44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 3, 2023 10:00AM
- Oct/3/23 4:17:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would add congratulations from someone who has known you for 35 years, since we were young students at Forum for Young Canadians. We always knew you would go places, and indeed you did.
Although it is a few years off for you and I, it is good to know that we raised old age security by 10% for seniors 75 and older. We raised the guaranteed income supplement by up to $947 annually for single low-income seniors. We launched the age well at home initiative to help more seniors age in their homes and communities.
Our work is far from done, but as minister for seniors, my priority remains affordability.
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- Oct/3/23 4:18:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, speaking of affordability, Canadians have seen what happens when Loblaws is left unchecked: price-fixing and gouging. Now, Galen Weston is turning his sights to health care by expanding Shoppers Drug Mart private clinics. Experts are warning that huge corporations put profits before patients. It is the government's job to prevent this.
What is the Liberal plan to ensure that rich CEOs like Galen Weston do not gouge Canadians for health care like they do with food?
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Mr. Speaker, I am going to talk today about Bill C-56, which is the Liberal-NDP government's attempt at dealing with the affordability issue.
To talk about the legislation itself, we first need to look at where we are in this country, and it is not a very pretty picture. If we look at where we are right now, mortgage payments over the last eight years have virtually doubled in this country from coast to coast to coast. We have a similar issue now with rent all across the country. If we look at the average rents being paid now, that amount has also virtually doubled. This is the track record of the Liberal government, which now suddenly seems to be concerned about affordability for Canadians.
However, the bad news for Canadians does not stop there. It used to take 25 years to pay off one's mortgage. Now it takes the average Canadian 25 years to save for their mortgage. Think about what the difference between those is. Some people might say that is not their problem and that this is a young person's problem when they are trying to get into the market. It is bad enough if it is a young person's problem, but it is also affecting average Canadians right here and right now.
I was recently informed about a person whose mortgage has come up for renewal. Their mortgage was coming from that nice, low fixed interest rate. People will remember those low interest rates the Prime Minister said were going to be there for a very long time, the interest rates the Governor of the Bank of Canada said were going to stay low for a very long time. Based on that, many people took mortgages with a very low interest rate because it allowed them to have a mortgage payment they could afford. However, as mortgage rates have continued to go up, as the Bank of Canada has continued to raise interest rates in order to fight inflation, average Canadians now have to pay the bill as a result of this.
In this particular circumstance, this family has said that it can hold on for about another six months with this increased mortgage payment. They can dig into savings and they can further borrow for about six months, and then they are not going to be able to make the mortgage payments on their home. That is the consequence of eight years of the Liberal government.
Inflation is out of control. I hear it all the time in my riding of Dufferin—Caledon. People come up to me in the grocery store and say to me that they now have to only go to the grocery store to shop bargains. They do not actually have a grocery list, because they can buy only what is on sale. This is all they can afford. After eight years of the Liberal government, this is what people are saying to me in the grocery store. It is a shocking turnaround for Canadians. They are having trouble paying their mortgages. They are having trouble buying groceries. They are having trouble heating their homes as a result of the carbon tax. All of these things are making life more expensive for Canadians.
There is a simple solution. There are actually two very simple solutions the government could implement right away. Number one is that it could cut the carbon tax. We know that would have an immediate impact, because, as has been said by Conservatives in the House of Commons over and over again, the farmers are taxed on farm produce. As they produce it, they are taxed with the carbon tax. Whether that is for drying the grain, driving the combines or whatever, they are paying a carbon tax. When that crop is harvested, the driver of the truck that comes to pick it up is going to pay the carbon tax. When it goes to be processed, there is a carbon tax. When a truck picks it up to take it to the grocery store, there is a carbon tax. At the grocery store, the carbon tax is heating the grocery store; therefore, the store owner is paying a carbon tax as well.
