44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 21, 2023 02:00PM
- Jun/21/23 5:39:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour and privilege to follow and share my time with the future prime minister of Canada.
When I was a little boy, my grandfather used to read—
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- Jun/21/23 5:39:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour and privilege to share my time with the future prime minister of Canada.
When I was a little boy, my grandfather used to read to me a great Canadian poet, Robert Service. The poem that he would read to us was The Cremation of Sam McGee, which starts:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.
The greatest line from that whole poem was, “Now a promise made is a debt unpaid”.
When we said things are broken, what is broken the most are the promises to Canadians: promises for a better life and a way to boost the ability and the affordability of the middle class and those who hope to join it, a promise for a better life in Canada with ample affordable rent and housing, a promise for a good paycheque and a promise for law and order.
When we said things were broken, these promises were broken, and what is left are broken promises, empty promises that are leaving Canadians with empty wallets and the debt that is left unpaid.
Canadians deserve better. They deserve the best, and the Liberal government has failed to deliver. It is our duty to effect change and to ensure that our hard work in this House today ushers in a better tomorrow for all.
The Liberals have stood for far too long with years of hopeful policy that has only led to empty promises and empty wallets for Canadians, especially in the middle class. With more than eight million Canadians using food banks, it is plain that more people than ever before are finding themselves out of the middle class. Rising interest rates are hammering homeowners, renters and businesses as every increase takes more out of Canadians' paycheques and wallets and gives it back to the government. As a business owner, I can say it is hard to watch.
Milton Friedman said it best back in 1992, over 30 years ago, when he said that although printing money has some immediate benefits that seem desirable in the short term, it can lead to harmful consequences in the long term, causing deficits that lead to inflation. The good effects come first, and it feels good. The bad effects only come later. There is a strong temptation to overdo it, but when governments stop printing money, it is the opposite: The bad effects come first and the good effects only come later. It is hard to reverse and it is addicting.
After promising teeny-tiny deficit spending before COVID and before the election in 2015, the government spent $100 billion prior to COVID-19 on deficits. The government printed that money. Then, after COVID, it printed $200 billion of non-COVID deficit inflationary spending, and then in this budget, after the finance minister promised to get his house in order, we see that the government is printing $63 billion, saying that it is bringing it down to $43 billion because $2,400 of new taxes per middle-class-income family is going back to those households.
This is the invisible tax that is taking hold further. Inflation rates have driven food prices up more than 10%. This invisible tax steals from Canadian incomes and steals from Canadian wallets.
We know that the solution to inflation is to stop printing money and make more of the things that money buys. Doing this creates powerful paycheques by creating more of the stuff that we need in Canada that we are short of, and powerful paycheques mean more money in people's pockets.
The complacency of the current Liberal government has fostered an environment in which our nation's doers and dreamers are forced into a playing field that is anything but level, and it is harder than ever to create those paycheques. Companies in Canada find it increasingly difficult to operate in Canada because of increasing costs caused by inflation, higher interest rates on their loans and the complete inability to hire talent and workers whom they need to generate income for their companies.
We have red tape. We cannot get LNG out of the ground. Our leader talked about this. We need faster building permits. A mine should take two or three years, not 25.
Furthermore, we have big, bossy institutions that dominate our marketplaces with rules that protect them and not our small business owners, who find it hard to grow their businesses. Although the almost 1.2 million small and medium-sized enterprises in Canada make up 98% of all businesses in Canada and employ 10.5 million people, or 54% of the workforce, monopolies run this country.
In this game of Monopoly, Canadians lose. We pay $200 every time we pass “Go”. Every time we roll the dice in the game of Monopoly, and kids hate this game, we land on Telus or Rogers or Air Canada or VIA Rail or InBev beer or RBC or Bell Canada or Mastercard, and we lose every time. No one wins.
The simplicity of bringing down prices is that it is about something very simplistic. It is about freedom, freedom of choice for consumers in a free market that is not dominated by monopolies. It is about free and honest competition, about fostering our small and medium-sized enterprises and allowing them to grow.
Competition is anything but competitive in the Canadian telecommunications sector, where Canadians pay the highest cellphone rates on the planet, rates that are three times higher than they are in Australia and double those in the U.S. and Europe. Is this competition? I think not. The landscape has been gamed to favour the monopolies, leaving consumers without choice. Without competition, these telcos do not have to earn our confidence and our hard-earned dollar; they just demand it. We pay for it, as some of the highest prices in the world can be found on our bills every single month. Everyone in Canada has a cellphone.
