44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 28, 2023 10:00AM
moved:
That the House call on the unelected Senate to immediately pass Bill C-234, An Act to amend the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, to remove the carbon tax on the farmers that feed Canadians, as passed by the democratically elected House.
He said: Madam Speaker, why is it that the House of Commons is green? The answer is that the first commoners met in the fields. They were overwhelmingly farmers who harvested a living from the fields of England. They were overwhelmingly taxed, though, by a greedy Crown that took out of their pockets and out of their hands the bread they had earned. As a result, they imposed upon King John, in 1215, the Magna Carta, the great charter, which required a whole series of restrictions on the power of the Crown. Among the most important of these was that the Crown could not tax what the commoners had not approved. Thus began the tradition that only the House of Commons can pass a bill to raise spending or taxes and only the House of Commons has the power of the purse.
That principle remains in place today. I have the rule book, O'Brien and Bosc, which the Speaker follows in his chair as he administers this chamber. It says, “The Constitution Act, 1867 provided that any bill appropriating any part of the public revenue or imposing a tax or duty must originate in the House of Commons”, with the commoners. It follows that the same principle be that if the commons votes to remove a tax, that tax must be removed.
This House of Commons has voted for a common-sense Conservative bill, Bill C-234, to take the carbon tax off the farmers who feed us. The farmers who feed us, of course, need energy to do so. They need the ability to power their drying machines to transport their grains and heat and cool their barns for their animals, all of which requires energy. The more tax the government imposes on that energy, the more expensive it is for them to produce the food we eat. Thus we have the misery and poverty that have resulted today in the same way they always have whenever the Crown, or in this case the state and the Prime Minister, takes too much.
We see what has happened. The government is rich and the people are poor. After eight years of the Prime Minister and his NDP government, there is record food bank use. This week we learned that under NDP policies imposed through the Prime Minister, 800,000 people in Ontario alone visited a food bank six million times. This is a record-smashing number. Nationwide, two million Canadians are going to a food bank. This is a 32% increase from when the Prime Minister took office.
After eight years of the Prime Minister, housing costs have doubled, rent has doubled, mortgage payments have doubled, down payments have doubled and tent cities have formed in every major city in this country. In Halifax, in the province of the federal housing minister, there are now 30 homeless encampments. This is in one city. We never had this before the Prime Minister.
What is his response? He divides to distract. He turns Canadian against Canadian. He gives out taxpayer-funded opioids to medicate people out of their misery. Later next year, he intends to bring in medical assistance in dying for the mentally ill so that people who are living with the total misery and isolation that his economy has created can have their lives ended altogether. We could not even have imagined that life would be this hellish for our people eight years ago.
What is his solution now? He wants to quadruple the carbon tax. He wants to raise it to 61¢ a litre on gas and diesel. Obviously this will make it unaffordable for people to drive to work and heat their homes. However, then there are the indirect costs, because when we tax the energy of the farmer who makes the food and the trucker who ships the food, we tax all who buy the food.
Let me give an example. In my riding we have Carleton Mushroom Farms. They supply mushrooms across the Ottawa-Carleton region and into western Quebec. They are spending $150,000 a year on carbon taxes, and now the Prime Minister wants to quadruple that tax. We can presume that their tax bill would go up to $600,000 a year for one farm. How is that farm supposed to feed people? The answer is that it will become mathematically impossible to do so. As the member for Foothills will tell the House, as I am splitting my time with him, we will see more of our food produced by foreign farmers in countries with poorer environmental standards.
This is the famous story of SunTech tomatoes, another great farm in my riding where the Prime Minister taxes the C02 they release into their greenhouse even though it is absorbed by the plant life. Apparently, he missed that day in science class. The problem is that it is now more expensive to buy a Manotick tomato in Manotick than a Mexican tomato. Therefore, the price signal the Prime Minister and the NDP send to the Manotick consumers is to buy the tomato that had to be trucked and trained across North America, burning fossil fuels from a less environmentally responsible country, to feed foreign food to our people.
