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Context: House Hansard - 233 - Oct/17/23

Ms. Leah Gazan (Winnipeg Centre, NDP)

Oct/17/23 10:25:56 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member for Carleton has regularly made videos going after the poor and people with addictions, further dehumanizing people already left out. The member for Carleton says he stands with workers, but I have never seen him stand on the front lines on the picket line. In fact, he has voted for back-to-work legislation. At the national inquiry, he was at the cabinet table when former prime minister Harper said that we were not on his radar, so how does one like them apples? My question is about seniors. Does the member for Carleton plan to stand with his Conservative colleague Danielle Smith and cut the CPP of seniors, sinking them further into poverty, seniors who are currently living in terror and becoming more poor? Is his common sense plan to take down people who are already down?

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Context: House Hansard - 233 - Oct/17/23

Mr. Jean-Denis Garon (Mirabel, BQ)

Oct/17/23 11:28:32 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my speech may not appeal as much to the member for Calgary-Centre. We shall see. First, let us talk about the text of the motion. I would like to thank the Conservatives. For once, they made our job easier. Entertaining a Conservative opposition day motion is usually quite difficult. We have to separate truth from fiction, sense from nonsense, and populism from statecraft. This happened with their carbon tax motion. The Conservatives force us to vote against their motions sometimes when they fill them with too much nonsense. We cannot support a motion that is 90% nonsense and 10% good sense. This motion, however, is about 70% nonsense and 30% good sense, and we will support it. I congratulate them. Mr. Speaker, in the most substantive part of its text, the motion essentially states that the government should submit a plan to achieve a balanced budget. We are not told, however, the number of years it will take. We ask that positive signals be sent to Quebeckers, Canadians and the markets, along with steps showing everyone that government management is not haphazard, despite current appearances to the contrary. There is obviously the date, October 25, which I will come back to later. It is yet another thing the Conservatives pulled out of thin air. Members may recall that we supported a similar motion in June. The Conservatives moved the motion when there was no upcoming economic statement. This illustrates their ability to manage their time and resources in the House well. Now they are moving the same thing a second time before an upcoming economic statement. I would like to talk about context. I have been listening to the Conservative leader make populist, misleading statements for months. We see that in ads on TV. I would like to remind him that the federal government has always churned out deficits and mismanaged public funds. The Conservative leader was a minor minister—which was a very good thing—in Stephen Harper's government. That government churned out one deficit after another—seven in a row, in fact. Back then, the Harper Conservatives set the record for deficits, but the current Conservative leader never said boo. None of the people who were here then and are still here now said boo. Nobody thought it was a problem. The Conservatives did well one year thanks to the financial crisis fallout when interest rates plummeted and, like a gift from on high, interest payments on the debt shrank. Interestingly, as the Conservatives went from one deficit to the next, the member for Lévis—Lotbinière, who I appreciate and whose office is next to mine, never rose to cry “scandal”. It is easier to criticize others than oneself. Still, I congratulate them on taking an interest in the management of public funds. The Liberals have the same problem. As my colleague from La Prairie pointed out earlier, the current Prime Minister came on the scene in 2014-2015. Essentially, the Prime Minister figured that he had a credit card. People who manage their personal finances will understand what I am about to say. The Prime Minister figured that it did not matter if he maxed out the credit card and paid the minimum balance each month, because everything would work out fine. He would not lose his job, his car would not break down and he would not have any bad luck. He would just always have to walk a financial tightrope. Then, in 2020, the car broke down. The pandemic hit, along with a lot of bad luck, and the government was unprepared. The country found itself in a situation where we had to borrow heavily. This pandemic spending was supported by the Conservatives, for one. It is high time these people wake up and realize that being unable to properly manage the public purse—which comes out of the pockets of taxpayers, who are having a hard time paying for groceries these days—is a deep-rooted issue here in Ottawa. Let us come back to the October 25 deadline. It took seven years for the Harper government to learn how to balance the books, sort of. The Liberals have been at it for eight years and they still have not gotten the hang of it. That is 15 years total. The Liberals could not do it in eight years, and the Conservatives, allegedly acting in good faith, are giving them eight days. They are telling them to come up with a sensible plan in eight days. That is the Conservatives' new turkey. I listened to the Conservative leader this fall. I do not know what he does with turkeys and I am not sure I want to know, but it was all about turkeys with him this fall. I do not want to assume anything. What did he do? He spent two or three weeks talking about the price of turkey and asking what the price of turkey would be at Thanksgiving. He wanted the government to promise to lower the price of turkey. Thanksgiving is over now, and the Conservative leader can no longer use turkey as a pretext for annoying the Liberals and trying to appeal to the public. Incidentally, he forgot to mention that the price of gas went down 18¢ at Thanksgiving. He was not interested in telling us that. What did he do then? He found a new turkey. His new turkey is October 25. Now, we are going to hear him talk about the plan that was not introduced until he can talk about the price of Christmas trees in December. Then, he will tell us all about Christmas trees until he can come up with something new to talk about. In reality, the Conservative leader is not interested in having a good plan. The mature thing to do, the thing that would make sense, would be to tell the government to do its job, to come up with an intelligent plan, to take more than eight days to think about this and to table the plan in the upcoming economic statement. What could that plan include? The Bloc Québécois and I have all kinds of ideas that we have been thinking about and repeating for years, while they are just now starting to wake up. For example, there is a basic principle for properly managing taxpayer money and the public treasury: Stop giving money to those who do not need it, including the oil companies. Why will the government not stop giving money to those who do not need it? From now until 2035, despite all the planned tax benefits and carbon capture subsidies, the government is going take money from people who are having a hard time paying for fuel, groceries and home ownership and give it to the oil companies. The amount of subsidies oil companies will be getting by 2035 is equivalent to what they would get if we lined up 40 million Canadians every year and asked them each to give these same companies $20. It is exactly that. The numbers show it. I did the math on what could be done with the money the government will be giving to oil companies, money that has already been promised and committed until 2035. For Thanksgiving, with the Conservatives' subsidies to the oil companies, we could have bought 21,789,473.7 turkeys for Canadian families. We could have paid for 1,815,789.47 turkeys for Canadians every year for Thanksgiving. That does not bother the Conservatives, because they do not care about food prices. That is the least of their worries. The cost of living is the least of their worries. Home ownership, the $900 million for Quebec that my colleague from Longueuil—Saint-Hubert is fighting for, that is the least of their worries. I can think of something else the federal government should do. It should stop behaving badly. How does it do that? It has to stop doing what it is not allowed to do, what the Constitution says it cannot do, something it has never been good at. It needs to focus on what matters. The government is unable to issue a passport, unable to take care of veterans and unable to take care of immigrants. We are the ones who deal with all this in our offices. I have files from Liberal ridings piled on my desk in Mirabel. Some ministers, whom I will not name because of the little self-respect they have left, are incapable of doing what little they have to do themselves. They are unable to order planes, to repair the Prime Minister's plane, to order ships, or to look after shipyards. I was going to say “shipwrecks” here, given their track record. We can imagine what their dental care is going to look like. I care about my teeth. I want to keep them. I would like them to keep their hands off dental care. We can also imagine what their pharmacare will look like. There is no doubt that it will cost more than $10 billion. They need to focus on the basics, stop subsidizing the oil companies, put the money where Quebeckers need it and focus on the little they have to do because, historically, they have never been able to manage well, much like the Conservatives. I think they should go back to the bare minimum, because the minimum for a Liberal is already a lot.

