44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 8, 2023 10:00AM
- Jun/8/23 2:12:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, earlier this week, the Bank of Canada raised the interest rate for the ninth time since February 2022. Of course, this should come as no surprise, given the budget the Liberal government tabled in March.
The real surprise was the budget itself. We thought relief was on the way when the finance minister admitted that deficits cause inflation, and then she added another 60 billion dollars' worth of fuel to the inflationary fire. The Liberal government’s deficits have caused the inflation crisis, and this in turn has caused higher interest rates, which has now put Canadians across the country at risk of losing their homes.
The IMF has warned that Canada is at the greatest risk of mortgage defaults out of all advanced economies. What is the solution? It is very simple. It is to stop the deficits, which would stop inflation, which would stop the interest rates from going up and stop the defaults. The Liberal government needs to stop its out-of-control spending before it is too late.
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- Jun/8/23 2:13:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, batten down the hatches. Canada is at the greatest risk of mortgage defaults of any other developed country, and it is because the Prime Minister is steering this ship right off course.
Liberal government deficits are causing inflation. Inflation is causing higher interest rates, and higher interest rates are causing Canadians to default on their mortgages. The Liberal government is forcing Canadians to sink or swim, but we know that most are barely treading water. Nearly half of all homeowners are finding their mortgage payments unaffordable, and Canada has the highest household debt in the entire G7. Liberal inflationary spending, red tape and government gatekeepers are leaving Canadians underwater.
Conservatives have a solution to right the ship and get our country’s compass pointing towards prosperity once more. We will stop the deficits, which will stop the inflation, which will stop the interest rates from going up, which will stop the defaults. Let us bring it home.
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- Jun/8/23 2:18:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians learned yesterday of the devastating news to their household budgets. The Bank of Canada has hiked interest rates once again, which are now 19 times higher than they were just one year ago. Plain and simple, Canadians are at the most risk of any advanced economy for mortgage defaults, according to the IMF.
Let us make no mistake about it. These rate hikes are caused by Liberal inflationary deficits. The finance minister admitted it just weeks ago, before adding $60 billion in new deficits instead of balancing the budget. The economics here are simple. Liberal government deficits cause inflation, which cause higher interest rates, which cause mortgage defaults. The solution is simple too. Liberals must stop the deficits, which will stop the inflation, which will stop interest rates from going up, which will stop the defaults.
The Prime Minister admitted he does not spend a lot of time thinking about monetary policy, and now Canadians are paying for it. Mortgage payments are going to go up another 40%. It is time for the Liberals to smarten up and get the crisis they caused under control.
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- Jun/8/23 2:25:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague has a selective memory. The Conservative leader clearly said that there are two things the government must do. First, it should not create new taxes and, more importantly, it should have a plan to reduce spending and get to a balanced budget.
Why have a balanced budget? That would honour the word of the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance who said that deficits add fuel to the inflationary fire.
Does the Deputy Prime Minister still agree with herself, namely that they really need to control spending and, most importantly, aim for a balanced budget for all Canadians?
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- Jun/8/23 2:35:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canada is supposed to be a place of prosperity, hope and opportunity, yet for far too many Canadians it has become a place where they can no longer afford to work, to live and to thrive. Earlier this year the finance minister admitted that her Liberal deficits were driving inflation. Still, they added $60 billion of inflationary fuel on a cost of living fire.
We know that deficits lead to inflation, inflation leads to interest hikes and interest hikes lead to mortgage default.
How many Canadians will lose their homes before the Prime Minister learns his lesson?
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- Jun/8/23 2:52:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Liberal deficits and spending have caused inflation to reach a 40-year high, which caused interest rates to reach a 22-year high. These rates will cause mortgage defaults.
We have made-in-Canada inflation, and people cannot afford the government. We need to stop fuelling the inflationary fire, stop interest rates from going up and stop people from losing their homes.
When will the Prime Minister stop his inflationary deficit spending?
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- Jun/8/23 2:53:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberal member just does not get it. The government refuses to take any responsibility for what it has done to affect the cost of living of Canadians.
For example, a local food bank in my community told me that they registered 294 new households in March alone, with the fastest-growing demographic needing help being two-parent, working households. Inflationary deficits are crushing families' finances.
When will the Prime Minister give people hope and end the inflationary deficit spending so that Canadians can afford to stay in their homes?