At the end of the day, Canadians cannot afford to pay for food, and they end up saying that they do not even have a grocery list and just go to the grocery store and buy whatever is on sale. If we would have said this to Canadians eight years ago, they would have said that this was not possible. In a country like Canada, food is abundant. We feed the world because we have the best farmers in the world, who are great stewards of the land. If we had said eight years ago that Canadians would only be able to go to the grocery store and shop bargains, that would have been an inconceivable thought, but here we are.
After eight years of the Liberal government, that is the sad situation that Canadians find themselves in. It is very difficult to pay the mortgage, very difficult to buy groceries, very difficult to pay rent and very difficult to buy a house. That is the Liberals' record. That is the context that we look at when they bring in this bill.
This is not a new problem. Conservatives have been talking about this problem for the last number of years. In fact, the Conservative leader, many years ago, said that the inflationary spending caused by the government was going to drive up inflation, which would then drive up interest rates. He is looking more and more like Nostradamus with that prediction. As for me, 18 months ago, I rose to speak about the impact of the carbon tax on food production. I said that it was going to cause a massive increase in the cost of food, and here we are. The Liberal government cannot therefore claim that somehow this is a new problem, that it was unaware of the problem. It was well aware. It was well forewarned and did absolutely nothing about it.
When we look at this particular bill, what is amazing to me is that Liberal members will get up in this House during debate and during question period and talk about how, as a result of tabling this legislation, one developer has said it is now going to build 5,000 rental units. They puff out their chests and say to look at them, look at the amazing things they have accomplished. Well, let us put that into context.
According to the CMHC, we will need to build three million more homes between now and 2030 than are planned or scheduled to be built. The plan is that we will build two million homes. We will have to build three million more than that in order to get back some affordability.
As I have said a few times in this chamber, I went to law school because I was not good at math. However, what I did before I prepared for this speech is decided to get out my calculator and look at this. I saw that 5,000 units out of the three million we need is 0.0016%. If I had a child come home with a bad grade, and the teacher not only put an F on there but said that my son got 0.0016% on the test, I would not be a proud father. However, somehow these members walk around like they have discovered fire with this plan to build such a small number of houses.
It is even worse. To even come up with some of their plan, they had to take from the Conservative leader's plan. With grocery affordability, again, the best thing they could do is cut the carbon tax, which they repeatedly vote against. We know that this would bring the most relief. They also decided they are going to bring in some Competition Act changes, which they also stole from a Conservative member of Parliament's private member's bill. When a government is completely out of ideas, affordability has gone off the scale and Canadians are deeply hurting, what does the government, the brain trust and all of the political advisers they have come up with? Well, they just take what the Conservatives said they were going to do.
They have only taken some of it. What we have here is a plan that is not going to do anything to address the affordability crisis that is going on across the country, and there is a real consequence. I spoke about this in question period. For example, there is Paula in B.C., 71, who is retired. She is now saying that she might have to move out of her house because the landlord is going to sell it. She is also facing a 75% increase in rent as a result of that. That is their record. They have not provided solutions quickly or ones that are going to address the concerns of Canadians.
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Madam Speaker, I am very fascinated when I hear Conservatives talk about affordability. I think of Doug Ford, Mr. X, the $8-billion scheme and the trip they took down to Vegas. They do not remember it, but they were all at the spa at the same time.
I would like to ask my hon. colleague about a meeting that was held on June 25, when four Conservatives were flown over to London, apparently paid for by my cousin Dan McTeague, which I find kind of surprising. The total cost of the meal was $4,690 Canadian. They drank one bottle of wine for $818, a second bottle for $265 and a third bottle for $719, and they topped it off with a bottle of champagne for $1,791.
I do not know a single Canadian who has ever drank that wealthily, yet the Conservatives were guzzling it back. Who paid for this trip and why were they there?
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Madam Speaker, it is amazing that all of this was predicted. The affordability crisis we find ourselves in, runaway inflation and high interest rates were all predicted by the Conservative leader.
