44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 1, 2023 10:00AM
- Jun/1/23 12:29:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the chance to follow the great member from Newfoundland and Labrador, a man who has a stronger and more honest and powerful voice for Newfoundland and Labrador than all other MPs from that province combined. He understands that his job is to be the voice of Newfoundland in Ottawa, not the voice of Ottawa in Newfoundland. Indeed, that is all of our roles.
Here we are today in a country where nine in 10 young people believe they will never be able to afford a home, something that would have been unimaginable eight years ago. There are 1.5 million Canadians eating at food banks, and one in five are skipping breakfast, lunch or dinner because they cannot afford the cost of food. What do the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc think is the remedy for all of that? It is a 61¢-a-litre carbon tax.
Let us go back, though, and examine the history of this tax. First, the Prime Minister said that it would give people more money than they pay, a tax that makes them better off. He said he would send out cheques to give people back the money they paid. It turns out that the Parliamentary Budget Officer he named proved that people will end up paying approximately $1,500 more in taxes than they get back in rebates. Then the Prime Minister said the tax would never go above $50 a tonne, but what he realized was that his tax was so ineffective at tackling emissions that he would have to raise it more than triple that $50. Of course, that news came out after the election rather than before.
Another falsehood is that he said this tax would help us meet our emissions reduction targets. He has missed every single target he has set. He did not even meet them in the year 2020, when Canadians were locked down and banned from using their automobiles. Even then, his tax was so ineffective that it did not reach the targets he set. Those are three falsehoods on which he built the tax in the first place.
When the first tax failed, what was his solution? It was to bring in another one. If it failed once, do the same thing all over again. The definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again expecting to get a different result.
The Liberals now have a second carbon tax. The first one will take the price of a litre up 41¢ and the second will bring it up another 17¢, to a total of 58¢ a litre. However, they are not done yet. They want to charge HST on the tax and the tax, to get it up to a full 61¢ a litre in taxes. We can imagine, then, that a cost of a litre of gas will be two dollars, three dollars or maybe four dollars if the Prime Minister has his way.
We should keep in mind that higher gas prices are not a bug; they are a feature of Liberal Party policy. The goal is to raise gas prices. That is not a secondary consequence. It is the policy, and it is a policy supported by the NDP and the Bloc Québécois. The NDP, which pioneered the carbon tax, brought it to B.C. and has raised it in that province higher than anywhere else, is voting with its Liberal bosses in Ottawa to more than triple the carbon tax on British Columbians.
What are the consequences of a tax on energy? When one taxes energy, one taxes everything, because everything has to be dug, built, moved, cooled and heated using energy. Let us start with food. If we tax the farmer who grows the food and the trucker who ships the food, we ultimately tax the food itself. This is at a time when food price inflation is at a 40-year high.
We just got more evidence. The Prime Minister told us inflation is on the decline. Worry not; it is all over. The nightmare has ended and inflation is going away. What happened in the month of April? Inflation shot up again. Why did it shoot up in April? What happened in the last part of March? There were two things. One was that the finance minister introduced $60 billion of new inflationary spending, or, as she called it, gas on the inflationary fire, two days before the start of April. Then the carbon tax hit on April 1, April Fool's Day. The joke is on Canadians. The tax hits, the deficits hit and inflation is back on the rise. It is cause and effect.
However, they are just getting started. The tax right now is only 14¢ a litre. We used to say “triple, triple, triple”, but it is not triple anymore. The Liberals want to quadruple it and more, from 14¢—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Hon. Pierre Poilievre: Madam Speaker, it is quadruple, quadruple, quadruple, quadruple. There is a tongue twister, but it is going to be even more painful to pay than to say.
We have families already living in poverty, and we know that the rich guys will be fine. They have no problem. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, this latest carbon tax will hit the poorest people the worst. Those with the least will pay the most, because energy constitutes a bigger part of their family budget. Rich people spend a smaller amount of their family budget on energy.
We know that it will affect the single mom, the truck driver, the barber and the student who is trying to scrape together an extra $4,000 or $5,000 a year as part of his 25-year plan to save for a down payment. Those are the people who will end up paying this tax, and for what? Canada places 58th out of 63 nations in the climate change implementation index. We are behind the rest of the world. According to this index, China has a better record than the Liberal government. It is worse than the dictatorship the Prime Minister so admires when it comes to climate matters.
We get all the pain and none of the gain. If the Liberals want a real plan for climate change, why not technology and not taxes. Let us speed up and lower the cost of carbon-free energy.
Let us cut through the red tape and allow Quebec to build hydroelectric dams. This would allow Quebeckers to double the amount of electricity available for electrification. Under my leadership, the government will allow Quebec to speed up construction of this green energy network.
We could approve the wave power that Nova Scotia was attempting to permit with a private sector company, using tidal forces to bring electricity to the great shores of Nova Scotia and power its grid with lower emissions. I would have approved that in a millisecond. The bureaucratic gatekeepers blocked it for years, and the company got up and left. I will green-light green projects like that. I will green-light nuclear energy, allowing for small modular nuclear reactors to electrify places like Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. They have already signed memoranda of understanding to move forward with nuclear power, but not if it takes 25 years to get it permitted.