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Context: House Hansard - 233 - Oct/17/23

Mr. Daniel Blaikie (Elmwood—Transcona, NDP)

Oct/17/23 11:43:31 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to a Conservative motion that is not what it pretends to be, presented by a Conservative leader who is not who he says he is. What I mean by that is that this motion pretends to be an analysis of the causes of inflation in Canada, except that it only includes one factor, which is government spending and government deficits. Yes, there is a deficit. Yes, there has been government spending. Yes, some of that may have contributed in some ways to inflation. However, that is far from the whole story. Canada has had deficits at the federal level in periods when there has not been inflation, or at least not inflation of this significant type that we are living with today. It has been inflation within the target zone. The seven consecutive large deficits that the Harper Conservatives ran when they were in power did not coincide with the kind of significant inflation we have seen. Obviously, there are other factors at work here. It is dishonest to pretend that only government deficit is what is driving inflation, or even that it is the major factor in what is driving inflation. There are supply chain constraints that arose through the pandemic, a reordering of purchasing, first towards goods and then back towards services. There are a number of strictly market forces that we could talk about. Chief among those is the role that corporate greed plays. It is a glaring deficiency of this motion, and not just this motion but also the Conservatives' analysis generally, that they do not talk at all about the role that corporate greed has been playing in fuelling inflation. What do I mean by that? When we look at corporate profits, for instance, in the grocery sector, at the very same time that Canadians are struggling, and we are hearing more and more about Canadians having to choose between paying rent and paying for groceries, we have seen massive increases in the profit margins of Canada's largest grocery retailers. That is not a function of their simply passing on costs from the carbon tax, supply chains or whatever else to their consumers. If they were just passing on the cost, their profits would not be increasing. The fact of the matter is that the profit is going up because they are charging Canadians more than the additional costs they are facing right now. That is important to talk about. When it comes to the Liberal government, corporate greed is just as much missing from their analysis of what is driving inflation as it is from the Conservatives', and they are doing just as little about it, which is certainly a frustration of ours in the New Democratic Party. The Liberal government called the big grocery retailers to Ottawa to give them a slap on the wrist, ask them to do better and ask them to not reduce but stabilize prices, which is to say, to consolidate the gains they have made by raising prices unfairly over the last number of years so Canadians have to continue to pay that going forward, rather than talking about ways to try to make food more affordable than it currently is. We cannot look to the Conservatives for solutions on food prices, because they have nothing to say other than to reduce the carbon tax, as if those very same grocery retailers who have shown that they are quite happy to raise prices to eat up whatever extra disposable income Canadians get would not just turn around and do that very same thing. Conservatives are silent when it comes to corporate greed in the oil and gas sector, which has been driving inflation for Canadians. When we talk about the role that energy costs play in driving inflation, it is important to note that the price increases on energy far exceed the increase in the carbon tax. That is why, from 2019 to 2022, oil and gas companies in Canada saw an increase in profits of 1,000%. Where is the analysis from the Conservatives on what that does to grocery prices? If oil and gas companies are going to gouge the farmer who grows the food, gouge the processor who makes the food and gouge the shipper who ships the food, Canadians are going to get gouged at the grocery store, notwithstanding anything that happens in this place or the level of tax. They are going to get gouged based simply on the outsized increases in oil and gas prices that oil and gas companies are using to pay larger dividends to their shareholders and bigger cheques to their CEOs. We have to talk about that if we are going to get real about the challenges Canadians are facing. We have a Conservative Party that talks about very little else other than inflation and about the housing sector. Canadians are experiencing pain, but to pretend that somehow deficits derived from payments so kids can get their teeth fixed is causing inflation in the housing market is either stupid or dishonest. The fact of the matter is that there is a ton of private capital in the Canadian real estate market, domestic capital that is bidding against Canadians when they are trying to buy a family home, in order to turn that house into a long-term investment. That is a big part of the story of what is going on. Conservatives talk about how we need lower taxes in spite of the fact that now, 1% of Canadians own 25% of the wealth in this country, while fully 40% of Canadians have to live sharing only 1% of the wealth being created in this country. The 1% that owns the 25% is a big part of the problem in the housing market. They have a lot of extra cash, which they did not get from government and which they are investing back into the housing market to buy up more housing and make more money off the backs of Canadians who are already