44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 21, 2022 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand today, as we get to the dying minutes of debate on the bill, to critique the fall economic statement. We have a lot of concerns about the fall economic statement because the Liberal-NDP coalition government failed to address the concerns of Canadians, who are asking how we are going to control the cost of living, how we are going to get inflation under control and how we are going to get government spending under control. We did not see any of that in the fall economic update, and that is why we will not be supporting this bill.
We know that the government, under the Prime Minister, has run up more deficits than every prime minister before him. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, as finance minister, have increased our national debt by over half a trillion dollars. Today's national debt sits at over $1.1 trillion. In my opinion, that is child abuse of the next generation. Our kids and grandkids and our great-grandkids are going to be saddled with a debt because of the orgy of spending we have witnessed from the government.
We know that, whenever we run high deficits, inflation gets out of control because there is too much money in circulation. The Bank of Canada then has to intercede. Of course, what does it do? It jacks up interest rates. We are seeing interest rates from the Bank of Canada go up, which is impacting mortgage rates and lending rates, so it is impacting every Canadian, whether they own a business, own a home or are trying to get a job, because the cost of government continues to accelerate the cost of living crisis right across the country. We have not seen this type of inflation since the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I have always wondered why Liberal times are tough times for Canadians, but I think, like father, like son.
We have the tripling of the carbon tax, which will impact every Canadian's life in a negative way because everyone has to eat. We continue to witness the cost of food escalating out of control. With respect to the net cost of the carbon tax, in my riding in Manitoba, they are going to be paying $1,145 per year per Manitoban more than what they get back in rebate cheques from the government.
Not everyone has the opportunity to take a train or jump on a bus, and this is because they live in rural parts of the country. They have to drive to get to work. Maybe they are retired, living on a fixed income, and need to drive to see their doctor in the city. Maybe they want to retire out at the lake. I have in my riding the beautiful shores of Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba. Canadians, and especially people in Winnipeg, want to move out there and enjoy their retirement time.
It is going to cost them more just to commute back and forth to the city, to visit their doctors and do their shopping, and the government seems to callously not care. This is hurting those seniors. It is hurting rural Canadians who are driving around to get their kids to hockey, soccer or other sporting events. Sometimes they want a drive to school. It is not like they can just jump on a bus to get there. They have to drive since there is no other option.
There is also the idea that everybody is going to be able to switch to electric vehicles, which still have not been tested in the severe climate we have during the winter months in Canada. They have not actually taken a hard look at how we would go long distances, especially in rural areas where they do not have rapid charge stations, or how the electricity to charge these vehicles would be generated. Would it be clean hydro, like we have in Manitoba, or would it come from thermal-fired generation plants, using either natural gas or, even worse, coal? We have to look at the overall carbon footprint that it would be creating.
No one is getting hurt more by this, though, than farmers producing food, and the cost is impacting food inflation. I have to remind Liberals of this all the time, but they put a carbon tax on the price of growing that food. Thankfully, we just recently passed a bill from the Conservatives that would reduce the carbon tax being paid by farmers, especially on heating their buildings and drying their grain, but still, after that food is grown on the farm, it has to go on a truck and hauled to a processing facility. Often it gets put on a train after that, and every time they haul it, there is carbon tax.
That will continue to increase the cost of production. It will increase the price of that food stock. Whether it is bread, beer or vegetables, every time it goes through an energy system of transportation or processing, the cost of food will increase disproportionately.
I want to talk a little about national defence. As the shadow minister of national defence, I am concerned that some of the spending in the fall economic statement does not recognize the threat environment we are currently in, not just because of the war of Ukraine, with Russian's aggression and its genocidal war atrocities being committed by Putin's war machine in Ukraine, but also because we are seeing a lot of sabre-rattling coming out of China these days, out of Beijing, with President Xi talking about Taiwan and trying to take Taiwan into that system by force. We need to make sure that Canada, through our Canadian Armed Forces, is prepared to protect Canada, in our Arctic, on the Pacific and on the Atlantic.