What kind of safety and environmental knowledge would we gain in the last 17 years of that process that we could not gain in the first three years? Why not compress the work? Yes, let us protect safety. Yes, let us protect the environment. However, let us do it quickly, because our environment and our energy grid cannot wait.
Finally, for carbon capture and storage, we would incentivize our mighty energy sector, which is the most advanced, sophisticated and ethical in the world, to reinvest some of its growth in cleaning its operations so we can have the lowest-emitting energy sector anywhere in the world and can put that carbon right back in the geological structures from whence it came.
All of these things are possible if we have a government in Ottawa that gets out of the way, green-lights green projects and incentivizes reinvestment of market revenues back into clean, green technology. The Liberals' philosophy is very different. If it moves, they tax it. If it keeps moving, they regulate it. When it stops moving, they subsidize it. That is a nonsensical approach.
What we have here is common sense. The common sense of the common people, united for our common home: their home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.
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- Jun/1/23 12:40:47 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have stood for exactly the same thing the entire time. When Prime Minister Harper was in office, he did not implement a carbon tax. He thoroughly and forcefully rejected the carbon tax the Liberal Party has proposed. Instead what he did was incentivize technology. That is why we reduced greenhouse gas emissions while growing the economy in this country. For example, we worked with the Province of Alberta and its tier system, which encourages large industrial energy companies to reinvest in reducing the intensity of their emissions. They succeeded, reducing emissions per barrel by approximately 30%.
This approach works. By using market forces and competitive technology, our free enterprise system can reduce emissions and build a cleaner, greener future that brings powerful paycheques home to Canadians.
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- Jun/1/23 12:42:40 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, are the members of the Bloc Québécois capable of being reasonable? Perhaps they are, but they certainly are not acting like it. We do not know why they are hardly ever reasonable. The members of the Bloc Québécois agree with the Liberals and the New Democrats on almost every political issue, except the location of the nation's capital. That is the only issue they disagree on.
The member mentioned that I said that nine out of 10 young people cannot buy a home. He says that has nothing to do with the carbon tax. I am sorry, but houses need to be heated, and heating requires energy. The carbon tax increases the cost of home heating, which means that many young people cannot afford a home. That is one of the reasons we want to eliminate this carbon tax.
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- Jun/1/23 12:44:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we are still against the carbon tax. The member will never be able to quote any statement made by me at any point in my political career that supports a tax on carbon. I have always been against it and I still am. The New Democrats want to raise taxes and income tax on the backs of the working class. The New Democrats are for the ultra rich, whom the government makes richer. We stand for ordinary folk, the people who work.
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- Jun/1/23 2:19:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Parliament passed a motion expressing its lack of confidence in David Johnston, the ski buddy, cottage neighbour and Trudeau Foundation member that the Prime Minister tasked with investigating Beijing's interference. In response, Mr. Johnston said that he was working not for Parliament, but for the government and the Prime Minister. That is the problem. Only 27% of Canadians trust him to do the job.
Will the Prime Minister finally fire David Johnston and appoint an independent judge for an independent inquiry?
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- Jun/1/23 2:20:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the Minister of Emergency Preparedness for his briefing yesterday with regard to the wildfires. I know that Premier Houston and other provincial leaders have been working hard to protect public safety, to save lives and to minimize damage to property.
Would the minister please rise and give us an update? Since the Government of Nova Scotia has asked for assistance, would the minister give an update on what assistance the federal government will provide?
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- Jun/1/23 2:21:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are in shock today that the Bay du Nord project is now being delayed by three years, and maybe forever.
The federal government killed two pipelines, bungled and massively overspent on a third, killed the Teck frontier mine and blocked 14 or 15 massive natural gas liquefaction projects that are necessary to fight global climate change.
Will the government remove its gatekeepers so Newfoundlanders and Labradorians can bring home energy production to their province and our country?
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- Jun/1/23 2:23:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, whenever the government henpecks to death a natural resource project, it forces the company to claim it has something to do with market conditions. It does that by threatening them to do more damage on other projects. We know the government did that with TransCanada's national pipeline, claiming that it was the daily price of oil that had caused the company to cancel a project that would have been place for more than half a century. We know that the price of oil has been stable now. We know that the energy demand is going to be continuing for at least half a century. We also know the government kills projects like this.
Why will it not get out of the way and let Newfoundlanders and Labradorians bring home paycheques for its people?
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- Jun/1/23 2:24:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the problem is that the Liberals cannot get out of the way to let people get things done.
It is not just oil and gas. The fisheries department blocked a tidal wave power project in Nova Scotia for so long that the private company that was going to build it left to build it somewhere else. By the government's own admission, it takes as long as 25 years to get a mine approved. It is no wonder we do not actually produce any lithium here in Canada. We have to import it from abroad. Yesterday, the resources minister tweeted a bunch of projects that are not even started.
Why will the Liberals not get out of the way so Canadians can get things done?
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