44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 1, 2023 10:00AM
- Jun/1/23 10:29:46 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this very important debate that affects all families, particularly following such an eloquent speech by the member for Mégantic—L'Érable.
Climate change is real. Humans played a role in creating climate change and so humans have a role to play in reducing its effects. The government is proposing a tax to reduce the impact of climate change. That is not the path that we are taking.
As we speak, we know that 1.5 million Canadians used food banks this month. One in five families will skip a meal this week because they do not have enough money in their pockets.
Inflation is the highest it has been in 40 years. That is the daily reality of Canadian families. The government is saying that, in order to provide direct assistance to Canadian families who are struggling because they do not have enough money in their pockets and have to skip meals, it has to impose a new tax. The government has to create a new tax and take even more money out of people's pockets.
For years, Canadians who have been saving have noticed that, under the Liberal government, the price of housing has doubled, the cost of borrowing to buy a house has doubled and the down payment required to buy a house has doubled. All of that has happened in the eight years that the Liberal government has been in power.
Families are having a hard time. The government's brilliant idea for helping Canadians is to create a new tax, the Liberal carbon tax 2.0. The Liberals think that the issue of climate change can be solved by taxing Canadians, but we believe that that is not the answer, especially in inflationary times.
Let us get one thing straight. The system in Quebec is different from those in other provinces. Quebec has a carbon exchange. One thing that everyone seems to forget in this debate, especially the Liberals and the NDP, is that, in passing the act that created the Liberal carbon tax, the federal government gave itself the right to impose a price on carbon in all of the provinces, regardless of whether or not they had a carbon exchange. The federal government was the only one that knew how much more this would cost. The Liberal federal government wants to impose its philosophy on everyone. It is unfortunate to see people who call themselves nationalists agreeing with the invasive approach taken by the Liberal government, aided and abetted by its pal, the NDP.
For eight years, the Liberal government has been in power. For eight years, the government has been lecturing the entire planet. “Canada is back”: That is what the Prime Minister was so proud to say in Paris in 2015.
Canada is way back; it is really way back. In the last eight years, the government has failed to reach any goals, except one during the COVID tragedy. If the government's plan is to shut down the economy in Canada to achieve its goal, I do not think this is the right way to go, and it is certainly not the one we will follow.
This government talks a good game but never follows through. Need I remind members that the Minister of Environment, the founder of Equiterre, is now being personally sued because, according to the document filed with the Federal Court on May 6, 2022, the government talks a lot, but fails to react or take any concrete actions?
The Conservatives are not the only ones who can see that the government's track record on climate change is mediocre. The United Nations sees it too. Last November in Egypt, which is a strange place to hold a conference on climate change, but that is the venue the organizers chose, the United Nations tabled a report on the performance of the 63 most important countries in the world for fighting climate change. “Canada is back”, he said eight years ago.
What did the UN think? It ranked Canada 58th out of 63 countries when it comes to climate change. That is what the report says, and that number is not all.
Let us look at another table. How does Canada rank among the 63 countries in terms of greenhouse gas emissions? It ranks 57th. That is not bad. It moved up a rung. “Canada is back”, indeed—way back.
Now let us talk about renewable energy. How is Canada doing after eight years of Liberal government? It ranks 52nd out of 63, yet it is telling the whole world what to do.
In terms of energy consumption, we are not doing at all well. Canada ranks 63rd out of 63. Canada certainly is back, at the back of the pack. It could not go any lower, since only 63 countries were evaluated. The upshot is that Canada, which loves to lecture everyone else, ranks 58th out of 63. We are not the ones saying that. It comes straight from the UN, yet the Liberals want to tell us what to do.
As I said earlier, pollution is real and must be reduced. Everyone has to work together to reduce pollution. The Liberal approach of imposing a Liberal tax on carbon is not the right way to do that, much less when this tax is doubled. For Canadian families, that means $573 more. For Quebec families, it is $436 more. This is in addition to the carbon exchange that exists in Quebec. As my colleague from Mégantic—L'Érable said, according to the report by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, there is an effect, but it is difficult to pinpoint the price exactly because it is the business that must absorb the costs.
