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Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC)

Nov/2/23 5:23:17 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, earlier this week—

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Nov/2/23 5:23:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague talked about efficiencies in terms of the fight against climate change. I am going to quote from an Edmonton Sun article. It says, “Answering in question period Wednesday on behalf of an absent Prime Minister...[the member for Edmonton Centre] suggested unhappy Albertans and other Canadians could always switch their natural gas furnaces for heat pumps”. The article goes on to say that this would cost $20 billion or more if this was to be implemented across the country. How is that efficient?

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Context: House Hansard - 245 - Nov/2/23

Hon. Michelle Rempel Garner (Calgary Nose Hill, CPC)

Nov/2/23 5:27:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today and implore colleagues to support the common-sense and fair-minded motion before us today. For those watching at home, the motion reads: That, given that the government has announced a “temporary, three-year pause” to the federal carbon tax on home heating oil, the House call on the government to extend that pause to all forms of home heating. The motion is about the carbon tax, but it is ultimately also about being fair to all Canadians, regardless of region and home heating source. That is what this motion is asking for: fairness. It also acknowledges something else, in direct response to the assertion made this morning by the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River. He asserted that the carbon tax is working and that it is worth the immense cost to the constituents in his expansive riding, many of whom pay a lot to do things such as heating their homes and getting around. I want to lay out for the House that the carbon tax is not working and is not worth the cost. In the heart of this motion is the fact that, after eight years of Liberal government, not only is the carbon tax not working, but it is also exacerbating the inflationary crisis and financial hardship for Canadians. This is another reason Conservatives have put the motion forward today. Ahead of our Wednesday morning caucus meeting and as winter temperatures began to set in across the country, the Leader of the Opposition announced that Conservatives would in fact force a vote in the House of Commons on Monday to extend a three-year carbon tax exemption to all forms of home heating in every part of Canada. The exemption was announced by the Prime Minister last week for Atlantic Canadian home heating oil. I know that the temptation for Liberal and perhaps NDP colleagues will be to continue to toe the line the Prime Minister took this week and vote against this motion. Perhaps the Bloc will as well. This line was that no additional carve-outs on the carbon tax would be forthcoming. However, that position would be a mistake, both morally and politically. If anybody in this chamber cares about public support for climate action, the inflation crisis and, frankly, keeping their jobs, they should vote in favour of this motion. Here is why: While inflation and the cost of living remain the top electoral concerns for Canadians, a very recent survey by Leger suggested that about 70% of Canadians are worried about climate change. However, support for keeping the Liberal signature climate policy, the carbon tax, only registers with the support of 18% of Canadians. The reason for the vast delta, that gap between public concern for addressing climate change and support for the climate tax, is something that few NDP, Liberal or Bloc intelligentsia appear to have considered. This blind spot is now both biting them in the rear politically and preventing Canada from meeting its emissions targets. What is the reason behind that gap? It is that the carbon tax is failing to move consumer preferences away from high-carbon products and practices in the way Liberals promised it would, and Canadians know it. In the middle of a generationally high cost of living crisis, all Canadians, even those very concerned about climate change, are unwilling to pay for a policy they know to be ineffectual. Put differently, people will only choose alternatives to things such as driving carbon-powered vehicles and heating their homes with carbon-based fuels if other options exist and if those options are readily available and affordable. Those circumstances may be partially available in more temperate and highly populated regions of the world, but that is not so much the case across the rest of our country. Even though the Liberals, the NDP and, frankly, the Bloc, seem to be content with keeping the tax in this scenario, Canadians are not choosing to purchase alternatives; in most parts of Canada, they do not widely exist and are completely unaffordable. If one is ever in the beautiful riding of Calgary Nose Hill, I encourage them to come and drive up a piece of road called Centre Street, which turns into Harvest Hills Boulevard. There is a beautiful laneway along a big chunk of that for a light rapid transit. For 10 years, I have been imploring different levels of government to build out light rapid transit in that corridor. That would pull 50,000 cars off the road every day. Yet, we do not see leadership from the Liberal government on building out this type of critical infrastructure that would actually deliver social inclusion for my community, and could materially reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, we see this dogmatic adherence to a policy that does not work. This concept is simple to grasp for even the most politically disconnected Canadians, particularly when they fill up their car and pay a carbon tax, but have no public transit alternatives and pay a carbon-based home heating bill for six months of brutal cold with no other option. There are LRT debacles in Ottawa. I encourage everybody to try to take the LRT to their place here in Ottawa tonight. I wish them good luck. Edmonton, Calgary and the greater Toronto area are perfect examples of this situation. Another good example is that after nearly a decade of wasted time, greenhouse gas emissions and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the administration of the carbon tax, the Liberals have not managed to deliver alternatives to things like heating oil. The measures the Prime Minister announced this week, a decade late and thousands of dollars short, would not even pay for a Big Mac value meal for rural Canadians each month. Earlier today, the NDP member for Timmins—James Bay said as much in the debate when he said that in Canada, heating homes is not a luxury. He is right. It is not a luxury, it is a necessity. If people cannot heat their home, they freeze. The Liberal member for Kings—Hants also said something similar when he said that if Canadians do not have the money to make a change to a different form of heating, then they are stuck. Stuck is a great way to