44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 31, 2023 02:00PM
- May/31/23 3:03:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister left right in the middle of a semester, and I am having trouble remembering why.
However, he certainly was not a math teacher. His own finance minister said that deficits pour fuel on the inflationary fire, right before she introduced $60 billion more in deficit spending measures. How much will that add to the inflation rate Canadians have to pay?
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- May/31/23 3:04:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is not just me who acknowledges that deficits pour fuel on the inflationary fire. It is his own finance minister. In fact, she said that two weeks before she introduced her budget. What followed her budget was a spike in the inflation rate the Prime Minister had promised would only ever go down. What do you know? Dumping $60 billion of fuel on the inflationary fire actually makes prices go up.
Did the finance department calculate how much this extra $60 billion of inflationary spending would add to the consumer price index? How much?
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- May/31/23 3:05:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have been very clear that I would get rid of the $35-billion incompetent infrastructure bank. I would get rid of the $54-million ArriveCAN app, which did not work and was not necessary. I would not blow billions of dollars buying back hunting rifles from lawful and licensed Canadians instead of going after serious criminals. The list of waste and corruption goes on and on.
My question, though, is this: How much is all of this spending adding to inflation? John Manley, the former Liberal finance minister, said that, just as the current finance minister has said, when we add deficits, we add inflation. The question again is this: How much extra inflation will the $60 billion in budget deficits cause?
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- May/31/23 3:11:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one in five Canadians is skipping meals because they cannot afford groceries and are already living in austerity. The 1.5 million Canadians who are forced to rely on food banks are already living in austerity. The nine out of 10 young Canadians who believe they will never be able to buy a home are already living in austerity.
The only person not living in austerity is the Prime Minister, because he is forcing austerity on all other Canadians.
How much will the $60 billion in additional spending add to the inflation rate?
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- May/31/23 3:11:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let me see if I understand the Conservative Party's austerity plan correctly. They are saying that Canadians are already facing hard times, so it is okay to make matters worse by spending less, investing less and providing less help for families in need.
Perhaps that is why the member voted against the dental care assistance we are providing to children. Thanks to our initiative, 300,000 children across this country have been able to access dental care services they could not access in the past, including 1,100 children in his riding of Carleton. He voted against it because, for him, it is all about austerity. That is irresponsible.
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Mr. Speaker, I always appreciate the opportunity to come here to this House of Commons and speak on behalf of the people of Calgary Midnapore.
Of course, I am very proud to say that I am a proud hockey mom in the riding of Calgary Midnapore, and I certainly like to have conversations with the other mothers at the hockey rink. We do that. We wait for our kids to get on the ice or wait for the practice to end, and we have conversations, and certainly we have conversations about child care. There is no doubt about it. A lot of families require child care. A lot of families are not so fortunate as to have a parent stay at home, as two incomes are required, but we also have conversations about why that is so, and we have conversations about the cost of living.
My truth, and the truth of the hockey moms I talk to, is that the words from the government about making life affordable for Canadian families are a lie, and day care is just a part of that lie. It is a cycle that the government has created.
First of all, there is inflationary spending. We have seen that excessively. We have seen excessive taxation, so there is inflationary spending and excessive taxation. This drives up the cost of living for Canadian families as well as costs for Canadian businesses. I have mentioned often in this House that I come from a small business family, so taxes on small business are very important to me and to my family.
As a result of the cost of living being driven up, Canadian families are driven into poverty. Businesses have to close and lay off workers, and Canadian families cannot afford to eat, cannot afford rent and certainly cannot afford child care.
What the government does after it has created this nation of poverty is throw little scraps out to the Canadian public, and this day care program is just a marketing plan. It is just one of those scraps.
The government threw out the rent subsidy. They said, “Here is $500 this month; I don't know what you're going to do next month, but here is $500.” The grocery rebate was $234, even though groceries are going to cost an additional $1,000 for a family of four.
The government makes life unaffordable for Canadians, and day care is just another example of what it is doing. It is creating a cycle of continuous poverty for Canadians, whereby Canadians are reliant upon the government instead of on themselves and the common sense of the common people, as we talk about. This day care scheme is just another example.
I talked about inflationary spending. We saw in budget 2023 an additional $69.7 billion that is going to be spent. This will cost each Canadian household an additional $4,200. I just came from the operations committee, where we had the president of the Treasury Board, who just added another $1.3 billion to the tab of Canadians for the recently negotiated agreements, which the Treasury Board failed to do two years previously. In a hurry to get things done, it has now finally completed these agreements. I thank goodness, because services were suffering for Canadians, but it is for the price tag of $1.3 billion.