The second Liberal carbon tax will have a direct impact, in that families will need to pay $436 more.
Why does the Liberal carbon tax not work?
If every country in the world had a carbon tax pegged at the same level, we could look closely at that, but this is not the case. I would remind members that, geographically speaking, we have a rather imposing neighbour to the south. There are 40 million Canadians compared with more than 300 million Americans. The U.S. is our next-door neighbour and our most significant financial partner, but it is also our greatest competitor. Our economies are interconnected, and we are proud of that, we are privileged, but we still have to participate on equal terms and get the same results everywhere, so that we can then conquer the world. The carbon tax does not exist in the President Biden's United States.
I was very proud to welcome the President of the United States here. He was just a few feet away from me. There is no denying that it was exciting. He has taken a leading role in the global fight against climate change, yet he does not impose a tax in his own country. Why should we Canadians have one, when our main neighbour, main partner and main competitor does not have one? Perhaps it is because the United States knows it is a risky move to go after American families directly.
That is not to mention the fact that our country generates 1.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, whereas the United States generates 14%. We also know that China is responsible for one-third of the world's pollution and that India produces an enormous amount of pollution. Many emerging countries are increasing their environmental impact because their economies are doing better. We must keep that in mind.
The last time I checked, pollution travels. I have never seen a CO2 molecule travelling with a passport. Pollution knows no borders. If other places in the world do not have the same measures as we do in Canada, then we are just undermining our economy without obtaining the tangible results we are trying to achieve.
We believe that we need to take specific concrete action to reduce pollution with tax incentives for investing in the high-tech sector, that we need to give the green light to green energies, that we need to be proud of our Canadian expertise in exporting around the world, particularly to emerging countries, and that we must do all of this with the support and co-operation of the first nations. Those are the four pillars that will help us to combat climate change. That is what we need to do, rather than taxing Canadians.
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- Jun/1/23 11:14:32 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the champion of the environment, the hon. member for Repentigny.
I am going to do something I rarely do. I am going to make an aside, because today is my son’s birthday; my loyal equerry is 22 years old. My son is studying political science, and I thought that the best gift I could give him was to use one of his university papers. No one will be surprised to hear that the paper was on populism. Everyone will see me coming right away: I feel like the motion before us here today is more populist rhetoric than actual political debate.
I would like to use the reading grid my son presented in his paper. He gives the simplest definition of populism as being the act of developing a simplistic solution to a complex problem. In my opinion, saying that the carbon tax is responsible for today’s inflation is a simplistic solution to a complex problem.
Once again based on the vast knowledge of my son, Émile Simard, populism can also be defined as the political tendency to create division, to simplify and to exacerbate differences of opinion. Later on I will talk about some of the discourse used by the leader of the official opposition. Members will once again see this tendency to create division, to simplify and to exacerbate differences of opinion.
Populism can also be defined as the discourse and behaviours of persons who use rhetoric that combines reality with demagoguery, and that turn the people against ideological adversaries or existing institutions. Lastly, it can be said that all forms of populism berate institutions that do not sufficiently take popular aspirations into account. Populism caricatures political adversaries as elites who are not interested in taking the people’s ideas and popular wisdom into account.
Let us start there and analyze the proposal contained in the Conservatives’ motion today. Populism revolves around populist themes. One of these themes we often see relates to purchasing power. This is telling people that, thanks to the political action of one party, they will have more money in their pockets. The notion of purchasing power is the focus of our Conservative colleagues’ motion. Another populist theme is mistrust of science. Climate change was made up by scientists. Another theme is the irrational need to defend the fossil fuel industry, which, as we know, contributes significantly to climate change.