describe the situation many Canadians find themselves in right now. The question Canadians now want answered is how the Liberals and their coalition partners in the NDP plan to get them financially unstuck after a decade of failure. A decade of Liberal rule has also shown people that the federal government is not, putting it mildly, particularly good at building out the infrastructure, like public transit, beefed-up electrical grids or a national system of EV charging stations needed to do things like pull gas-powered cars off the road. The Liberals expect people to pay a carbon tax, with no alternative. They expect people to pay a carbon tax on home heating, with no alternative. That is the record of eight years of Liberal government. The carbon tax is not working and yet the Liberals expect people to pay for it in the middle of winter, on their heating bill. However, the Liberal government does seem to be good at one thing, blowing a lot of tax dollars and political attention on waste and scandal, like the SNC-Lavalin scandal, the WE charity scandal, the ArriveCAN scandal and the foreign interference crisis. None of those things would bring inflation under control or address climate change. The Liberal government's record on both fronts is abysmal, and it does not want to be held to account on that front. The government is not meeting its climate targets. It is just taxing Canadians with a policy that does not work. Further to this point, this week's serious whistle-blower allegations regarding allegations of gross misappropriation at Sustainable Development Technology Canada, an agency that is supposed to spur the development and deployment of emissions reductions technology, will undoubtedly further erode public trust in the Liberal government's capacity to provide lower-cost alternatives to carbon fuels. I want to read from this article, because I do not think people at home have heard much about this scandal. It just broke this week. Somebody named Doug McConnachie, assistant deputy minister at Innovation, has been working with whistle-blowers on this file, and they recorded him. This is what came out of the recordings when they were looking at the misappropriation of funds in this giant slush fund that is supposed deliver low-cost alternatives and combat climate change. This is from a CBC article: By late July, McConnachie was convinced certain spending decisions were badly handled, including the payments of nearly $40 million during the pandemic that was not based on precise needs and did not require follow-ups. “It was free money,” he said.... I know there are a lot of people in my community who would like free money. This was free money designed to combat climate change that went to some Liberal cronies. We do not even know how, and the people who made these decisions still have jobs. The government has known about this for months or years. Those people still have jobs, and the Liberals expect us to believe that they care about getting inflation under control or that they care about climate change. The article goes on: “‘It was free money,’ he said, before making an analogy with the controversy that affected Jean Chrétien's Liberal government in the early 2000s.” “Affected” is putting it nicely. It was brought down. “‘That is almost a sponsorship-scandal level kind of giveaway.’” This is a fund that was supposed to address climate change in Canada, and it turned into, as everything else has with the government, a slush fund for Liberal cronies. People who care about climate action and care about getting inflation under control should not look at the Liberal government, because it does not care. Its members just virtue signal on these things and give away tax dollars to their friends while people are expected to pay tax on home heating in the middle of a Canadian winter. That it disgusting. That has an impact on climate change. Again, how do those people still have jobs? Members do not have to take my word for all of these facts, because the results are laid bare in recent government reports that show that even with the carbon tax, Canada will still miss its 2030 emissions targets by close to 50%. I have heard so many Liberals get up today and talk about forest fires and the impacts of climate change, yet they are dogmatically supporting a policy that does not work and that, according to the Governor of the Bank of Canada at the finance committee, is affecting inflation in a major way. Tiff Macklem said this at committee yesterday. The Liberals are dogmatically adhering to a policy that does not work when they know that Canada is on track to missing its emissions targets by 50%. Canadians know this. They know the carbon tax is not working. There is proof of these facts in recent political trends too. The Liberals' capitulation on the tax on home heating oil should have been viewed as an inevitability for even the most lay observer. The signs have been present for months. For example, in August, a Nova Scotia provincial riding that had been a safe Liberal hold from time immemorial was flipped by provincial Conservatives due in part to the unpopularity of the federal Liberal carbon tax. Within the federal Liberal backbench there has also been extreme dissent over this issue, likely due to the sustained precipitous drop in polls that the party has seen. These incidents have followed nearly a year of high-profile campaigning by the leader of the Conservative Party against the tax. I have heard colleagues in the Liberal Party complain that we have brought motion after motion in this House to fight the tax. They are absolutely right. We are going to keep doing it, because it does not work and it is costing Canadians. Now that same crisis has overlaid the tax and it means millions of Canadians are facing the prospect of choosing between heating and eating, never mind considering, as some of my colleagues are talking about, buying expensive alternatives that might not even exist in their regions. That is the most bourgeois concept I have ever heard. It is much like when the member for Edmonton Centre said that everybody can buy a heating pump. Does he not know that people in his own community cannot even afford their rent? The Prime Minister's late-stage partial capitulation on removing the tax for heating oil but not other carbon heating fuels also risks creating perverse incentives, like the one mentioned by Rural Municipalities of Alberta, which suggested that the Liberals' partial tax exemption may generate higher demand for higher-emitting heating oil in certain circumstances. Keeping the tax's regional inequities will also further divide our country at a time when we need to unify. The world has changed, and those in our country need to be strong, not pitted against each other by inequitable policies that do nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our country. Contrary to the opinions of many left-leaning pundits, after eight years of climate failure and the creation of an inflationary crisis, no one here should continue to lean into this tax. It needs to go.

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