44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 3, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, the member opposite and I served on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, so he knows we have some disagreements on this.
The Bank of Canada Governor recently said that carbon pricing contributed 0.15% to inflation. That is equivalent to about 15¢ on a $100 grocery bill. The European Central Bank has estimated that climate change contributes as much as 3% to the cost of food per year globally, which is three dollars on a $100 grocery bill. This means that climate change has 20 times the influence that the carbon price has on food prices.
If the member opposite really wants to fight inflation and is serious about it, then why does his party not have a plan to fight climate change?
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Madam Speaker, the Liberals have had a carbon tax in place for many years, and yet I do not see grocery store prices going down. I do not see life becoming more affordable for farmers.
When I talk to farmers, their number one issue is not climate change. Their number one issue is Liberal government bureaucracy, red tape and carbon tax. It is the biggest stress in their lives.
Farmers in Canada do everything they possibly can to reduce their emissions. That is the thing the Liberals miss. They continue to punish Canadian farmers instead of rewarding them for what they already do. Instead of comparing them to Europe and asking Canadian farmers to get to where Europe is, they are thinking about this backward. What they should do is say they will help get Europe to where we are, with precision agriculture, zero till and 4R nutrient stewardship. Those are the things Canadian farmers are doing, and Liberals had better start recognizing that.
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Madam Speaker, when debating access to housing, there is one concern that is not mentioned nearly enough: access to affordable housing, community housing and even co-operative housing—
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- Oct/3/23 5:11:51 p.m.
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Order. I hear conversations going on. I do not know who was speaking, but it was certainly not just the member asking the question.
The hon. member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue can start his question over.
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Madam Speaker, I was saying that when debating access to housing, the thing we do not talk enough about, in my opinion, is access to affordable housing, especially community housing or even co-operative housing.
I would like to ask my hon. colleague the following question: What could the federal government do to improve access to these types of housing? Could a new law be brought in? What can we do to get more people into affordable housing?
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Madam Speaker, as a matter of fact, the first townhouse my wife and I had after we were married was in co-op housing in High River, Alberta. We certainly could not have afforded to start our family if we did not have that option.
Our leader, the hon. member for Carleton, has put forward a plan that will make housing more affordable in Canada, and that is to access 15% of federal buildings that are not being used. These could either be sold to the private sector or developed through a government program. Certainly, the plan would encourage the development of high-density, affordable housing around mass transit.
Those ideas are there, and we certainly hope to have the support of all parties in the House for the bill the leader of the Conservative Party has put forward.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to follow up on the question that was just asked by my colleague from the Bloc.
We had the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery in Canada, and he spoke specifically about the commodification of housing, where investments concentrate on private housing for wealthy individuals, but similar investments for social housing are non-existent.
The member talked about living in a co-op. Obviously, the New Democratic Party has been calling for co-ops and much more investment in social housing and below-market housing. However, we are not hearing the same thing from the Conservative Party. Would the member support significant investments not only in rental properties but also in below-market housing, in below-market rental properties?
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Madam Speaker, we have voiced our support all along. We know that there should be a variety of different options when it comes to housing. However, we cannot impose these things on municipalities, where they are not putting forward land designation and programs in place to do these things.
In fact, there is a town in my riding that has applied to many programs the Liberal government has put forward, but those municipalities that are doing things right do not qualify for those types of programs. These programs are there for the laggards. Therefore, we also need programs in place for those municipalities that have been doing it right and developing programs such as co-op housing.
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Madam Speaker, I am very proud to rise and speak to Bill C-56, technically an act to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Competition Act.
We need to frame the situation that Canada is in right now as a time when the chickens have really come home to roost after years of economic policies of the Conservatives and the Liberals. They told us that our cities would be better off if we let the market and global capital decide the value of our neighbourhoods and gave up the security that we had with union jobs and defined pension plans, if we turned our nation over to the Morneau Shepells of the world to decide what kinds of benefits we should have after a lifetime of working. We see the results.
When I go into stores in my region, people in their seventies, who used to be retired, are now working at places such as Tim Hortons, because they cannot afford to retire. I see the results when talking to men in my region who are 68 or 69 years old, who went back to work underground on the drills because they could not pay their housing costs. Working on the drills is hard for a young man, but 70-year-olds are going back underground because they cannot afford to pay these costs.