It is actually a shocking amount of spending. The federal government, under this NDP-Liberal coalition, now spends $176 billion per year every year more than in 2015. I hear from constituents when they raise that issue, and I ask, “What in your life is better?” No one can answer that. All of this spending has really driven the affordability crisis and has not helped the vast majority of Canadians.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member opposite for helping me find an audience for my speech.
I do not think that these are token measures, and adding 200,000 to 300,000 units of affordable housing or rental construction units is not a small feat. It is a significant amount, and we can couple that with the $82 billion in the national housing strategy and the housing accelerator fund dollars, which are speeding up the process for municipalities to help lead the way on building more affordable housing. I think that these things are, in total, going to help create a more comprehensive approach to solving the housing affordability issues that we have.
There is much more opportunity and additional measures to consider, and I hope to undertake those conversations and listen to the ideas of my colleagues across the way.
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Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise to speak to the Liberal government's Bill C- 56, an act to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Competition Act.
This is yet another half-baked, half-measure bill from the Prime Minister to solve an affordability crisis that he, himself, and his government have created. After eight years of inflationary taxes and out-of-control spending, Canadians have now found that they cannot afford the Liberal government. They cannot afford housing. They cannot afford fuel, and they certainly cannot afford food.
What makes this bill that much more frustrating is that the Liberals are adding more bureaucracy to try to solve a problem that they created, when there is actually a very quick measure they could enact today that would reduce costs for Canadians significantly, and that would be by eliminating the inflationary carbon tax 1 and carbon tax 2. These two carbon taxes and the inflationary aspect of them are making life unaffordable for Canadians.
Today, we saw in a report by the Financial Post that their new initiative, the Canadian sustainability standards board, is actually going to exacerbate those costs on Canadians, especially when it comes to food costs. It is going to add additional bureaucracy to every industry and every commodity, asking them to identify the impact of carbon on every link in the supply chain. This is going to add so much red tape and bureaucracy, and and an onus on every industry, manufacturing every product and growing every commodity, that it is going to make life that much more unaffordable.
The interesting thing is that the Liberals are implementing or imposing these punishing carbon taxes on, for example, agriculture, which is one of the industries that we are a leader in. We are world class in sustainability, in our emissions and in our ability to grow food with the lowest emissions in the world.
The data in painfully clear on the impact the Liberals' carbon tax 1 and 2 is having on Canadian farm families. According to the Canada food price index, a 5,000-acre farm would be paying $150,000 in carbon taxes every single year. There is not a farmer I know that could absorb those types of costs and still remain economically viable.
That is the question the Liberals always seem to forget. They talk about sustainability. I think they get a quarter every time they say it. However, they never talk about economic viability. When these new regulations and taxes are imposed on industry, agriculture or energy, it is impacting their ability to remain economically viable.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer just published a new report confirming the correlation between inflation in Canada and the suffocating carbon tax on our farmers. Diesel will go up 70¢ a litre. In many provinces, gas has already exceeded two dollars a litre.
When I was in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, in the GVA meeting with some farmers, it was $2.08 a litre for gas. It is unbelievable that the government is now expecting Canadians to absorb that and still be able to put food on the table and pay their mortgages. This year alone, the carbon tax collected from farmers, just from on-farm propane and natural gas, was $50 million.
I find it interesting that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change said in his speech on Thursday that he did not know why we were so excited, that the carbon tax does not impact farming. The statistics from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the Canada food price index and just about every commodity group in the country say otherwise.
This is why we have brought forward Bill C-234, which would exempt the carbon tax from natural gas and propane because they are still paying the carbon tax on those two fossil fuels, and that is because there is no alternative. They need these fuels to heat and cool their barns, dry their grain and power their irrigation equipment. This is not something the Conservatives are tossing around, these are indeed the facts.
Those who think those numbers are bad can hold my jerry can. The newest Parliamentary Budget Officer's report on the impact of the carbon tax on farming said that between this year and the year 2030, agriculture will be paying $1 billion in carbon taxes alone.