strapped. That is not to knock business. Small and medium-sized businesses are an important driver of economic growth in this country. They are important employers. They help make the world go around, and there is a lot of room for legitimate business. We know that a lot of small and medium-sized enterprises are actually struggling right now. They are not the ones that are the problem, so let us not conflate our criticism of big corporations and big capital with the small business owner who is providing services in their community and trying to break even in a very difficult time. I heard earlier from a Conservative MP, “Well, don't go after the wage payer if you want to help the wage earner.” When we talk about the oil and gas industry, look at what happened the day after the Alberta election. A big oil and gas company laid off 1,500 workers, despite the fact that it is extracting more oil than ever and making more money than ever. The fact is that more and more employment in the oil and gas industry has been decoupled, through technological advances and other things that do help with productivity growth, from the employment of Canadians. That oil and gas company timed the announcement of those layoffs in order to help its political friends in the Conservative Party in Alberta, to spare them the embarrassment of bringing that fact to light during an election. That is why this motion is not what it pretends to be. Furthermore, as I said earlier, it has been presented by a Conservative leader who is not who he pretends to be. He talks about the housing crisis. In fact, earlier in his speech on this very motion, he took credit, naming himself as the minister who was responsible for housing in the Harper government. This was the government that lost 800,000 affordable units during its tenure. It was the government that, when operating grants to create affordable rents were set to expire because they were tied to 40- or 50-year mortgages signed in the sixties, seventies and eighties in order to make rent more affordable, took the decision not to continue providing that operating grant money but to let it drop. That is why we are seeing places like Lions Place on Portage Avenue in Winnipeg get sold off because, without the operating subsidies, they cannot continue to provide the deeply affordable units that they were providing. What happened there? A big corporate landlord swooped in. It is going to superficially renovate the building, kick out the existing tenants and start charging a lot more rent for the people who can afford to move in. I do not begrudge those folks the housing, because we know that no matter where one is in the housing spectrum, there is a need. We do not have enough supply of any of those kinds of housing. I will not begrudge Canadians' taking the opportunity to find a home they can afford, but it is no excuse for a government that is not willing to do what it takes to make sure that those people who need those deeply affordable units have a place to go. That is where we need a federal government that is willing to take responsibility for that. I am sorry, but we have not seen that from the government. We are not building enough deeply affordable and affordable units in this country. We are simply not. If we leave it to the market, it will never get done. As a developer at the finance committee said yesterday, they are never going to build affordable housing. It is not their job. Their job is to build housing that they can make a buck on, and they are not going to make a buck if they undercharge on the rent. We know that. That is why the federal government for decades made serious repeated, regular and predictable offerings in the social and affordable housing space for a generation. That is why, during that generation and for a little while after, we did not have the kind of housing crisis we currently have. The problem is that we have a government that is focused too much on simply effecting market solutions in the very market that let us down and that said it would not fix the problem. If we look to the Conservatives, how are they different? They are not, because they too only offer solutions predicated upon the market. It is not that we do not also need market solutions, but if we focus too much and only on those market solutions, we are never going to get to where we need to be. We have a Conservative leader who wants to talk about housing and says that he has the answer, but who, just like the government, is overly focused on market mechanisms instead of the kind of non-market housing that we need and used to have in the past, in the period when Canada was not facing this kind of housing crisis. He is not who he pretends to be. He says that he wants workers to have powerful paycheques. I agree; I want workers to have powerful paycheques. That is why when workers are on strike, I am out on the picket lines with them, supporting them to bargain for better wages, working conditions and health and safety standards in their workplace. I have never run into that guy on a picket line. I have never seen a picture of him on a picket line. I have never seen him support picketing workers with a tweet, a post or anything. What I have watched him do is vote with the Liberal government on back-to-work legislation to prematurely end strikes on terms that are favourable to the employer, so do not tell me that this guy has the backs of workers. We watched as he sat at the cabinet table and raised the age of retirement from 65 to 67, denying Canadian seniors their old age supplement for a further two years. Why was that done? It was to keep them in the workforce. That is not having the backs of Canadian workers who have worked their whole life in order to be able to enjoy their retirement. Anyone who has had a