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House Hansard - 266

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 12, 2023 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 266 - Dec/12/23
Mr. John Williamson (New Brunswick Southwest, CPC)
  • Dec/12/23 10:06:02 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the 35th report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, entitled “Specific COVID-19 Benefits”. There are also three dissenting reports to this committee report. We will hear from the official opposition on one of those in a moment. Pursuant to Standing Order 109, the committee requests that the government table a comprehensive response to this report.
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Context: House Hansard - 266 - Dec/12/23
Hon. Pierre Poilievre
  • Dec/12/23 5:33:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I can understand why the NDP is so sensitive, because their betrayal of the working-class people they have so long claimed to represent is becoming more clear the longer I speak, and they are desperate to silence that voice. Everywhere I go, I meet working-class New Democrats, people who voted for the NDP their whole lives, who say that they have been betrayed and that is why they are now standing with the common-sense Conservatives. The reality is that when $600 billion of cash is created, is funnelled through the financial system and is lent out to wealthy investors, they are obviously going to bid up land and housing costs, which they did. One of the critiques, of the bought-and-paid-for Liberal press gallery, of my documentary is to claim that it was COVID that caused housing prices to go up. First of all, that does not explain why they went up so much more in Canada than in all the other countries in the world, where they also had COVID. Second, it does not make any sense. All of the phenomena related to COVID should have brought house prices down. Immigration was ground to a halt. Wages dropped. Job losses occurred. A recession happened. All of those things are typically associated with declining house prices, not rising house prices. Do not just take my word for it, CMHC predicted, in the spring of 2020, that these COVID phenomena would lead to a 32% drop in house prices. What caused the market to reverse what otherwise would have been such a serious drop and instead turned into a 50% increase in two years in house prices? Obviously, it was the massive flood of new cash into the financial system, which was lent out. We need to have accountability for that. Why does this matter, given that the quantitative easing program seems to be over for now? We have to elect a government that would never use the central bank as a personal ATM, to print cash, to inflate costs and to destroy the purchasing power of the working class. When I am Prime Minister, we will get the central bank back to its core mandate of stable, low prices, not paying off politicians' spending. That is common sense. What we are really talking about here is common sense. I am proposing common-sense measures that are attracting the support of Canadians across the political spectrum and in every corner of the country. Let us start with my first priority of common sense, which is to bring home lower prices. How are we going to do that? We are going to start by axing the tax. Everything the Prime Minister said about the carbon tax has proven false. First, he said the tax would never go above $50 a tonne. Well, it has gone above that already, and he admits he is going to quadruple it. It is going to go up to $170 a tonne, plus there will be a second carbon tax caked on top of it, which would have the effect of quadrupling the current tax from roughly, depending on the province, 15¢ or 16¢ a litre, up to 61¢ a litre. That is his radical and insane plan, fully supported by the NDP. The NDP wants to raise taxes on working-class Canadians for the crime of heating their homes, gassing their trucks or feeding their family food grown on a farm. That is the choice in the next election. We are going to have a carbon tax election. The Prime Minister could try to avoid it—
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