This policy of quadrupling the tax on our farmers will mean more expensive food for consumers and more foreign food that sends our money, our jobs and our future out of this country, at the same time as sending more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We would be better to repatriate food production to Canada. We have the sixth biggest supply of arable land per capita in the world. We should not have to import any food, but here we are, more dependent on the rest of the world because the Prime Minister punishes the very farmers who try to feed us every day.
This tax compounds again and again. It is a tax that does not apply once like, for example, the sales tax. Sometimes on a single product, it can apply 20 or 30 times. It applies, for example, when the farmer buys the fertilizer. That fertilizer has already been carbon taxed. Then he has to bring the seeds to his field. The transportation of those seeds has to be carbon taxed. When the harvest comes out and he brings it in from the field, he has to be carbon taxed to dry those grains. Then, if it he is feeding those grains to his livestock, they might be in a barn. That barn has to be heated during the winter and so the barn is carbon taxed. Let us say they are hogs. When they are slaughtered, the slaughterhouse is carbon taxed. The trucker who ships the hogs to the slaughterhouse is carbon taxed. Then when the final cuts of pork are packaged and put in a truck to go to our grocery store, that truck is carbon taxed. Then heating that grocery store, which has a lot of space to heat, that heat is carbon taxed as well. By the time that piece of food gets onto someone's plate, it may have been carbon taxed 15 or 20 times.
People wonder why we have had the worst food inflation in 40 years after eight years of the Prime Minister. They wonder why food is so much more expensive in Canada than it is in the United States of America. They wonder why seven million people are skipping meals and not eating enough to remain healthy. They wonder why we have lineups around streets, around blocks; if the images were put in grainy black and white, they would assume they were watching something out of the dirty thirties. The answer is the Prime Minister is taxing the farmer who makes the food, the trucker who ships the food and every other person who works hard to bring that food to our table.
Common-sense Conservatives have a bill that has been passed by this House that would take the tax off. The Prime Minister has deployed his carbon tax minister to pressure senators to block that bill, in an undemocratic attack on the prerogative of the commoners to decide who pays what. The government cannot tax what the people do not approve and the people do not approve of this carbon tax. They want us to axe the tax; to bring home lower prices; to bring home our food production, our self-reliance and independence to this country; and to bring home more powerful paycheques, affordable food and decent homes to our Canadian people, the common people, the common sense of the common people, united for our common home; their home, my home and our home. Let us bring it home.
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- Nov/28/23 10:27:01 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the senator's contact information is widely available on websites. The member is simply trying to distract.
I want to tell the member what intimidation looks like. Intimidation is when a single mother opens the fridge in the morning and there is nothing there. She looks over at the empty lunch bag that she needs to fill for her children and there is nothing to put in it. Intimidation is when, at the end of the month, she looks at the bills that have stacked up, then at her bank account and the former is way bigger than the latter. She does not know where she is going to live the next month. That is the real intimidation that the government has imposed on working-class people right across this country.
If he wants to talk about threats, it is the threat to the quality of life of the people who do the work in this country that I am most worried about.
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- Nov/28/23 10:28:32 a.m.
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Yes, Madam Speaker, I do believe those things, and I know it.
For starters, I am not the one who said that people are asking for medical assistance in dying because they are going hungry. That was the CEO of Food Banks Mississauga. My colleague can read her comments about how people went to the food bank to request medical assistance in dying. They did so not because they were sick, but because they were hungry. The Bloc Québécois members do not know this because they spend all their time travelling around Europe to talk about sovereignist movements over there. They could not care less about the people in their own ridings.
Furthermore, the carbon tax does apply in Quebec. Food produced elsewhere in Canada is taxed when truck drivers transport it to Quebec, and there is another 17¢-per-litre carbon tax coming that will apply and that the Bloc Québécois wants to drastically increase.
Only the Conservative Party wants to eliminate those taxes and bring prices down for Quebeckers.
