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Mr. Francis Scarpaleggia (Lac-Saint-Louis, Lib.)

Jun/1/23 10:59:38 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, since we are talking about fuel, gasoline and the like, today, I would like to ask you a question. It is a rhetorical question; I am not expecting an answer. Do you have a car? I am sure you do. I am sure you drive on two-lane highways and three-lane highways. If you are like me, you see, every now and then, a car that moves from one lane to the next and then back again, sometimes without even signalling. That is frustrating and it is dangerous. I will come back to that car later. The official opposition has a gift for holding two contradictory positions at the same time. It is a clever balancing act, and, in some ways, I am impressed. I find it disturbing in a way, but it is clever in its own way. The official opposition can argue both sides at once. It is as though it wants to have its cake and eat it too. I will give an example. We hear, every day, that inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods. In other words, it is caused by a record expansion of the money supply during the pandemic. The next day, the official opposition says inflation is cost-driven, principally by the price on carbon, not by any other factor impacting costs, like supply chain bottlenecks and so forth. I will give a second example. The official opposition gets up and says that the horrible drug problem we have in this country is because of the low price of street drugs, which has created high demand. However, when we talk about the high price of gasoline, somehow that does not curtail demand. In other words, it seems like, according to the opposition, only those with addictions respond to the price mechanism. There are contradictions everywhere. I will give a third example. The official opposition has been for the price on carbon, and then it has been against the price on carbon. I would suggest that every Conservative MP in the House owes their constituents an explanation as to why they ran on a platform to impose a price on carbon yet abandoned that platform commitment very shortly afterward. They call the price on carbon a tax, but we are in an alternate reality here. The price on carbon is simply a transfer. They then call the clean fuel standard a second tax, but when it comes to the clean fuel standard, the government is not imposing any kind of charge. The clean fuel standard is not a tax; it is a regulation. This brings me to the fourth example of Conservative contradiction. For years, the Conservatives have been saying no to a price on carbon. That was before the 2021 election platform. Before that, they traditionally favoured regulation, as if regulations do not have a cost. They would say that they are not for a price on carbon, and that they prefer regulation, because, they say, there is no cost to regulation. It is very simple. It is like a magic wand. They will combat climate change through the magic wand of regulation, which, according to the Conservatives, costs nothing. The clean fuel standard is a regulation. No money goes to the government. It will result in the transfer of credits between companies, but only if a company does not meet its intensity target. It is not even clear how many credits a company or an enterprise would have to purchase, and since we do not know how many credits a company would have to purchase in 2030, we do not know what the cost impact of the purchase of those credits will be. The clean fuel standard is something Conservatives should approve of and support, because it will drive innovation. We know that Conservatives like that, because, as the solution to climate change, they always invoke the magic word “technology”, which again they imply is something free. Technological advancement and innovation are often the result of government regulation and involve costs for research and development in order to arrive at new, more efficient technologies. The next thing they will be telling us, and this will be another contradiction in their discourse, is that the methane regulations the government brought into force, which are meant to stop fugitive and controlled methane emissions, are a tax, which they are not. We are in Alice in Wonderland; it is all sleight of hand. Then there is the Conservatives' fake math. They are pulling numbers out of thin air and omitting to tie them to specific dates. Do members remember “Triple, Triple, Triple” on the Conservatives' hit parade? That ditty seems to have fallen from the number one spot recently. It made it seem like the price was going up in multiples overnight, but the price on carbon goes up only $15 per tonne annually, or 30% from 2022 to 2023, not 300%. I think the Conservatives got the decimal point wrong. It will go up in a declining percentage every year: 23% from 2023 to 2024, then 19% from 2024 to 2025. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which is no friend of the Liberal government, estimates that, after the 2023 increase on the price on carbon, the total impact of carbon pricing will amount to an extra 14¢ per litre, not “triple, triple, triple". There is another thing the opposition omits, and that is the rebate, which is what makes the price on carbon a transfer. Milton Friedman, who agreed with the price on carbon, did in fact include a rebate in his formula. We know that the leader of the official opposition is a disciple of Milton Friedman. I think Milton Friedman would be very upset, if he were alive today, to know that the leader of the official opposition here in Canada is against a market mechanism like the price on carbon. Once the clean fuel standard regulations take full effect, according to figures the PBO obtained from Environment and Climate Change Canada, they will increase the price of gas and diesel by as much as 17¢ per litre, but that is in 2030. Conservatives never mention the date when they get up and say, “triple, triple, triple". They forget there is a calendar date that is far off into the future. There is another point I would like to make about the PBO study, which would be apparent to anyone who has studied economics. I do not know how many people on that side have studied economics, but I am sure many other people in the House have. The PBO's analysis is based on what is called “static” economics. It does an analysis based on the idea that everything else stays the same, so it does not take into account innovation, or the fact that companies innovate to meet the intensity target and will not have to buy credits, and so on. It is not real-time economics, and I would say the official opposition needs to get with real time. I will come back to the big, blue car on the highway. Conservatives are for a price on carbon, then are against it. Conservatives are for regulations that drive innovation, then are against them. That big, blue gas guzzler that zigzags incessantly across the highway needs to pick a lane.