member of their family fall ill with cancer in their sixties knows how precious those two years can be and what a difference it can make in their life and that of their family in benefiting from some of the things they worked hard to build during their life. Those two years are not nothing. I have watched the Conservative leader bring three opposition day motions in the last five months. He has put them in his name. He has given the lead speeches for them. I watched a special debate about the allegations that the Government of India had killed a Canadian on Canadian soil as a result of his political beliefs and activity. I watched as just about the whole Conservative caucus, except for its House leader, was silent. I watched a very intense protest and counterprotest on the rights of children to be safe and to make some of their own judgments about what is safe or not in their home. I watched as the Conservative leader told his members not to go, not to speak and not to post. This is the apparent champion of freedom of speech, but just not for his caucus, I guess. I watch as Conservative MPs rehash the same member's statement over and over again, clearly formulated out of the talking points of their leader, who says that he wants people to say what they will. I want to know why, if the Conservative leader does not trust Conservative MPs to speak for him, Canadians should trust Conservative MPs to speak for them in this place. I watched when the Conservative leader was a member of the Harper team that pioneered the electoral tactic of telling its candidates they were not allowed to go to local debates, speak their own mind and offer their own position. Perhaps he is worried that if they speak too much, they will reveal that he is not who he says he is. I noticed earlier that the Conservative MP for Tobique—Mactaquac got up and said that he never supported a carbon tax. Maybe if he had read his platform in preparation for debate in the last election, he would have noticed there was a carbon price in that platform. Maybe the Conservative leader does not want his MPs talking too much in this place or elsewhere because they would expose the fact that what he is saying now is not what they have said in the past and is not what they will do in the future. I heard the member say that we cannot support wage earners without supporting wage payers in respect of the oil and gas industry. As I said earlier, the wage payers in the oil and gas industry are making more money than they have ever made before and are laying off workers, so I really do not think that is an example we can take to heart. This motion calls for a financial plan with a path back to a balanced budget, which is fair enough. I don't think that is a bad thing. Perhaps we will see something like that in the fall economic statement, but I will not hold my breath. We listen to this guy talk about the incompetence of the government, and there are some very compelling arguments on that front. We may not make all the same arguments, but we certainly have our own. Then he wants Canadians to believe it is plausible for them to come up with a plan to balance the budget in a week's time. Come on. It is not serious, and fundamentally, the Conservative leader is not serious. This motion is not serious either, because it does not get to the bottom of what is driving inflation in Canada. It just singles out one thing that incidentally is to his electoral advantage to have people believe and leaves out all the ways he will help the corporate players that are driving inflation in Canadians' household budgets. He does not want Canadians thinking about that, because then they would know those problems will persist. He likes to quote a former Liberal minister, John Manley, which is curious because we have seen him be very disparaging of anyone with any connection to the Liberal Party. I understand the impulse, but I find it passing strange that a long-time Conservative and strong public servant of this country, David Johnston, could have his character assassinated by the leader of the official opposition when he happened to not necessarily agree with everything the Conservative leader thought. Then he is willing to turn around and hold up a former Liberal minister, whose advice I never took very seriously but who is now suddenly an authority for the Conservative caucus. It is the surest sign of despotic tendencies in a political leader when they are willing to disparage and engage in character assassination, even of their own folks who come out of their own political movement, for the simple cry of disagreeing with the leader and then hold up people they would otherwise criticize as authorities when they agree with them. To do that in a context where he has shown he is quite happy to silence his own people in order to make sure they do not expose some of the web he is weaving and the wool he is pulling over Canadians' eyes is another sure sign. It is just like when it comes to the opportunity my private member's motion offers to Conservatives to curtail the powers of the Prime Minister to unilaterally prorogue this place and dissolve this chamber, providing more political accountability for that. One would think the Conservative leader would be interested in putting some meaningful constraints on the gatekeeping powers of the Prime Minister, but he is not. The Conservatives were first out of the gate to say they would not support that motion, and it is because this leader wants those powers for himself, not because he has an objection to the gatekeeping powers of the Prime Minister's Office. Those are just some of the reasons the Conservative leader is not who he says he is, just as this motion is not what it says it is, and that is why the New Democrats will be voting against it.

