44th Parl. 1st Sess.
January 29, 2024 11:00AM
Happy new year, Mr. Speaker.
This is my first time rising in the House in 2024, and I want to wish everyone a happy new year.
It is 2024, and the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. That is the reality. That was the reality in 2023 and 2022, but the cost keeps going up every year.
That is why the Conservative Party has a very focused common-sense plan. We have four priorities that we want to work on in Parliament, and they are to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop crime.
After eight years in office, this Prime Minister has managed to drive up the cost of living at the fastest pace in 40 years by doubling the national debt and printing $600 billion. He has increased inflation and interest rates at the expense of the working class and our seniors, and he did so with the support of the Bloc Québécois. The Bloc Québécois completely agrees with the exorbitant spending increases and the cost of government, which are creating a burden for Quebeckers. The Bloc Québécois voted in favour of all of this government spending in the fall of 2023. It supported the tax increases on gas, which punish Quebec farmers and workers.
The common-sense Conservative Party is the only one offering an alternative to this destructive and costly policy implemented on the backs of Quebeckers.
First, we will eliminate the second carbon tax, which does indeed apply to Quebec.
Second, we will control spending by eliminating waste. We are going to get rid of the $35-billion infrastructure bank, which has not delivered a single project for Canadians. We will get rid of the ArriveCAN app and the so-called green fund which, according to the officials involved, is now a scandal on par with the sponsorship scandal. We will cut spending on consultants, who now cost every Canadian family $1,400. In eight years, this Prime Minister has doubled the amount spent on outside consultants. These are extraordinary costs that do not produce results for Canadians. It is work that could have been done by the government, by public servants, whose numbers have ballooned by 50%.
We are going to introduce a common-sense law, a dollar-for-dollar law. Every time ministers in my government increase spending by one dollar, they are going to have to find one dollar in savings to offset that spending. Instead of increasing the national debt, inflation and taxes, we are going to cap spending. Once the government is forced to reduce the cost that falls on the backs of our people, it will enable workers, businesses and our economy to grow.
Let us talk about our workers. There is a war on work right now. Workers are being punished with sky-high tax rates that claw back more and more of every dollar they earn. A common-sense Conservative government will lower taxes and reward work here in Canada, for our workers, small businesses and all Canadians, so that we can be a country that rewards work.
We will protect the paycheques of ordinary Canadians and ensure that they can earn bigger paycheques by doing away with unconstitutional laws that prevent natural resource projects from going ahead. We will allow Quebeckers to build dams and develop mines and other projects that generate wealth for our country, instead of sending money to China or other countries that are dictatorships. We will keep that money for ourselves, so that Canadians can have bigger paycheques. We are also going to build houses.
After eight years under this Prime Minister, the cost of housing has doubled, rent has doubled, the money needed for a mortgage on an average house has doubled, and the down payment needed to buy that same house has also doubled. In Montreal, it has tripled.
After eight years under this Prime Minister, the cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Montreal has increased from $760, when I was the housing minister eight years ago, to $2,200 now. Red tape has blocked the construction of 25,000 housing units over the past six years. Thousands of construction projects across the country are in limbo because of red tape. In Vancouver, whose former NDP mayor is incredibly incompetent, it is even worse. He added additional costs of $1.3 million to each housing development built. These increases are tied directly to the red tape and taxes charged by the governments.
In Quebec City, I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Trudel with my Quebec lieutenant. He told me that $500 of the monthly rent for these apartments goes toward taxes and red tape, the costs charged by the government. For apartments that rent for $1,000, half of that amount covers only the taxes and the bureaucracy. That cost is too high. That is why a common-sense Conservative government will encourage municipalities to speed up construction instead of obstructing it.
The federal government pays out $5 billion to municipalities through the sales tax program. Quebec receives about $1 billion. There are already a lot of conditions attached to that money, a lot of federal conditions. However, those conditions do not include accelerating construction. That is why we are going to work with the Quebec government on a new infrastructure agreement that incentivizes construction. We will tie the amount of money that each municipality receives to the number of houses and apartments completed in the previous year. That would mean that municipalities like Victoriaville, Saguenay and Trois-Rivières would receive substantial bonuses, because there has been a huge boom in construction there. Last year, for example, construction increased by 30% in those municipalities. That should be rewarded. Real estate companies are paid according to the number of homes they sell. Construction companies are paid according to the number of houses they build. We should pay local bureaucracies on the basis of the number of homes they allow to be built. This would encourage the acceleration of construction.
We should also insist that every transit station be located near apartment buildings. Transit stations should be surrounded by large apartment towers. Across Canada, in Vancouver, Montreal and elsewhere, we see beautiful transit stations, yet there is almost no housing around them. It is ridiculous.
The federal government provides funding, but often a third or a half of the amount needed. We should insist that this money not be invested if there are no apartment buildings where our seniors and young people can live next to a public transit station. That is how we are going to speed up home construction. We are going to insist that CMHC provide funding for apartment buildings within two months, not two years. Executives should be fired unless they meet that deadline. Finally, these homes should be located in safe communities.
After eight years under the leadership of this Prime Minister, crime has increased by nearly 40%. He has increased crime by allowing the same small groups of repeat offenders to keep committing the same crimes over and over, and by letting them out on bail the very same day they are arrested.
A Conservative government will replace bail with jail. We will target real criminals who use guns and seal our borders instead of targeting hunters and sport shooters. We will treat and rehabilitate people with drug addictions instead of decriminalizing crack, cocaine and other drugs, as the Prime Minister has already done in partnership with the NDP in British Columbia.