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Mr. Speaker, it is important to be clear about what the government has spent money on. When the Conservatives talk about those deficits, those deficits were spent on such things as CERB, the Canada emergency response benefit, or the Canada emergency wage subsidy, which quite literally kept households afloat during the pandemic.
When it comes to what we are spending on right now, we are spending on such things as the Canada workers benefit. That is in the current budget, which the Conservatives are delaying, and it will help the lowest-income Canadians have more access to more money.
If the Conservatives truly cared about helping low-income Canadians, they would support Bill C-47. They would vote with us, and they would—
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- Jun/8/23 3:00:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, massive deficits cause inflation. Inflation causes rate hikes. Rate hikes make mortgage payments unaffordable. Unaffordable payments lead to mortgage defaults.
However, there is a solution. The Liberal government could stop the deficits, stop inflation, stop rate hikes and prevent defaults. Even the finance minister agreed with this basic advice a few short months ago.
When will the Prime Minister end his inflationary deficit spending?
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- Jun/8/23 3:01:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the latest interest rate hike is having a devastating effect on Canadian homeowners and homebuyers.
Half of homeowners say that their mortgage is already barely affordable now, and shocking higher payments are only one renewal away. Rate hikes are also crushing the dreams of new homebuyers and threatening to collapse transactions that are currently in progress.
When will the Prime Minister take the advice of former Liberal finance minister John Manley, take his foot off the inflationary gas pedal and rein in his deficits?
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- Jun/8/23 3:05:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister and his speNDP junior partners have caused a problem. Their massive inflationary budgets have caused rate increases, which cause mortgage increases, which cause defaults on homes for Canadians.
We have the solution. The solution is to stop the deficits, stop the inflation, stop the interest rate hikes and stop the defaults on homes.
I have a simple question: When will the Prime Minister stop his inflationary deficit spending?
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- Jun/8/23 3:33:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as it is Thursday, we would ask the House leader on the government side if he could inform us as to what the Liberals have for their agenda next week. Specifically, the Conservatives would like to know if the Liberals have a plan to address the higher deficits, the higher inflation and the higher interest rates they have caused, which are causing people across this country to be worried about losing their homes.
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Mr. Speaker, I am always pleased to rise in the House to speak on behalf of my constituents, and today we are debating Bill C-35, an act respecting early learning and child care.
I spoke on this bill at second reading, before it went to committee. After reviewing my comments from my previous speech, I do not see many improvements that would address the very important concerns I have with this legislation.
From the outset, I want to affirm that Conservatives support making child care more affordable for families. That is why, back in 2006, our Conservative government created the universal child care benefit, which put money directly in families' pockets to spend on their priorities. At the time, the Liberals claimed that families would just spend it on beer and popcorn, but they have since come around to our position with their improved Canada child benefit, which combined a number of already existing child care benefits, including the Conservative universal child care benefit, under one program.
The Liberals have moved forward with their new Canada-wide early learning and child care initiative. In budget 2021 it was projected to cost $25 billion, at least, over five years. Now, due to record-high inflation and high demand for limited, affordable child care spaces and limited professional child care workers, this number has undoubtedly become far larger.
I would remind the House that this program is being funded entirely by borrowed money, and the cost of these Liberal deficits and higher interest rates means that, for every billion dollars borrowed, they will pay an additional $45 million in interest every year.
I am very excited to see the new movie Oppenheimer. Thinking about that movie got me thinking about the brilliant Albert Einstein. Einstein is reported to have said that the eighth wonder of the world is compound interest. Those who understand it will receive it, and those who do not understand it will pay it. I do not think the Liberal government understands it because compound interest is truly a powerful force.
As the Liberals borrow billions more each year to fund their programs, that interest compounds. At the current interest rates of 4.5% for Canada government bonds, the interest cost for a plan that costs a billion a year will exceed and rise exponentially as long the government borrows year after year. These deficits are radically increasing the interest costs Canadian taxpayers will have to pay. Eventually, this debt has to be repaid. It is Canadians and the economy that will suffer because the government will either have to borrow more or tax Canadians more to pay for it.
We have always given the Liberals a hard time. We have called them the tax-and-spend Liberals, but today we have something that is far worse. We have the borrow-and-spend Liberals. At least with the tax-and-spend Liberals, they would go out and raise taxes to try to gather money to pay for their programs. With the borrow-and-spend Liberals, they conjure this money out of thin air. They create new money in the system.
