44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 21, 2022 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, I understand the economics of making sure that supports are in place, such as CPP and EI, for people who need it the most when they want it the most. It is a particular Conservative trope to try to raid these important supports that Canadians build up over a lifetime.
Let us just be really clear that, when it comes to the supports in the fall economic statement, they have been very carefully calibrated not only to provide supports to Canadians who need it the most at a time when they need it the most, but also to not increase inflation and to put billions of dollars against the deficit.
Canada has the lowest deficit in the G7, the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7 and a AAA credit rating based on Moody's and the other agencies. The economic fundamentals of this country are strong and we need to get this bill to committee and to third reading so Canadians can get the supports.
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Madam Speaker, with regard to the Harper era, I had an independent study done by the Library of Parliament on the bringing in of the HST. It was $6 billion in expenditures. That was required for a couple of provinces. If it were to be paid over 10 years, it would actually cost $10 billion.
I would like the member's thoughts about that. Was that a good idea, in the sense that we are still paying debt on bringing in the HST?
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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, it is important to remind members of the House that students have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. Paying tuition is another double whammy on their lives and is simultaneous to the issues of inflation. The least we can do is ensure they are not paying interest on those loans.
I would go further, though, to add that it is important to begin the process of ensuring that the government looks at the principal of those debts so we can find ways to actually reduce the debt load that many Canadians are suffering with right now by forgiving $20,000.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a privilege to rise in the House to represent the incredible people of Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner.
Today, as we debate the fall economic statement, Bill C-32, I find it challenging to speak to the government's financial priorities. The priorities of the Liberal government differ dramatically from the priorities of Canadians and the official opposition. We have fundamentally different beliefs, and we generally disagree on the role government should play in the lives of Canadians.
This is a politically charged financial statement with two objectives: first, for the Liberals to spend enough money to buy the support of the NDP so their Liberal-NDP political love story can continue; and, second, to divide Canadians based on an ideological framework regardless of the financial or political consequences.
Canadians are tired. We have been stretched emotionally and spiritually, and now we have been physically pushed beyond our limits, especially over the last two and a half years. Like an overworked body, we need time to rest and recover. We need a sense of normality and hope, but that is not what is happening here. Canada is facing a cost of living crisis brought on by years of overspending, excessive borrowing and money printing, though the government will say it is quantitative easing, which has created the highest rates of inflation in decades.
Of late, the Bank of Canada has been raising interest rates at an unprecedented pace, and it is not done yet, all in an effort to curb the inflationary trend. The government has doubled Canada's debt in the last seven years, and the Prime Minister, as has been said many times before, has added more debt than all prime ministers in the history of Canada combined. For those trying to keep track of that at home, that is over half a trillion dollars.
The Liberals would have us believe that they had no choice, given the pandemic. However, 40% of all new spending and measures has nothing to do with COVID. That is over $200 billion. The resulting national debt interest payment costs have doubled, and next year those interest payments will be nearly as much as the Canada health transfers to the provinces. Let us just think of the impact of that.
I am sure that members of the House recall the Prime Minister, the current finance minister and the previous finance minister touting how inexpensive it was for the government to borrow money. This is no longer the case. Now Canadians are stuck repaying their bills at these new and much higher interest rates.
The only person with any fundamental financial understanding back then and now is the Conservative leader. He warned the finance minister back in December of last year. She was asked what impact a 1% average increase on interest rates would have on Canada's national debt. She was unable to provide any number. The crushing part is that rates did not go up 1%. They are up 3.5%. A finance minister who could not fathom a 1% increase when questioned was clearly unprepared for that eventuality.
Now we are in a situation where the reality is substantially worse than that, yet the finance minister remains equally as oblivious to the situation and as arrogant to her colleagues as she was a year ago. In her fall update, she should have been singing the praises of the Leader of the Opposition. After all, he was clearly the only one with both the foresight and understanding that interest rates would not remain at historic lows forever and the conviction to ensure that the government had a plan.
During this time of self-induced financial uncertainty, the government needs to partner with Canadians and not continue to punish them. Let us take small business owners, for example. They are the unsung heroes of Canada's economy. They employ nearly two-thirds of workers across the country and take on incredible risk to provide the necessary goods and services to our communities, yet under the Liberal government, small businesses are being punished with rising payroll taxes, an increasing carbon tax, labour shortages and staggering inflation, which is driving up the cost of everything.
This fall economic statement was the Liberals' chance to let Canadians know that the Government of Canada is a strong and stable partner, and they failed. It was the Liberals' chance to rein in spending and focus on getting the country's financial house in order, but they failed there, too. It was their chance to acknowledge that a carbon tax only hurts Canadians who are struggling to make ends meet, but Liberals let Canadians down there, too.
Sadly, the Liberal plan does nothing to address the cost of living crisis and government overspending. Rather, it shows that government revenues have increased by $40 billion this year alone. This not only means that inflation is increasing the cost of everyday essentials, but it also means there is an increase in taxes while the Liberal government is profiting from increased inflation on the backs of already struggling Canadians.
Canada's Conservatives had two clear expectations and demands of the government, as did Canadians: stop the taxes and stop the spending. Stopping the taxes means no new taxes and includes cancelling all planned tax hikes and the increasing of the carbon tax. Stopping the spending means no new spending and that any new spending by ministers must be matched by an equivalent saving. None of those demands were met in the fall economic inflationary update.
As I stated recently in the House, all that Canadians really need to thrive and survive is individual freedom and good government. I believe a good government is for the people, not of the people, and is transparent. It acknowledges that every time a dollar is given away, it must first be taken from a Canadian who went to work to earn it. It is a government that makes life more affordable for Canadian, not by creating more cash but by creating more of what cash can buy, and understands that ethically produced and environmentally responsible Canadian energy helps fuel our economy and should fuel the world. It is a government that knows carbon taxes will not tackle climate change and that focuses on promoting Canadian technology to the world, making alternative energy cheaper, not making Canadian energy more expensive. It is a government committed to reforming the tax and benefit system so that those who work can keep more of what they earn, and one that offers Canadians hope and creates an environment to succeed and prosper.
Freedom and good government are exactly what the Conservative leader, my Conservative colleagues and I are intent on providing Canadians. Buckle up folks. The fight to get Canada back on track has started.
It starts with removing the carbon tax, which is further burdening already struggling Canadians. It starts by helping the finance minister understand that her plan to print, borrow and spend on political pet projects needs to end. It starts by voting down this misguided and hyperpartisan fall economic statement. I ask my colleagues to please join me in ensuring that this bill does not pass.
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Mr. Speaker, no. One will find, on the record, that at the time Parliament gave unprecedented support to the government to do what was best for Canadians so they could keep their homes and not go into a financial crisis. Once we got to a certain point, there was $200 billion in extra spending that had nothing to do with pandemic supports. That is really where the problem is.
The U.S. had the same problem, and that is why its inflation went crazy too. If it would have just kept it to what it was, we would have a different level of inflation at this time, and maybe very little. We certainly see the deficit spending in the first four years of the government, which was $100 billion in deficit, and that is a lot of money. It is 30% of our total debt. These little things make a big difference.
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