The Liberals are saying that these costs on farmers, which they do not even believe exist, while the Parliamentary Budget Officer confirms they do exist, are not impacting the price of food and not the reason we are seeing these high costs at the grocery store shelves.
I do not know anyone, other than maybe those in the Liberal-NDP coalition, who thinks that adding taxes will somehow reduce prices. However, that is exactly what they are saying. As part of this discussion, the Prime Minister has threatened the CEOs of the major grocery chains in Canada, saying that, if they do not stabilize grocery prices by Thanksgiving, there will be tax consequences. He is threatening to increase taxes on the grocery store CEOs and the major chains in Canada.
Is there an issue with competition in Canada? Yes, I would agree with that. We need to do things to improve competition in Canada, which always brings down prices. However, do the government members honestly think and truly believe that if they increase taxes on Sobeys, Loblaws, Costco and Walmart, the companies are just going to absorb those additional costs? There is no scenario where an industry just says, “The government is right; we are going to pay more taxes, and thanks very much.” Of course they are not. They are going to pass them on to the consumers, and that is going to drive up costs even more.
I want to emphasize the real-life consequences these taxes are having on those whom we are relying on to grow the food that we use to feed our families; these growers certainly play a key role in Canada's ability to help feed the world. A fruit and vegetable grower in my riding showed me their power bills for the last few months. They were paying $5,000 a month in carbon taxes alone, plus $800 of GST on top of that carbon tax; it is a tax on a tax. The grower has now decided to close their market in the winter months because they simply cannot afford to stay open. That is fresh fruit and vegetables at a nearby farmers' market and grower, which my rural constituents were able to go to without having to drive into the city. That is now going to be closed, forcing constituents to drive even further. It makes a lot of sense if climate change and reducing emissions is their goal.
A farmer in southern Alberta told me he paid $140,000 in carbon taxes last year, meaning that he could not invest that money in new equipment, which would have been more energy efficient and more fuel efficient. More frustrating for this grower is that he was hoping to have that money to put aside for his daughter, who wants to take over the family farm. She would have been the fifth generation to take over that farm. Now, instead of having that money to invest in his operation, improve efficiency, reduce emissions and help the next generation, where has that gone? It has gone to the Liberal government into general revenue. In fact, again, if reducing emissions and addressing climate change is their ultimate goal, this is doing the exact opposite.
There is another interesting thing. The Liberals want to increase taxes on the grocery CEOs; however, many of the grocery stores in Canada are actually owned by local franchisees. I went to visit the operator at one of the larger Sobeys operations in my riding, to see how things were going. His energy bill has gone up $6,000 a month as a result of the carbon tax. He is trying to absorb those costs, because he is a local business owner. However, he says that, eventually, he is going to have to pass this on to the consumers; otherwise, it is going to have an impact on what he can pay his employees or what he can contribute to local community initiatives, service clubs, sports teams, youth organizations and all those things that business owners try to help support.
The Liberals think that these costs are just magically absorbed by those farmers and small business owners, but they are not; of course, these costs are passed on to the consumer. That is why we see apples up 61%, carrots up 72%, and oranges and potatoes up 76%, just in time for Thanksgiving. The Liberals need to realize that when they increase the tax on the farmer, trucker, manufacturer and retailer, those costs are passed directly on to the consumer. Canadians are paying the price for that.
We are seeing that with millions of Canadians. Seven million Canadians went to a food bank last year. In Alberta, food bank use is up 70%. The food bank in Calgary is supporting 700 families every single day. These are numbers that I know the operators of food banks across the country have never seen before.
In conclusion, if the Liberals really cared about grocery prices and family farms, they could do something right now: They could eliminate their carbon taxes and certainly their plans to quadruple the carbon tax. That, not more red tape and bureaucracy, would make food more affordable for Canadians.
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