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- Nov/28/23 10:30:18 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will tell the member why I think I can lecture him. It is because the member betrayed his constituents. They elected him to be a member of the opposition and, instead, he works for the Prime Minister. Every time I go to Vancouver Island, people say their MP sold them out, sold them down the river. He voted to ban their hunting rifles while allowing violent gun criminals onto the street. He voted to hand out dangerous drugs that caused crime and chaos in tent cities all over Vancouver Island. He voted to quadruple the carbon tax in order to fund the extravagances of the Prime Minister.
New Democrats, especially those from Vancouver Island, are working for the Prime Minister instead of working for the common people in their constituencies. It is not only me who should lecture the member. It is every single Canadian who should lecture New Democrats that their job is to work for the people, not for the Prime Minister.
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- Nov/28/23 2:21:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, this Prime Minister is not worth the cost. He said that doubling the national debt would not have any consequences because interest rates were low, but those same deficits drove up interest rates and, next year, the government will be spending $52 billion, or $3,000 per Canadian family, on interest on the national debt. That is more than the government will be spending on health.
Why is the Prime Minister spending more on bankers than on nurses?
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- Nov/28/23 2:21:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is false. Seniors and Canadians are the ones who now have to make cuts to their grocery budget. The head of Food Banks of Quebec says it is an unprecedented and tragic situation, adding that organizations in his network are facing exceptional and growing pressure, with 71% of them reporting a shortfall of food. That is what misery looks like after eight years of this Prime Minister, who is driving up the price of food with his inflationary deficits and his taxes on our farmers.
Will he finally reverse his inflationary policies so that Canadians can eat?
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- Nov/28/23 2:23:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is impossible to believe anything the Prime Minister says. First, when he gave $15 billion to one battery plant, he said there would be no foreign workers, that it was all a rumour. Then he said it would be one. Then his minister said there would be a few. Now the company says there will be 900.
This is $15 billion, $1,000 in costs for every single family. Now the Liberals are giving money for 900 foreign workers to do a job that the Canada’s Building Trades Unions said could be done by our people, at a cost of $300 million of lost wages for our union workers.
Will the Prime Minister release the contract so we find out how many Canadian tax dollars are going to foreign replacement workers?
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has forced seven million Canadians to cut back on their diets, to a point where they are no longer healthy. The Prime Minister has forced Canadians to cut their budgets for food. Therefore. a record-smashing two million people are lined up at a food bank every month, around corners in ways that we have not seen since the Great Depression. That is the austerity he has imposed on Canadians. Now he wants to quadruple the carbon tax on the farmers who bring us our food.
We have a common-sense Conservative bill, Bill C-234. Will the Prime Minister stop blocking this bill in the Senate and let it pass so that our farmers can produce food and our people can afford to eat it?
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- Nov/28/23 2:26:13 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, actually, we are the only party that has stood with Ukraine rather than trying to impose a carbon tax.
I understand what the Prime Minister is doing. He has imposed so much misery here at home, whether by doubling housing costs, forcing people into tent encampments or forcing two million people to go to a food bank. These are the problems here at home at the kitchen table. He is so desperate to talk about anything else that he avoids talking about what is happening in our country.
Will he answer the question? Will he take his tax off our farmers so our people can afford to eat?
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister continues to dodge the question about the tax he plans to quadruple on Canadian farmers. One farm alone in my riding is spending $150,000 a year on carbon taxes, and the Prime Minister wants to quadruple that number, for up to $600,000. That might put the farm out of business, which would mean we would have to buy more foreign, expensive food from more polluting countries.
The Prime Minister is blocking a common-sense Conservative bill, Bill C-234, in the Senate that would take the tax off our farmers. Will he commit here and now to another carbon tax flip-flop and carve it out for our farmers, so our people can afford to eat?
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Mr. Speaker, we are against the carbon tax deal that the Liberals put before the House, and we are against quadrupling the carbon tax on Canadian farmers. The Prime Minister cannot defend his position, nor does he have the courage to just admit, as he did on home heating oil, that he was wrong. He plans to quadruple the tax on our farmers, who feed our people; this will send millions more people to the food bank.
Will the Prime Minister rise today and show the courage to admit he was wrong and back Conservative Bill C-234 to take the tax off our farmers, so our people can afford to eat? He should get up and answer.
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