Another man I knew said he had to go back underground at 70 because he could not pay for his wife's medicine. We have a government that has talked about pharmacare since my hair was dark and long before that, and yet it still has not delivered. Of course, the Conservatives do not believe in pharmacare, just as they do not believe in the public programs that we and our parents built up over generations, which have been stripped away steadily under the belief in the free market, that we had free market in labour so that people were on precarious gig work. That was Bill Morneau. Members will remember when he told a young generation to get used to it; this would be their new normal. Of course, COVID blew all that away. Young people are saying that this is not going to be their normal, and they have started walking away from these jobs.
We see the situation where people cannot afford to buy their groceries because of the relentless price gouging of the likes of Galen Weston. We will never hear the Conservatives stand up to a CEO. For example, the other day, they were telling us that the price of potatoes in Calgary had gone up 70% because of the carbon tax. Calgary does not get its potatoes from P.E.I. It gets them from Idaho, which does not pay a carbon tax. In Idaho, the reason the price of potatoes went up is because of the climate crisis that is ongoing in the west. This is something the Conservatives will never admit, even in a year where we have lost 14 million hectares of forest lands and where over 200,000 people were forced to be evacuated in Canada, with billions in costs. That is what we get from the Conservatives.
The Liberals talk about it, but emissions continue to go up. The Liberals say they are going to sit down and meet with the CEOs of the grocery chains; hopefully, they will do something. Nobody believes them. We need stronger commitments. I do not know how many announcements and reannouncements I have heard in eight years from the Liberals about their commitment to housing, yet I still do not see those houses being built.
We need to take this issue seriously because of the price gouging that has gone on, the market exploitation and the turning of our cities over to Airbnb, which allowed young people and working-class people to be forced out of the cities they love. In my region, the housing and homelessness issue is at a crisis level. We never saw Doug Ford offer to build any houses in Timmins. He was willing to sell off the greenbelt, but we could use those houses.
This is the situation we are in, so people are frustrated. They deserve a straight vision. They deserve a commitment. How would that commitment look? Certainly, in terms of housing, we know that the market-driven solutions have driven us into this crisis. We know that what worked before, until the 1990s, when Paul Martin walked away on it, was the federal investment with the provinces and municipalities to build housing. The best solution is co-operative public housing that has mixed-income housing. That is what we need.
I need to be able to go back to my communities with a commitment that these houses are going to be built. There is not a quicker driver to build an economy than housing. We could do that today if there was will in this House to do that.
We need to get serious with the CEOs. We have talked about a windfall tax, but we need to actually make them deliver, or we have to start talking about issues like price controls. We know that people are being gouged, and we are in a situation where we cannot allow the oligopoly of grocery chains, because there is no competition, to call the shots, as they are doing. We need to limit their ability to continue to spread their powers as we see Shoppers Drug Mart moving more and more into health care. We simply cannot trust them. We need to protect the public health care system.
These are all the issues that are coming toward us at this time. I mentioned it quickly, but I want to actually really focus on how we are also in the middle of a climate catastrophe. We need to talk about the climate catastrophe. We have the leader of the Conservative Party, the member who lives in Stornoway, a 19-room mansion with his own personal chef, who would make burning fossil fuel free.
We are at an absolute crisis on our planet. We are also at a time when the International Energy Agency said, as of last week, that the end of big oil is imminent because of the incredible investments that have been made all around the world, but not in Canada, on clean energy. There is no place in the world that has more potential for clean energy right now than in the province of Alberta, yet Danielle Smith shut down $33 billion of clean energy projects and rented a truck to drive around Ottawa, telling us that the power is going out in Alberta.
Most premiers spend money to attract investment or to say their province is an energy superpower. Is that not what Alberta said? They said they were a province that could build energy projects and get them off the ground. Instead, she is paying for the gas to go around saying they cannot keep the power on in Alberta. That is the Conservative vision. They are wedded to big oil, an industry that has made billions in the last few years while we got gouged at the pumps.
We will never hear the Conservatives talk about the price gouging that we know is happening. When we go home on a Friday in northern Ontario, we know the price goes up right across the board on those long weekends at the same time; everybody knows it is price gouging, but the Conservatives say they will get rid of the carbon tax and make it free to burn.
I can ask anyone if they think big oil is not going to, if that tax came up, just hoover that up and put it into the profits of people like Rich Kruger.
We are at a time when Canadians are looking to Parliament to actually deliver. In the last election I went door to door talking to people about their concerns. I heard, again and again, that people could not afford to get their teeth fixed. People said they do not trust politicians anymore. They asked how they could get their kids' teeth fixed. I said that if they elected us, we would go back and get a national dental care plan. We are going to get that plan. The Conservatives announced they would spend all summer going around to try to stop that budget implementation, but we are going to get dental care for seniors and children this year.