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Context: House Hansard - 204 - Jun/1/23

Ms. Marilyn Gladu (Sarnia—Lambton, CPC)

Jun/1/23 1:28:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in the House and especially today for this opposition day motion, which talks about how the first carbon tax would increase the price of gas by 41¢ a litre and how the second, the clean fuel regulations, would add 20¢ more to that when sales tax is included. This will further exacerbate the cost of living issues that people are facing across the country. What I want to do today in my speech is talk about what the carbon tax will do, talk about what it will not do and talk about what real solutions should be offered. First of all, what does it actually do? It increases the price of things. It is not just the price of gasoline that is going up, because it is an escalator. For example, if we look at food, it has increased in price, on average, by 12%, but some items of food are up 30% and 40%. When we are talking about a farmer who is producing the food, they will have to use more diesel and fuel to heat their barns and take care of growing their products and drying them. There is a carbon tax on that. To make it worse, there is a tax on the tax. The Liberals are applying tax on top of that, and it is a substantial amount of money. We are talking about $150,000 for a farmer. That is a real thing that they obviously have to pass on to the consumer. Then they are shipping the product to a processing facility, and there is a carbon tax on that and a tax on the tax. Then at the processing facility, depending on the type of processing facility, there is a carbon tax on emissions. Then we are talking about shipping it to the grocery store. Again, that is another carbon tax and a tax on the tax. Then we get to the grocery store, and it has to be put in refrigerators. If the Liberal do not buy them, that is another expense, but then they are spending more energy trying to keep the products preserved. What is happening is this is hurting individuals. Before the pandemic, the data reported said that half of Canadians were within $200 of not being able to pay their bills. Let us think about that. Then fast-forward to where we are now, where we have added a second carbon tax that is estimated, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, to cost each individual $538 a year. Half of Canadians were within $200 of not being able to pay their bills every month, and now the Liberals have added $600 more. That is on top of the estimated cost of the already existing carbon tax, which the Parliamentary Budget Officer says, depending on the province we live in, is between $1,500 and $3,000 a person. By the time all these taxes, carbon taxes and the tax on the tax get to an individual, we are talking about $4,000 per Canadian. That is a substantial amount of money. If we break that down by month, we are talking $300 a month, which puts us way over the 50% of people who could not pay their bills if they had an increase of $200. The Liberals are going to say that Canadians get back more than they give, but we know that is not true. I have seen my climate action rebate cheque come to me, $128.55 four times a year. Adding that up, it is nowhere near $4,000. It is absolutely a misrepresentation of the facts to say the government is giving Canadians more back. No, it is not. I am getting calls at my office, continually, from individuals who are saying they cannot afford to pay their bills and are losing their house. I have a lot of seniors in my riding, and some of them have had to go back to work at 74 years of age in order to afford heating, gasoline, groceries, the whole thing. That is what the carbon tax is doing. It is adding to inflationary pressures that we already have from the out-of-control spending happening on the other side. That is what the carbon