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Context: House Hansard - 233 - Oct/17/23

Mr. Mark Gerretsen (Kingston and the Islands, Lib.)

Oct/17/23 12:37:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I know that before this member, the member for King—Vaughan made the comment that only Conservatives know how to bring in a balanced budget. I am assuming this member thinks the same thing. An hon. member: That's right. Mr. Mark Gerretsen: Madam Speaker, she just yelled that I am right. The unfortunate thing for her is that no Conservative has ever done it, not in Brian Mulroney's time and not in Stephen Harper's time. Let me correct that record. It is true that Stephen Harper had two surpluses in the beginning, but those came off the heels of Paul Martin's budgets. The only prime ministers since 1970 to actually run a surplus, a balance or have no deficit have been Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. There is absolutely no historical record that would suggest that Conservatives actually have the know-how to do that. Could the member please inform the House as to exactly how Conservatives would do that, and without the rhetoric of bringing down interest rates to lower inflation?

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Context: House Hansard - 233 - Oct/17/23

Mr. Jean-Denis Garon (Mirabel, BQ)

Oct/17/23 12:39:58 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the Conservatives have all kinds of things to teach us on this opposition day. However, they need to be reminded that the last Conservative government ran deficits for seven years straight. I would sure like to know what today's Conservatives, whose leader was part of the Harper government, would do differently from what they always did in the past—should they come to power—so they can finally stop being a party that habitually runs deficits.

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Context: House Hansard - 233 - Oct/17/23

Mr. Mark Gerretsen (Kingston and the Islands, Lib.)

Oct/17/23 1:37:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to participate in today's opposition motion debate. I first want to congratulate the Conservatives on bringing forward a motion that is not directly associated with the issue they have been bringing forward time after time in the House. Now, we get to talk about something a bit different, although I do have great concern with the premise of the motion they have brought forward. The “whereas” clauses and the assertions they have made are, I think, wholly inaccurate, and I look forward to explaining that in the next 10 minutes or so. This country certainly took on a lot of debt in order to support Canadians from coast to coast during the pandemic, and we have certainly had to take on our fair share to do that, much of which was unanimously approved by the House, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic. However, it is always important to look at things in terms of context. Obviously, debt is significantly affected by GDP, the amount a country is able to produce in terms of economic activity, because that is exactly what will end up supporting that debt. When we talk about the debt in this country and when we look at the debt-to-GDP ratio, Canada is actually doing quite well. As a matter of fact, if we look at our debt-to-GDP ratio, we are at 14%. Some people might ask whether that is good or bad. That is fair, because I do not think everybody is an economist and knows the default answer to that, but let us compare that 14% in Canada to the percentage for our G7 partners. France is at 99%. Germany is at 47%. Italy is at 129%. Japan is at 161%. Probably the two most comparable to us, the U.K. and the United States, are at 95% and 96%. When we talk about our debt levels, it is extremely important to compare where we stand on them to the position of our G7 counterparts, our most comparable economies in the world. In that regard, we are in an extremely good position. I would add that I will be sharing my time with the member for Kings—Hants today. That is very important for context. I know that Conservatives, including this lot here, like to come into the House and routinely tell us about how theirs is the only party that knows how to introduce a balanced budget. They may want to go ahead and cheer and clap now, because usually they do that when I try to pay them a compliment, before I add the “but”. It is really important to consider this: Conservatives will tell us that they know how to balance budgets, but if we look back to— An hon. member: We do. Mr. Mark Gerretsen: Madam Speaker, they said “we do”. They will then have to explain the following facts to me and why they did the following. Since 1990, there have been only two prime ministers who have significantly added a surplus or balanced a budget. They were Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. This is interesting, because Conservatives will always say that Stephen Harper balanced budgets, but no, he did not, and Brian Mulroney never had a single balanced budget. Stephen Harper did not really either, and I will explain why. The first two budgets Stephen Harper brought into Parliament were on the heels of Paul Martin's surpluses that he had been running for years. The Conservatives certainly squandered those surpluses and went into a deficit position very quickly. Of