44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 12, 2023 10:00AM
- Dec/12/23 2:01:54 p.m.
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Madam Speaker,
'Twas the week before Christmas, just before the House break,Eight long years with a government on the take.The economy was stalled, Liberal spending was high,Canadians were struggling just to get by.No one could afford a house or pay rent,The carbon tax quadrupled is making a dent.Canadians struggling and having to choose,Between heating and eating, it was only bad news.For families lined up at the food banks to eat,The costly coalition was making Christmas look bleak.But alas there was hope, from the opposition side,A new Conservative leader was sure to provide.With a common-sense plan geared for all people,He would axe the tax and end the upheaval. His housing policy would fix what the Liberals had broken,He would ensure there would be no need for food tokens.After eight long years of wasteful spending,He would stop the debt from ever ascending. The member for Carleton will soon be PM,And this costly coalition will come to an end. I heard him exclaim as he rode out of sight,Your home, my home, our home, let us bring it home and to all a good night.
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- Dec/12/23 2:10:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, our government is continuing to invest in affordable housing.
In 2017, our Prime Minister launched a badly needed $80-billion national housing strategy to fill the big gaps left by the previous Conservative government's denial of federal responsibility for housing. Countless Canadians remember what life was like during Prime Minister Harper's “decade of darkness”.
Last week showed that today's Conservative leader is cut from the same cloth. On Thursday and Friday, Conservative MPs voted against funding indigenous housing, funding 15,000 permanent affordable homes, constructing 71,000 rental homes and so much more.
Our government is working to strengthen the economy by supporting the middle class and those seeking to join it. While in Mr. Harper's cabinet, today's Conservative leader worked to undermine Canada's electoral democracy and shred our social safety net.
The Conservative leader is simply not worth the risk.
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- Dec/12/23 3:11:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, by 2026, nearly 60,000 households in Edmonton will live in unsuitable housing or will not be able to afford rent because of the government's failure to build affordable homes. Corporate Conservatives and delay Liberals continue to play cover for rich developers and billionaires as they renovict my constituents. Last year, 156 people died in Edmonton because they were homeless. These were deaths that could have been prevented had the government acted sooner.
Again, when will the government get the money out the door to build social and co-op housing now?
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- Dec/12/23 3:12:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his advocacy to continue to invest in affordable housing, including co-operative housing. I would point him to the recent fall economic statement, which increased grant funding to co-operative housing by more than $300 million, and we will be rolling out a program worth more than $1.5 billion beginning early in the new year.
I do agree with him on one point of his question, however, which is the Conservatives' dedication to opposing funding for affordable housing. In fact, just last week, when they had an opportunity to put their position on the record in the chamber, they voted against supports for affordable housing. They voted against emergency transition shelters for women and children, and they voted against supports for veterans living through homelessness. It is the—
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- Dec/12/23 5:18:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we then went on to demonstrate in the documentary another indisputable fact: that Canada has the fewest homes per capita in the G7 after eight years of the Prime Minister, even though we have the most land to build on, and that we built more homes in 1972 than we built last year. In fact, in 1972, there were 22 million Canadians. Last year, there were 39 million. In other words, we have doubled the population while reducing the number of homes we are building, because of the massive bureaucracy the Prime Minister continues to build up. As a result, the number of homes relative to the number of families who need them is in stark decline.
What do colleagues think is causing the rising cost of building a home? In Vancouver, for example, what would colleagues think is the leading cost of building a home? Is it land, labour, lumber or even the profit of the builder? No, it is the government: the cost of permits, delays, consultants, red tape and taxes. All of these costs add up to more than all of the other costs combined. They add up to $1.3 million for every newly built home. In Montreal, the city has blocked 25,000 new homes in the last two years. In Winnipeg, the courts had to shoot down a decision by the city hall to block 2,000 homes right next to a transit station that was built for those homes. Why was that? It was because the city councillor said his constituents did not want neighbours. Many Ontario municipalities have raised development charges 900%. Have the costs of servicing communities gone up 900% over the last several decades? I would like to see why.
Granted, those decisions are municipal, but they are federally funded because the Prime Minister happily forks over billions and billions of dollars more, rewarding bureaucracies for blocking the way. For example, he has created the new housing accelerator fund. After two years and $4 billion, it has not completed a single solitary home. Recently, the minister had a great photo op in the city of Halifax, in your province, Mr. Speaker, and boy, did we ever need a housing announcement there, because, after eight years of the Prime Minister, there are now 30 homeless encampments in that city. Can people imagine that?
Mr. Speaker, you are from Nova Scotia. Would you ever have imagined that there would be 30 homeless encampments in Halifax? Eight years ago, if I had told you that would have happened, you would not have believed me. This is after eight years of the misery and poverty that the Prime Minister has imposed on our people. We were all a little bit relieved when, all of a sudden, the minister decided he was going to show up and do something on housing. He announced millions of dollars for the Liberal mayor. What did we find out the money was for? It was for hiring more—
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- Dec/12/23 5:23:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I love how when the first nations people do extraordinary things, Liberals show up to take all the credit. The member reminds me of the rooster who thought that just because he crowed when the sun came up, he made the sun come up. He did not make the sun come up; he just crowed about it. It is actually the first nations people who are building this project, and it is a shame that Liberals try to take credit for it.
If we could just get the Liberals and the government out of the way, we could do many more great things because we know that, prior to the current government, housing was affordable in this country, taking a fraction out of a family paycheque to afford a home. The good thing is that housing was not like this before this Prime Minister and it will not be like this after he is gone.
The second cause of the housing hell, which I pointed out in my documentary, was the rampant money printing that the government unleashed. While it was technically done by the Bank of Canada, it was clearly in total collaboration with the elected government and with the total support and the lack of discipline from the government to print $600 billion. The government has created 32% more cash in a period of time when the economy has grown by 4%. In other words, the cash is growing eight times faster than the stuff the cash buys.
The Liberals did this through a program called quantitative easing, where the government sells bonds to the private sector and the Bank of Canada buys them right back at a higher price, profiting the financial institutions, freeing up easy money for government to spend, but also flooding the financial markets with easy cash that is lent out to wealthy investors.
In my documentary, I use a Bank of Canada graph demonstrating the total liftoff in the number of homes bought by investors that happened exactly—
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- 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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