tax does. Let us talk a little about what it does not do. It does not reduce emissions. It is a tax plan; it is not an emissions plan. If we look to who has met their Paris targets, our neighbours to the south have met their Paris targets, and they did it through emissions reduction technology and switching to fuels like nuclear, LNG and lower-carbon fuels. These are actual, concrete solutions. They put capital incentives in place so that businesses would put emissions reduction technology in place. That is how they did it, and they did it in four years. If we look at where we are, we were supposed to reduce our targets by 30% from the 2005 level. The 2005 level was 732 megatonnes and we are now at 670 megatonnes. In 20 years, we have reduced 60 megatonnes, but the target we have to get to is a reduction of 538. We are nowhere near the plan. In the approach the Liberals have, they talk about tree planting. They are going to plant two billion trees. Do members know how many trees we already have in Canada? We have 318 billion trees in Canada and this is two billion more. More trees are always better, but the reality is that recent reports said the Liberals have planted less than 2% of these in years. It is because the program that was introduced does not work. I know a great group, Climate Action Sarnia-Lambton, that wants to plant trees. I approached the minister and said that we have lots of volunteers who are willing to come out. They have all the tools. We just need the money to get the trees and get them in the ground. Do members know what I heard? We have to plant 10,000 trees or we cannot get any money. We have to start somewhere with a program that works a little better than that. That is what the carbon tax does not do. I have heard this a lot in the discussion today during the debate: Well, what about the wildfires and what about the floods? We are seeing severe weather events and we are seeing them at a frequency that we have not seen before. However, Canada is less than 2% of the carbon footprint of the world. We could eliminate the whole thing and we are still going to get all of those wildfires and all of those floods, because we have countries, like China and India, that are building coal plants. China is 34% of the footprint. What would be better is if we exported Canadian LNG. We could reduce the global footprint by over 10%. We could reduce five times our existing footprint. That is real climate action. Instead, 12 LNG projects have been shut down by the Liberal government. The Germans approached us. Germany decided to go down the green energy path, and they found out that it was so expensive that they got rid of it and went back onto coal and LNG. They approached us to get a contract with us for $58 billion, which we refused. The Australians used to have a carbon tax. They got rid of it. It made everything more expensive and it did not help them meet their goals. We have a situation where countries are in need of our fuel. We are the most environmentally responsible producers of LNG in the world, but we cannot get anything built because a Bill C-69 project approval thing was put in place. We have seen the disaster that the government is making with the Trans Mountain project. It was supposed to be $7 billion and is up to $30 billion, and it is not even built yet. The carbon tax hurts Canadians. It inflates their costs. People cannot afford to live. They are struggling. I know that Liberal MPs are hearing this from their constituents and they need to listen. What we need to do is have emissions reduction technology, get on lower-carbon fuels, export them to the world and work together to get a better planet. That is what we need to do and that is the vision on this side of the House.

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Context: House Hansard - 204 - Jun/1/23

Mr. Ziad Aboultaif (Edmonton Manning, CPC)

