44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 6, 2023 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-47, the budget implementation act, this evening.
Canadians are facing a cost of living crisis; there is no doubt about that. Food, housing and fuel are all costing more these days. The more the Prime Minister spends, the more everything costs. Of course, even his finance minister has pronounced that the spending has driven inflation up. At a time when Canadians are already feeling the pressure of inflation on their personal finances, the Liberals' budget is adding $67 billion in new inflationary spending. These inflationary deficits are contributing to record-high food, housing and fuel costs, and I will briefly touch on the situation of each of these items.
The cost of food is at record levels. “Canada's Food Price Report 2023” predicts that a family of four will spend up to $1,065 more on food this year. That puts food-price inflation at a 40-year high, with costs pushing 20% of Canadians to skip meals because they cannot afford to eat. This is why the use of food banks has increased so dramatically. One in five Canadians says that they will likely need to get meals from a food bank this year; in fact, perhaps it will be longer than that in the future.
Some of the federal spending that has contributed to this inflation was the spending that took place during COVID. There was $500 billion that was spent or budgeted by the government and put into the hands of Canadians and out into the economy. Much of that was needed for things like housing, putting food on the table and keeping warm in our cold climate, but the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer came out and said that 40% of that, or $200 billion of the $500 billion, had nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Therefore, 1.5 million Canadians are eating at food banks and one in five is skipping breakfast, lunch or dinner, because they cannot afford the cost of food. High home prices have left nine out of 10 young people who do not own a home believing that they will never own a home, and it is not just teens or people in their early twenties but many who are much older than that. The down payment needed to buy a house has doubled from $22,000 to $45,000. Mortgage payments for a new house doubled from $1,400 a month to over $3,100. If high interest rates and inflation continue, by 2026, Canadians may end up paying an additional $30,000 to $40,000 in interest per year on their mortgages.
Then there are the high fuel costs, which are made worse by the Liberal carbon taxes. There is not just one carbon tax; now, there are two. With the Prime Minister bringing in a second, hidden carbon tax, the cost of gas, groceries and home heating will only continue to climb. The first carbon tax did not succeed in reducing emissions. The second one will not either, but it will still make life more expensive. The independent Parliamentary Budget Officer has indicated that the second carbon tax will cost the average Canadian household an extra $573 a year without any rebate. Families in some provinces will face costs as high as $1,517. Combined, these two carbon taxes will cost some Canadian families up to $4,000 each year. This is an extra 61¢ for every litre of gasoline, with 37¢ a litre from the first carbon tax, 17¢ per litre from the second and another 7¢ accounting for the sales tax applied to the carbon tax.
In Manitoba, the second Liberal carbon tax will cost the average household an additional $611 a year, bringing the full cost of the two carbon taxes to $2,101 by 2030. That is asking a lot from Manitoba families at a time when costs are already skyrocketing. It should not come as a surprise that the Parliamentary Budget Officer confirmed that this tax will shrink our economy. Families should not be left to struggle under the weight of the reckless Liberal approach, particularly after the pandemic that they have just been faced with.
That is why Conservatives are fighting to make life more affordable for families and pressing for two key things. First, the Prime Minister must give us a plan to end the inflationary deficits and spending and to bring down inflation and interest rates. Second, the Prime Minister must cancel his carbon tax hikes. Canadians are struggling, and acting on these proposals could help bring real relief to those struggling to make ends meet.
I have a parallel that I just want to refer to. When I was in the Manitoba legislature, we went through the years of Mr. Doer from 2000 to 2009, when he left. They were probably the best economic years in Manitoba's history. Mr. Selinger took over as premier from then until 2015, and those were very high-spending years. The province increased the provincial sales tax again. It increased the tax by 1%, but the province was debating whether it should be 2%.
Today, the Prime Minister's spending provides a great parallel to what happened in Manitoba, with the most high-spending NDP premier we ever had. This means that, today, we have the most high-spending Prime Minister we have ever had. Therefore, I would say we have already elected the first New Democratic prime minister in Canadian history, and he is the member for Papineau; it is ironic that he is in a coalition with the NDP to do it.