The government has to bring down inflationary spending and excessive taxation so Canadians can have a chance. We see an escalator tax on beer, wine and spirits of 2%. Let me say that the hockey moms and I sometimes could use a nice glass of wine at the end of the day, but it is 2% more now, as a result of the government and its creation of a life that is not affordable for Canadians.
We see an increase of 40% in the cost of food with high inflationary spending, with 1.5 million Canadians visiting food banks in a single month. We have talked about these numbers a lot in this House. One in five Canadians are skipping meals, and as I mentioned, the grocery rebate is just $234, but groceries are going to cost an additional $1,065.
Day care is a part of this lie of affordability that the Liberals say they are creating for Canadians, when really they are just making everything more expensive.
The cost of shelter has doubled. Mortgages have doubled from $1,400 in 2015 to $3,100 in 2023. Rents have doubled from $973 to $1,760, and that is for a single bedroom. Life is not affordable. Again, it is a result of what the Liberal government is doing. It is taking all this money and handing out little bits, little scraps, like this fake day care plan.
The housing minister could not say what rent was in Kelowna when the member for Kelowna—Lake Country asked last week. That is an example of how out of touch the government is.
The government is raising payroll taxes on workers in small businesses. A worker who is making above $66,000 will now need to pay an extra $255 to CPP and an extra $50 to EI, and of course we have the carbon tax. The carbon tax went up 14¢ a litre on April 1. We know that the carbon tax is driving up the cost of gas and groceries, as I indicated. Those groceries have to get to the supermarket somehow. They go through vehicles, which use gas, so there is a double taxation there.
Then there is home heating, something that all Canadians need, yet the government has called Canadians “polluters” in the past. It called grannies in the Maritimes “polluters” when really Liberals are creating the cycle of poverty to make people dependent on them. An average family will spend between $402 and $847 a year more on the carbon tax.
I have talked about all of these other things. I have talked about how the government needs to reduce inflationary spending because the cycle that it is creating drives up the cost of living for Canadians and drives them down into poverty, and then Canadians are forced to accept these scraps, like this $10-a-day child care.
This $10 day care is an illusion, because if it cannot be accessed, it does not exist. It does not help thousands of families and children on the wait-lists or the operators who do not have the staff or the infrastructure. It has been said that in the future there will only be one space for every three children who need it and that a shortage of 8,500 child care workers will exist in this country by 2026. Perhaps the government could use a pink seal program, something very similar to the blue seal program that our leader has put forward for the trades. In B.C., 27% of child care centres turn away children due to a lack of staff. In Ontario, by 2026, 38% of kids will not have a space.
The thing about this is that the Liberal government has the audacity to think that it can do things better than the common people, better than Canadians. Where have we seen the failure of this? We have seen it with passports, from the very minister who is responsible for this program, and with the immigration backlog, and with the inability to negotiate a public service deal over two years.
Also, what does this say about mothers? So many moms would rather just stay home with their children, but they cannot. They cannot because the Liberal government has made us into a country of two-paycheque families. Two paycheques are needed to keep a family functioning, to keep a roof over their heads and to keep them fed.
As well, what does it say about the women who operate these day cares? They are closing them down, taking away income from families, and often it is new Canadian families.
In conclusion, the Liberal government's talk about making life affordable for Canadians is a lie. Inflationary spending and taxation drive up the cost of living for Canadians and for businesses. It drives Canadians into poverty. They cannot eat, they cannot afford rent, and businesses close. I will not even get into the natural resources sector.
The government throws scraps at Canadians. This day care program is one of the scraps. “Making life affordable for Canadians” is a lie. This day care program is one of them.
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Mr. Speaker, that is the whole point. We should be debating ways to find efficiencies within the government to lower taxes and to lower spending. Instead, we are wasting our time here in this House, creating programs to make the government look good and to pretend to Canadians that it is doing something.
I absolutely agree with the member that we should be doing things that actually benefit Canadians, like decreasing inflationary spending and decreasing taxation so that Canadians can buy whatever they want in the grocery store, so that Canadians can actually purchase a home, and so that Canadians can make the choice for a parent to stay at home if they want.
The Liberals are perpetuating their lie. That is what they are doing, and Canadians are catching on to it.
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Mr. Speaker, as my colleague said, fortunately there is the right to opt out with compensation. However, when I read that a “Multilateral Early Learning and Child Care Framework” would apparently fall under the federal spending power, I admit that concerns me.
Am I right to be concerned?
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