The Liberal government campaigned on lower bills and more choices. It said they would be 25% lower. Today, those empty promises come with a significant price. The Canadian telephone monopolies have suffocated start-ups and silenced critics. If they cannot win by offering the prices that they do, they buy their competitors. They have bought more competitors to take them out of the market than anything else.
We must fight for freedom of choice for Canadians. We must create an environment that breeds competition in a fair and open market. We must fight to ensure that our hard-earned dollar is equal to the affordable and reliable service that we all deserve, because the Liberal Party’s empty promises just mean empty wallets.
It is the same in all sectors, and the solution to see Canadian paycheques grow is to have Canadian businesses grow. We need more homes. We need microchips. We need food. We need farms. We need food processing. We need LNG.
It is also about keeping Canadian IP in Canada. Canadians invented peanut butter, the zipper, the Ski-Doo, the Sea-Doo, the pacemaker and the WonderBra. Where are all of these inventions in the past decade?
We dedicated billions in funding to R and D, which gets pilfered by our foes and allies. We have put millions into battery research in the east coast at Dalhousie, but who owns that battery research? It is Tesla. We put millions into the Sidewalk Labs at Google. Who owns that research? It is Google. We are still paying for research from Huawei in our Canadian colleges and universities. Who is paying for that? It is Canadian taxpayers.
Again, we have not been smart at all with where we are putting our investments. When it comes to looking after Canadians’ money, it is all about one thing only: It is about investing in Canadians’ futures, and we have not been doing that.
People with good intentions make promises; only people with good character keep them. There were promises made and a debt unpaid, leaving Canadians with more debt owed than any generation before them.
The moral of this story is this: Do not make promises that you do not intend to keep. Perhaps the real lesson here is that promises made are only as strong as the person who gives them. If we cannot trust what someone is saying, we need to turn to a new voice.
A Conservative government will be that voice, a voice for all Canadians in a time of need. As families struggle to make ends meet and sacrifice daily to put food on the table, the last thing they need is more empty promises.
A Conservative government will rise above the unnecessary layers of bureaucracy that have stalled out in bringing about much-needed change. Action is what we offer, and bringing home paycheques to fill emptying wallets is what Canadians deserve. It is what the future deserves, and this future government will bring it home for Canadians.
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- Jun/21/23 5:49:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is three more than the Liberals have ever delivered to Canadians.
The simple fact is that whenever Conservatives get in, they tend to clean up the mess from the previous government. We saw a pattern here. We talk about it. Every 30 years, we tend to learn those lessons. We saw that pattern after the current Prime Minister's father was in government. We are certainly seeing the pattern now.
The whole premise is that as Conservatives and as Canadians, we believe that the only people we need to be listening to are Canadians, but when it comes to fixing this mess, it is going to be Canadians who also fix it, resulting in powerful paycheques, businesses that get rid of red tape and lower taxes to create new jobs for workers who want a better paycheque and who want to work in those jobs, who want to make this country a better place.
Conservatives are going to do that. We look forward to many balanced budgets in the future.
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- Jun/21/23 5:51:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, there is a perfect correlation in the fact that all governments that ran greater deficits ended up with higher inflation.
Something that we do not hear bandied around any more, although we used to in the beginning, is the modern monetary theory, this whole new proposition that we can spend our way out of a pandemic, out of a major problem, and that budgets would balance themselves. There was new thinking, although money has been around for thousands of years, that we could just keep spending and there would be no consequences. Well, the consequences are here and they are very real, and Canadians see them every single day.
This motion that we have is perfect, because it talks about going back to the table to return to balanced budgets. We have identified so clearly that Canadians know—
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- Jun/21/23 5:53:09 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we stand up for all of those people.
I think the simple premise, though, is that this party over here is supporting a government that is failing Canadians in every single aspect of their lives right now, with the homes that they cannot afford and the rents that they cannot afford. We see it every time a single mother tries to fill up her car, pay her rent or get groceries. This party is propping up the government right now and not solving any of those problems. We are the only party in the House right now standing up for Canadians, standing up for their rights and their future, and we will continue to do so.
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