In order to deliver results for Canadians, Conservatives are bringing forward many amendments to the budget bill, and I hope all parties will recognize the importance of supporting these amendments to support all of our fellow Canadians who are struggling right now. The reality is that Canada's federal debt for the 2023-24 fiscal year is predicted to reach $1.22 trillion, as some of my colleagues have already said today. That is almost $81,000 for every household in Canada. The Prime Minister has added more debt than all the other prime ministers combined and has no plan to balance the budget or to control his inflationary deficits, which are driving up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay.
There are consequences to the government's actions, and we are seeing them now, as inflation erodes the spending power of our families, friends and neighbours. Conservatives have advocated for a plan to make Canada work for the people who work. Their paycheques should not be diminished because of their government's inflationary spending. Nobody wants to spend more and get less, but that is what inflation does. Instead, people's hard work should pay off. Every dollar they earn should be able to cover the costs of their everyday needs and, as often as possible, the extra things they enjoy, such as a weekend away, a night with friends or just something special for the kids.
One's ability to buy a home should not be diminished because of the government's inflationary spending. The Liberals' one-size-fits-all plan for mortgage development does not work in every area of Canada. Home ownership should not be only for the wealthy, but the way prices are going under the current government, it is hard for many who want to enter the housing market to make their dream a reality. By removing the government gatekeepers to free up land and speed up building permits, the government could have made a real difference in the lives of those who are looking to own a home.
I want to switch gears for a moment to talk about another important theme, and that is public safety. Again, in the budget, the Liberal government has failed to lay out a meaningful plan to respond to public safety issues in Canada. We are facing a 32% rise in violent crime since 2015. As my colleague, the member for Kildonan—St. Paul, has appropriately noted, 32% is not just a number. It represents 124,000 more very serious violent crime incidents that have impacted innocent Canadians across the country.
We want to bring home a nation that works for the people who do the work, bring home lower prices and powerful paycheques, and bring homes that people can afford. That is what we stand for on this side of the House, and we will keep fighting for that.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague could not be more wrong. That is the most ridiculous statement I have ever heard in the House, or one of them.
Particularly, he is saying that farmers are the cause of food going up. The government has put the carbon tax on all the inputs for all the industries in Canada.
The profits that he is talking about are coming right out of the pockets of the individuals that he is trying to say are saving the country. They are building the food, trying to keep crime down and providing industries with jobs. These are the companies that are providing jobs in Canada. They are also the ones that have to bear the government's taxation, and they are the ones that provide the government with billions and billions of tax dollars.
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Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleague for raising that very good question. It is one that I did not get to in my speech.
The costs of health care, of course, have gone up dramatically, as well, over these years. One thing I know from my 14 years in the Manitoba legislature is that the former premier of Manitoba, Mr. Doer, in about 2006, indicated that the Liberal government cuts to health care from the federal government to all provinces in Canada were huge. However, in Manitoba, they amounted to $252 million in 1995 dollars.
If one extrapolates that to today's money, 28 years later, one can see the damage of the cuts made in those early days by the Liberal government. They decimated health care across the whole country of Canada and left all these provinces with a huge drain on their financial budgets. The government basically off-loaded huge percentages of support for hospitals and nurses and doctors in all our provinces.
I would say that the transfers are more important than ever in health care. However, it is certainly a detriment to the province's abilities to be able to maintain and increase the services we have.
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Mr. Speaker, there are several things one could say about my colleague's great question. One is that he knows in British Columbia there were something like 15 LNG projects that could have been built when the Prime Minister came into power, and not one of them has ever been completed. Those dollars could have been used for what natural resources have been used for in this country, and that is to build the coffers of the federal government to make those transfers in education and health care back to the provinces so that we can all have the same level of health care across the whole country.
The other thing is that the profits from those companies are being used to make those transfers, but the member knows full well that the government has stymied the development of those industries with Bill C-69. If we want to talk about percentages of profit increases, we are talking about $40 barrels of oil a number of years ago that are now $80 a barrel. There is a doubling right there. It is very hard to compare percentages when we have a product that has doubled in price over the last five years.
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