The other commitment we made, and I am putting the Liberals on notice, is that we made that commitment to pharmacare. We have two more years in this Parliament. If we do not see pharmacare, it is going to be pretty hard to go back and say that we hung out with the son of PIerre Elliott for two or three years. People ask why we are hanging out with that guy. We are hanging out here on this side to get something done. That is pharmacare and dental care.
If we go back to the Canadian people and say we did that, it shows them how Parliament can work and that we can work across party lines. We intend to make sure we can go back to the Canadian people who said that in a time of crisis, New Democrats were there on the issues that mattered to people.
We will stand up and fight for people who cannot afford to pay CEBA back, when the government only gives them an extra 18 days. We will fight for small businesses. We will fight for a cleaner climate. We will fight for the indigenous communities that continue to be ignored. We will fight for pharmacare, and we will fight for dental care. That is why we were elected and that is why we are here today.
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Madam Speaker, I note that my colleague brought up a really interesting point, which is that Conservatives talk about the carbon tax quite a bit, but they seem to stop short when it comes to trying to explain the rising costs otherwise.
There is a very good graph that was recently posted that shows exactly where the price of fuel has increased. Over the last year, the price of fuel has increased, as a result of the carbon tax, by 2¢ per litre. The price of fuel has increased by wholesale margins, in other words, profits, by 18¢ per litre.
Can the member for Timmins—James Bay provide some insight as to why the Conservatives are so hung up on talking about the increase of 2¢ per litre as it relates to the carbon tax and not the 18¢ per litre as it relates to the profits received by these oil companies?
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Madam Speaker, the Conservative leader announced he was going to spend all summer during the hottest summer in history, as Canada was burning, promoting burning fossil fuels for free. It was so bad he got choked out of a number of the communities that were facing this. Even as their own communities were burning, like when Kelowna was on fire, what did we have? We had the member for Kelowna—Lake Country bragging about fossil fuel burning being free.
The connection between burning fossil fuels and the climate crisis was proven a long time ago, despite the amount of money Exxon spent trying to suppress that. The Conservatives have no plan. Only recently, they said they have something called technology. They do not really know what it is because they are against battery plant investments, solar and geothermal, but they are into burning the planet.
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Madam Speaker, I heard the member talk about palling around and burning fossil fuels.
In 2020, the member took a trip to Washington on sponsored travel, when most Canadians could not travel. In 2022, the member took a trip to Germany and burned fossil fuels worth $10,489. He talked about palling around with Pierre Elliott Trudeau. On this trip to Germany, he palled around with a group that actually did a joint press conference with Hezbollah, which is now a terrorist organization.
Can he explain to his constituents why he is palling around with Hezbollah terrorists?
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Madam Speaker, that was pretty bizarre, but I am not surprised. When I was in Berlin, I was actually meeting with the chancellor about clean energy. We met with the chancellor, unlike the four Conservatives—
An hon. member: Oh, oh!
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- Oct/3/23 5:28:05 p.m.
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The member had an opportunity to ask a question. If he has other questions, wishes to raise a point of order or table a document, I would ask him to wait until it is the appropriate time.
The hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.
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Madam Speaker, it was quite the honour to meet with the German chancellor and talk about hydrogen. It was a real honour to meet with representatives of the German Bundestag on whether Canada can supply clean energy.
That is rather different than the four Conservatives who got flown over to London, apparently by my cousin, Dan McTeague. The one bottle was $1,791 for champagne and he wants to talk about affordability. I am sure the member gets really high and happy when he gets a little bottle of Spumante Bambino, but they were spending $1,791 for a single bottle of champagne.
Who paid for that trip? Why were they there? People knew why we were there. We were meeting with the German government because we stand up for Canada. They were over there boozing it up for whatever reason. Let us know who paid for that trip.
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- Oct/3/23 5:29:15 p.m.
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We have a point of order. The hon. member for Regina—Lewvan.
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- Oct/3/23 5:29:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am sure the member would like me to table a document showing who he actually met with in Germany, so there is proof that the meetings I talked about are true.
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- Oct/3/23 5:29:34 p.m.
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Does the hon. member have unanimous consent to table the motion?
Some hon. members: Nay.
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- Oct/3/23 5:29:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would be more than willing to let them table it, if they table all the receipts and who actually paid for—
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- Oct/3/23 5:29:47 p.m.
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That is becoming a point of debate.
Does the hon. member have unanimous consent to table the motion?
Some hon. members: Nay.
The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes): Questions and comments, the hon. member for Shefford.
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