course, Conservatives also like to tell us, and I have heard it already this morning, that they left the fiscal state of this country in great shape in 2015 with the last budget they presented in a last-ditch effort to get Canadians to vote them into office one more time. They brought forward a “balanced budget”, and for the purposes of Hansard, I should say I am putting “balanced budget” in quotes, but they did it on the backs of veterans by closing Veterans Affairs offices. They sold off our shares of GM at the time at bargain prices in order to get that off their balance sheet. They did a whole host of things in order to portray the illusion that they had balanced the budget, when they really had not. They did it at the expense of Canadians and the investments the government had on behalf of Canadians. I know that many will say this was so long ago, 10 years ago for Harper and even longer for Mulroney. Fine, let us just get back to this lot of Conservatives right here. All of them who are here today ran on Erin O'Toole's plan in the last election, and that plan was to run deficits for a minimum of 10 years. Here we have a group of Conservatives who are now coming into the House with a motion that says to develop a plan for a balanced budget by October 25 of this year, a week and a half from now. Meanwhile, they had no intention of doing so when they were running in the last election. They did not care when they were knocking on doors and presenting their plan to Canadians. The plan from Erin O'Toole and the Conservatives was to run deficits for at least 10 years. That is the reality of it. This should be concerning to Canadians, because this is not the first time that we are seeing hypocrisy come out of the Conservatives. It is actually the second time. They also ran on a plan to introduce a price on pollution and to modify the existing price on pollution that this side of the House had. They ran on that, too. This morning, somebody challenged them and asked a Conservative member why they ran on that. That Conservative member stood up and said, “I did not believe in it.” That is funny, because that is the second or third Conservative I have heard say they were not running on a price on pollution or a carbon tax. However, they had no problem going along with the plan during the election. They did not say a single word in opposition to it at the time. Now, suddenly, they come in here and think that the buzz phrase of the day is going to be “axe the tax”, and this would bring them into power. That is not the position that somebody who is aspiring to be the leader of this country should be taking, asking what buzzwords happen to work today that would get him into power. I also find it very interesting when we talk about inflation specifically. Today we have seen that Statistics Canada has reported that the inflation in Canada has dropped to 3.8%. I should add that all the economists who were predicting this in advance of today said it would be anywhere between 3.8% and 4.2%. It ended up being on the lower end of that. Conservatives are laughing. Maybe it is time to compare that. I did it earlier, and I can compare it again. Let us compare it to the G7 countries. Again, Canada and the United States are tied for second place in terms of the lowest inflation. I think it is extremely important when we talk about our comparative countries. Canada is heading in the right direction when it comes to inflation, but interestingly enough, when we look at inflation and the different sectors of the economy, transportation is one of the only sectors of the economy contributing to inflation, and it is the biggest contributor. It is interesting because the member for King—Vaughan was up earlier, and I asked her what proposals she would have to reduce the inflationary impact around transportation. Of course, the exact answer that I think everybody in this room would have expected, and I certainly did when I asked the question, was to get rid of the carbon tax, because the carbon tax is contributing to inflation. The reality of the situation is that the carbon tax is not contributing to inflation. Tiff Macklem, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, recently said that the overall impact of the carbon tax to inflation is 0.15%. I believe he was in Alberta at a Chamber of Commerce meeting. We could chalk that up to a rounding error. Now I know the default for my Conservative friends would be to jump up and say that they do not trust Tiff Macklem; they have already made their position on that very clear. I have a whole list, and I will not bother reading it right now, of Conservative MPs who have stood up in this House and invoked the name of Tiff Macklem as the expert when he has all the right things that they want to say at the moment. They cannot pick and choose when they want to use somebody as an expert in the field. It goes without saying for the rest of us in the House, other than Conservatives, that Tiff Macklem is an expert in this field. When he says that the carbon tax contributes 0.15%, I am sorry to the member for King—Vaughan, but getting rid of the carbon tax is not going to be helpful. It is not going to be the solution as it relates to inflation specifically. Once again, we are confronted with a motion by Conservatives. All they are interested in is political games and cheap shots at the Prime Minister.