This creates inflation in two ways. By competing for capital in the economy, they raise the cost of everything from mortgages to business lines of credit, which thus raises the cost of owning a home, running a business and many other things. The second way it creates inflation is when they spend that money. When government spends the money it borrowed, it is competing with consumers and businesses for goods and services, which raises the cost of everything.
The Liberal child care plan is proving to be not only an expensive failure, but also extraordinarily inflationary. I have spent the last two years, since the government brought forward this program, consulting with families and child care operators. Very few of them have anything good to say about these programs. While some families have benefited from lower child care costs, there are at least tens of thousands of Canadian children who are stuck on waiting lists. Some of them have been stuck on these waiting list for years. Their children will be in kindergarten before a spot ever opens up, if it ever does, so they will not benefit from this program.
The guiding principles under section 7 about funding in this bill say that this program must be accessible, affordable and inclusive. The program has been implemented over the past couple of years. It is still in the process of being fully implemented, but looking at the outcome of what we have seen so far, the program, as it stands, is not accessible. At least 50% of families have not been able to access an affordable care space. It is not affordable because those families that cannot access a space are still paying the full unsubsidized price for child care, and it is certainly not inclusive because these families are from all sorts of communities.
Because this is a universal child care plan, it does not matter if a family earns hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or a family is below the poverty line. There is no consideration for lower-income families or special dispensation for these families, so what we are seeing is that marginalized communities are being further marginalized by being excluded from programs. As such, on its own principles, the government is failing to achieve what it said its principles are.
The government also said under paragraph 7(1)(b) of this legislation that the bill must provide access that enables “families of all income levels, including low incomes, to benefit”. Before the implementation of the Liberal early learning and child care plan, many families across Canada already benefited from subsidy programs provided by their municipalities and provincial governments. These low-income families were paying far less for child care than the top rate that most middle-income and upper-income families were paying. These families were already benefiting from government subsidies in some form or another. However, because the government has implemented a universal system that does not take into account means testing of income, we have a flood of people from middle- and upper-income families taking spots in the system, and low-income families that could get subsidized spots in the system are no longer benefiting from these spots. Therefore, on another principle of this legislation, the government's already existing child care plan is failing.
Statistics show that the demographics of people who were already accessing child care in this country before the implementation of this Liberal plan were primarily middle- and upper-income families. Those middle- and upper-income families that already had a child care space are the primary beneficiaries, because they never had to wait on a waiting list since they already had a child care space. When the government took the $1,500 a month families were paying and brought it down to $500 a month, it was putting $1,000 a month in the pockets of primarily middle- and upper-income families.
This fails on the standard and principle of creating equity and fairness, because we know that inflation impacts lowest-income families the most. Lowest-income families spend proportionally more of their income on things like shelter and housing, transportation, food and other things. As such, when these families do not get access to child care, they continue to spend a lot of money. When higher-income families get access to these government subsidies, which they are currently, they get extra money in their pockets and spend it on things that are not necessarily shelter or necessities because they are of higher income and it is a lower proportion. They are spending money on more restaurants, a new vehicle or maybe a bigger house. As we are seeing, these are areas where inflation is really rising in this country.
This is another example that demonstrates the inflationary power of the government's legislation. The people who are being hurt the most are the lower-income families, because the prices of things are being pushed further and further beyond their reach.
I spoke to child care operators and asked what the biggest problem they are facing is, and they said labour is the biggest problem. They said to me that currently in Ontario the most they can pay a child care operator is $25 an hour. That is annualized at about $48,000 a year. There was a woman working at a day care centre who has been working there for 30 years, and she is getting paid $25 an hour. She is making less today, after inflation, than she was making when she started 30 years ago. For a high school or university graduate coming straight out of school, an entry-level job in the federal government will pay around $48,000.
A 30-year professional child care operator under this Liberal plan, which the Liberals say will raise wages somewhat, is making less than an entry-level worker for the federal government, and with competition for labour, they are losing people left, right and centre. They cannot retain people, and because of the restrictions and regulations the government has put in place under this legislation, they cannot compete for this labour. Their hands are tied and they are losing staff, which means losing capacity and increasing wait-lists. This is an unfolding disaster that families are seeing across Canada.
Finally, the child care director told me that the reason families cannot get spots is that the government has capped the number of spots it will fund. These families cannot get spots because the government is choosing not to fund them. The government is responsible for the wait-lists we are seeing in this country.
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