Jun/1/23 3:43:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Regina—Lewvan. We need to start today with a bit of history. There is an expression that says those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. That appears to be true of the government, which has never met a tax it did not want to increase. The Liberal government first introduced its clean fuel standard in 2016. The effect on Canadians was noticeable. Some lower- and middle-income homeowners found it difficult to heat their homes due to the price increases associated with this standard. In effect, it was a tax on those who could least afford to pay it. Three years ago, the Department of the Environment put the direct costs of the clean fuel standard on Canadian households at $2.4 billion, and I am sure it is way more now. The Liberal-NDP plan for the environment is not designed to combat climate change. It is a plan to increase taxes. The clean fuel regulations require liquid fossil fuel producers to gradually reduce the carbon intensity of the gasoline and diesel they produce and sell for use in Canada. That is a worthy goal, but what happens to producers that do not meet that standard? They will be taxed. What will they do when they are taxed? They will pass the tax on to the consumer in the form of higher prices, which the Liberals do not mind because then they can add more taxes to the higher prices. With inflation already at historic levels, this new clean fuel regulations tax is a tax that Canadians do not need. Giving more money to the Liberals to help them mismanage the Canadian economy and the federal budget is not the way to fight climate change. After eight years of the Liberal government, Canadians have seen their lives become more unaffordable thanks to the inflationary carbon tax. Now the Liberals are bringing in a second carbon tax. Do they not understand that they are making life unaffordable? Do they not understand that people are struggling to make ends meet and that adding to that tax burden makes things worse, not better? I can see the looks on the faces of the Liberals. It is not hard to tell what they are thinking as I say this. I know what their questions will be when I finish speaking. They are going to ask me why I did not mention that their government is offering Canadians a carbon tax rebate, and whether I understand that the carbon tax does not really cost anyone any more. If that is the case, why have it at all? The truth is that the carbon tax is not offset by carbon tax rebates. It is a source of government revenue, just like any other tax. My Liberal friends do not want to admit that they find it better to live in a dream world than admit their taxes are hurting the people they are supposed to serve. They do not want to hear about the numbers the Parliamentary Budget Officer has given us. They do not want to talk about how their first carbon tax is going to cost the average Canadian family $710 this year after taking their rebate into account. They would prefer that I did not mention that once the second carbon tax is fully implemented, the cost to the average Canadian family after rebates will increase to $1,160 annually. Let us talk about the true cost of carbon taxes. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the second carbon tax will cost the average Canadian household an extra $573 per year without any rebate, with families in some provinces facing costs as high as $1,157. Both carbon taxes will have a net cost of up to $4,000 for each family depending on the province in which they live. The combined impact of the two Liberal carbon taxes will be an extra 61¢ for every litre of gasoline at the pumps. If the government was interested in economic growth, it would scrap the new tax and the existing carbon tax. The Parliamentary Budget Officer says the effect of the clean fuel regulations and the existing carbon tax will not help grow the economy but rather will shrink it. That is not what Canadians want from the government's policies. I have heard the Liberals' argument. They whine that the Parliamentary Budget officer was not being fair to them and that the PBO only took the numbers into account when making his calculations. The Minister of Environment and Climate Change has complained that the PBO has not taken into account the technological change the clean fuel regulations will help promote. I would love to hear about those changes from the minister. What new technologies have been developed as a direct result of this tax? My guess is the minister does not understand that taxes do not stimulate invention. If he wants new technologies, perhaps his government should try to encourage a climate where businesses and individuals are free to innovate. However, do not ask the PBO to calculate the benefits to the economy of some imaginary technology. That makes no sense. Perhaps in some Liberal fantasyland carbon rebates and carbon taxes balance themselves, just as budgets do. In the real world, these taxes hurt Canadians and provide no benefit to the economy or ecology of the country. Simply put, a tax is a compulsory contribution to state revenue imposed on taxpayers in order to fund government spending. That is what the clean fuel regulations are for. They are to fund government spending. They have nothing to do with combatting climate change. Unfortunately, the Liberals and their NDP allies appear to be blinded by ideology and uncaring as to the needs of Canadians. It is ludicrous to continually raise taxes at a time of high inflation and when grocery prices are soaring and Canadians are finding it difficult to make ends meet. The government is apparently determined to push through this tax no matter who it hurts. The reality is that the Liberal government's policies are fuelling inflation and making people poorer, which is why one in five Canadians is skipping meals and food banks are seeing record demand. The Liberals have no plan that will actually help Canada reduce its carbon footprint. The objective is to fund never-ending Liberal deficits. This scheme will only hurt our economy, discourage investment and increase the cost of everything in a Canadian household. As a Conservative, I oppose this tax and the burden it places on Canadian families. This is not the way to fight climate change. The way to fight climate change is through innovative technologies and harnessing Canadian brainpower, not through increased taxes. A Conservative government will govern with fiscal responsibility, axe these taxes and bring home affordability for Canadians.

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