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Context: House Hansard - 233 - Oct/17/23

Mr. Peter Julian (New Westminster—Burnaby, NDP)

Oct/17/23 5:22:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I note that the motion from the Conservatives talks about fiscal discipline, and Conservative fiscal discipline is an oxymoron. We lived through nine years of the dismal Harper regime. One thing that characterized that was absolutely appalling financial decisions. Members will recall the $116 billion that Harper showered on Canada's big banks to maintain profits, taking money out of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation that should have gone to affordable housing. That helped contribute, thanks to the Conservatives, to the housing crisis that we are seeing today. The Conservatives also put in place the Harper treaties. Notoriously, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said that these handouts to billionaires and profitable corporations cost over $30 billion a year, thanks to Mr. Harper and the Harper regime. However, the Conservatives used fiscal discipline all right; they cut back on veterans services and forced seniors to work years longer. My question is very simple: What are they going to do now? Are they going to end the dental care for seniors that the NDP is bringing in at the end of this year?

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Context: House Hansard - 233 - Oct/17/23

Mr. Peter Julian (New Westminster—Burnaby, NDP)

Oct/17/23 5:39:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate my colleague, but I know that during the Harper years, the Conservatives brought in a system of tax havens that now cost us $30 billion a year, according to the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. My question is simple. How can we believe the Conservatives when their approach of imposing fiscal discipline was such a dismal failure in the past?

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