We are seeing, again, this year, that the Liberals are allowing defence spending to lapse. At over $2.5 billion, this is the biggest lapse of spending we have seen since they took office. Last year, it was $1.24 billion. Since they introduced their defence policy, SSE, they have allowed over $6.8 billion to lapse.
They said that they would never allow a cent to lapse, but here is money that should be invested, in an expedient manner, in our Canadian Armed Forces to buy equipment and deal with the recruitment crisis, yet we are not seeing that turn into assets for our forces to use to defend Canada and protect our interests around the world while we fight beside our allies against adversaries, as we are witnessing happening in Ukraine today. Because of their slow investment and inability to invest in the proper procurement, we do not have our surface combatants yet, or even the design finalized.
We are not seeing NORAD modernization done in an expedient manner. We know that NORAD is critical to continental security. It is critical to our relationship with the United States and we still have not seen how we are going to update our North Warning System. We are not seeing how we are going to make sure that we have submarines that can go under the ice and other monitoring systems, whether they are unmanned vehicles or not, to monitor what is happening in our Arctic sea.
We are not seeing the investment in that continental security, no only in the Arctic but also in making sure that we are getting more of our assets to our borders to help with our continental security.
The case in point is that, in this economic statement, they announced they are going to extend the lease on the auxiliary offshore replenishment ship we have, the Asterix, which is privately owned with federal leasing, but it ends in 2025. We still do not have our first joint supply ship in the water. Why would we only want to have one vessel when we are trying to project our abilities beyond our shores?
If we want to have a blue water fleet, then we better have offshore oil replenishment capabilities in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. We need to make sure that we have the ability to also deal with things like maintenance on those vessels once they are out to sea. Having one on each coast is not enough. We need to have at least one more ship to deal with the need to provide that scheduled maintenance, which happens throughout their life cycle. We need to have that extra ship to sail, and we have to think long term on why we need another AOR.
We still have not signed the lease on our F-35s. The government has been sitting on its hands instead of signing the contract to make sure that we buy the F-35s. The surface combatants need to get in the water to get built.
There is no money in here to deal with the real crisis happening today in the Canadian Armed Forces, which is recruitment. Chief of the Defence Staff General Wayne Eyre has said that this is a crisis. I say that it is a catastrophe, and we need to deal with that very quickly.
We have a lot of needs, but we are getting no vision. It seems like everything these Liberals touch, they break.
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Madam Speaker, if we look at things the Liberals touched and broke, one of the things they broke is Veterans Affairs. We already have a bunch of our veterans who are waiting not weeks, not months, but years before they get any pensions. One RCMP veteran contacted me. He has been waiting for over two years to get his pension from Veterans Affairs.
How is that compassionate? How is that management that people can rely upon? It comes down to these Liberals, despite throwing money right, left and centre, never having been able to provide the services Canadians expect under their leadership. During their time in government, things have gotten worse not better.
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Madam Speaker, I am a big fan of the Davie shipyard. I believe it proved itself as being able to deliver on time and on budget when it delivered the Asterix. We campaigned in the last election on having that shipyard also deliver the Obelix so that we could have two offshore auxiliary replenishment ships, one on each coast, plus have the joint supply ships that are being built at Seaspan in Vancouver.
We think that is the right mix of ships we need to maintain our navy in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and to have the ability to deploy all of the assets we have within the navy. I do believe that Davie has a role to play, and it is one we need to investigate even further. There is no plan in this economic update for where we are going with our surface combatants or where we are going to get submarines. We need to deal with the proliferation of submarines by our adversaries, and the best way to fight a submarine is with a submarine. We need to get some new submarines.
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Madam Speaker, I will give a very brief answer. When it comes down to veterans, that was seven years ago. The backlog we are dealing with now, which has grown so much, is all on the shoulders of the Liberal government. When I talk about RCMP officers waiting for their pensions for 24 months, that all happened under the Liberal leadership. It has failed, in every way, our veterans in the armed forces and our veterans in the RCMP, and it is failing our current serving members in the Canadian Armed Forces.
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