The Conservatives have tabled a motion here today that is textbook populism. It uses the inflationary context to advance their goal of antagonizing the members of the Liberal Party and the Bloc Québécois, who recognize that measures must be put in place to fight climate change. They are also trying to advance the agenda of the oil companies.
Let us be honest for a moment and say, right from the start, that those who are not populist and remain rational understand that there is no second carbon tax. What the Conservatives are talking about are the clean fuel regulations, which aim to reduce the carbon intensity of fuels. As a result, we can say that the Conservative discourse linking this policy to the current purchasing power crisis is populist; it is doomsday rhetoric aimed at demonizing the energy transition.
Let us say right from the start that the carbon tax that the Conservatives are talking about does not affect Quebec, but only Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. It must also be said that, for many years, the Conservatives have demonized the carbon tax. That was already the case under Mr. Harper. The goal is to score political points in the short term, which is another basic characteristic of populism.
It must also be said that, at the last Conservative convention, 54% of Conservative Party members rejected the existence of climate change. So more than half of Conservative Party members do not believe that climate change is real.
To counterbalance that, I recall that the hon. member for Durham, the former Conservative leader, had said that he wanted to put a price on carbon. I do not know what led to the carbon tax becoming a key issue for the Conservative Party. At the last election, we had a leader who said that we should still have a tax on pollution.
In my view, the Conservatives are using the Parliamentary Budget Officer because it suits them today, but we rarely hear them when the Parliamentary Budget Officer tells us about a phenomenon as important as the fiscal imbalance. I rarely hear the Conservatives say that they will use an opposition day to study this scourge of the Canadian federation that is the fiscal imbalance. Of course, if we synthesize all that, we are faced with simplistic solutions to the complex problem of inflation.
There is a problem that none of my Conservative colleagues have mentioned. I do not want to address the real problem, because then I would be guilty of populism myself. The problem no one has mentioned is the problem of Canada, which continues to increase the production of dirty oil and tar sands, an unconventional and polluting type of oil. This is the problem we need to tackle today in this federation if we want to fight climate change, which will have a considerable impact on the economy.
What my Conservative friends also often forget is that, historically, what has contributed the most to price fluctuations are fluctuations in the price of oil. We have seen that on numerous occasions. The gluttonous oil companies, which are forever increasing their margins, are earning record profits. We saw that during and after the pandemic. We need to ask these gluttonous oil companies, which are earning record profits, to make an extra effort, and not blame the carbon tax. This distorts reality.
There are ways to fight inflation. I will mention one in particular: increasing retirees' fixed incomes. We have been calling on the government to increase the OAS and GIS for quite some time now. I would have liked to hear my Conservative colleagues talk about that.
This brings me to the favourite topic of the Conservative leader, the member for Carleton and leader of the official opposition. I have heard the opposition leader denounce “wokeness” on numerous occasions. On a trip to Quebec, he said that the Bloc Québécois and the Liberal Party are woke parties. Here is a quote that made me laugh. While in Montreal, the Conservative leader said:
The Liberals and their woke buddies from the Plateau Mont-Royal are waging a war on cars. So, having listened to the common sense of the people from the Quebec City region, allow me to send an equally clear message: A Poilievre government will not fund a third link without lanes reserved for cars.
“Good common sense” is a populist term. When someone uses those words, they are usually a populist. Let us not forget the ultimate populist theme: driving. The woke are against driving. What is really funny is that the leader of Conservative Party was rebuked by Quebec's premier, who said that it was not the Liberal federal government that put an end to the third link, it was Quebec. The leader of the Conservative Party was rebuked.
I will conclude by saying that I am going to use a little populist discourse myself. Those we consider woke in Quebec are generally those who are against Bill 21, the secularism law, and Bill 96, the French language law. I know that the leader of the Conservative Party is against both these laws.
Is the Conservative Party a woke party because it is against Bills 21 and 96? That is what I want to know. Perhaps my son can give me an answer on his next birthday.
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