolutely oblivious to our call to axe the carbon tax, which is making everything more expensive, from transportation and food costs to everything else.
I must admit it is very challenging for me, and I am sure for my colleagues, to listen to the Liberals brag and pontificate about their plan to save the world by tripling home heating costs. They have a tax plan, but not a climate change plan. The Liberals' plan is just to promote. We are number 50 out of 63 countries on the greenhouse gas reduction target. The Liberals have not met any of their targets. What they are doing is ridiculous and, yes, full steam ahead toward the iceberg.
I live in the Vancouver area where there are the highest gas costs in North America. It has been up to $2.50 a litre. Something has to give, but the Liberals are basically saying to have no fear, the Liberal government is here, and it has bags full of money to scatter. The Liberals have tremendous causes, each one of them. They put those causes in there for talking points to say they are helping these people and these people for the bad policy they brought in.
The Liberals have lit an inflationary fire, and they are pretending they are trying to put it out. They have doubled the national debt. They recognized that inflation is not great for them politically, so what did they do? They said, “How can we take care of inflation? Let us ramp up interest rates.” That is causing real problems for people who are renewing their mortgages. In the Vancouver area, people having $500,000, $600,000 and $700,000 mortgages are quite common. People are now going to be paying hundreds and thousands of dollars more each month and each year.
The Liberals are just saying that they are going to invest. They keep on talking about investing in this and in that, and that they are going to put money in here and in there. I always hear this word “invest”. First of all, it is not the Liberals' money to invest; it is taxpayers' money. Second, it is not just how much they spend, but how effective they are when they are spending. It should not just go to more bureaucracy. We have a lot bigger bureaucracy with worse results. It should not be there just to pad their friends' wallets, whether it be former MP Frank Baylis with a $250-million contract for ventilators, who charged twice the amount, or the ArriveCAN app.
The finance minister wrote a letter and said that they had a meeting with Chancellor Scholz to get Germany to buy hydrogen. The Liberals did not say anything about Scholz's asking if they could get LNG to Germany. There is a war happening. The Prime Minister said there is no business case.
They are now producing this in Germany. They are now building these LNG plants and they are getting the LNG from other countries. Those could have been Canadian jobs. That could have been money to go towards health care. It could have helped National Defence and in other ways. The Liberals talk about a war on climate change. It is actually a war on the resource sector, which means that our Canadian dollar is not as strong and Canadians cannot purchase as much as they used to be able to.
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Mr. Speaker, I would say it is the Liberals' policies that have caused the problems in the first place and that they should go back to the source, to the root, and take care of their spending. It is fine to help, but they should find some savings in other places. They have not. They still have a $37-billion deficit and it is accumulating.
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Mr. Speaker, I agree that companies need to be paying their fair share. I will make note that this year the Alberta government is seeing a massive amount of revenue coming in, and a lot of that is because of the incentives to help in Fort McMurray. That is now going to the government and making a tremendous difference.
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Mr. Speaker, it is not up to the government to decide where investments will be made. For resource or other projects, it is up to the companies and investors to make that decision. What is happening now is that there are no investments because projects are not getting approved in Canada to our detriment.
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