What I have been describing here is common sense. This is the kind of common sense used by ordinary Canadians. For decades, there was a common-sense Liberal-Conservative consensus that led to our extraordinary success. A Conservative government will rebuild that consensus to give Canadians back the country they love and deserve. That is our goal. We are going to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and, finally, stop the crime. It is common sense, and that is what we are going to do.
Madam Speaker, I wish you a happy new year. It is 2024 and the Prime Minister is still not worth the cost. He is not worth the crime. He is not worth giving up the country that we know and love. After eight years, everything costs more, crime is running rampant, housing costs have doubled, the country is more divided than ever before, and the Prime Minister seeks to distract and attack anyone who disagrees with him in order to make people forget how miserable he has made life in this country after nearly a decade in power.
Our common-sense counterpoint is very focused. In this session of Parliament, we will fight to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. That is how we are going to turn around the mess the Prime Minister has created in eight years.
Let us quickly touch upon that mess. After eight years of the Prime Minister, housing costs have doubled. This is after he promised that those housing costs would go down. In fact, they rose 40% faster than incomes, the worst gap in the G7 by far and the second worst among all 40 OECD nations. It is twice as bad as the OECD average, with roughly a quarter of OECD countries actually seeing housing affordability improve over the last eight years. Here in Canada, under the Prime Minister, we have seen it worsen at the fastest rate in the entire G7.
The Prime Minister has created a situation where only 26% of Canadians are able to afford a single-family home. It now takes 25 years to save up for a down payment on the average home for the average Toronto family, when 25 years used to be the time it took to pay off a mortgage. After eight years of the Prime Minister, it is now more affordable to buy a 20-bedroom castle in Scotland than a two-bedroom condo in Kitchener.
After eight years of the Prime Minister, a criminal defence lawyer reported on Twitter that numerous clients have asked if she can help extend their prison sentences so they do not have to live in this housing market and find a place to rent. In other words, the Prime Minister's housing market is worse than prison by the judgment of several people who actually live in prison.
After eight years of the Prime Minister, we have 16 seniors crammed into a four-bedroom home in Oshawa according to its food bank, which told me it had to house middle-class seniors together. They are all losing their homes because of the incredible rent increase the Prime Minister's policies have caused.
We have homelessness skyrocketing across the country. Every town and centre now has homeless encampments. Halifax has 30 homeless encampments for one medium-sized city. After eight years of the Prime Minister, who would have imagined that we would have 30 homeless encampments in one city, but that is the misery that he has created through his policies that are not worth the cost of housing.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister makes the problem worse. He gives tax dollars to incompetent mayors and bureaucracies to block homebuilding. The worst incompetence, of course, has been by the former mayor and the present mayor of Toronto, and the former mayor of Vancouver blocking construction in those cities and making it uninhabitable for many of the people who should be able to afford a home. We now have the second-slowest building permits of any country in the OECD. That is why we have the fewest homes in the G7, even with the most land by far to build on.
We were told that the media darling Minister of Housing, who was brought in in the fall, was going to fix all of this. He was going to hold photo ops right across the country, and all of a sudden there would be more building. What happened was that housing construction actually went down. There was a 7% reduction in housing last year under the leadership of the current housing minister.
Is it any surprise, when the guy who destroyed our immigration system was put in charge of housing, that we got a destructive result? It is not me accusing him of ruining the immigration system. It is his own Liberal successor. The current Liberal Minister of Immigration says that the system is out of control. In his own words, he claims that his predecessor was giving study visas for students to come and study at what he calls “puppy mills”. Those are his terms. I would never have used that term. It is insulting. They are actually human beings, not dogs. That is the language we get from the current immigration minister to describe the chaos that his own predecessor caused in the international student program and the temporary foreign worker program, not to mention countless other programs that have now been overwhelmed by fraudsters, shady consultants and bureaucratic incompetence. Now they take the guy who ruined all of that and say that this is the guy they are bringing in to resolve the housing crisis.
It is no wonder it gets worse and worse by the day. The Liberals' only defence is that they are spending lots of money. Failing is bad and failing expensively is even worse. That is what the Prime Minister has done after eight years. It is not only in housing. It is in generalized inflation. After eight years, inflation hit 40-year highs. After eight years, the Prime Minister has increased the cost of food so quickly that there are now two million Canadians, a record-smashing number, who are required to go to food banks in a single month. We have students forced to live in homeless shelters in order to afford food. We have seniors who say they have to live in tents in order to be able to shop and feed themselves, because food prices have risen so high.
In Toronto, one in 10 Torontonians are now going to a food bank, enough to fill the Rogers Centre seven times. If the monthly users of the food bank in Toronto alone were to go to the Rogers Centre, the place would have to be filled seven separate times, just to accommodate them all. Who would have thought we would have this many hungry people in Canada's biggest city, a city that has elected no one but Liberals since 2015? This is the result from that.
In that same city, crime and chaos rage out of control. In the adjoining suburbs, we now have stories of extortion, where small businesses receive letters saying that if they do not fork over big dollars to international crime syndicates, they will be shot at, their houses will be burned, their families will be targeted, and the government does nothing to protect them. Who would have thought that Canada would be so vulnerable to this kind of criminality and chaos that these foreign criminal syndicates would think Canada so weak and so easy to target that they could go after innocent small business leaders and their families in order to shake them down for money? Yet that is what has happened.
These same business owners go to bed at night with one eye open, because they know their car could be stolen as they sleep. I told some stories yesterday to the caucus, incredible stories of people in Brampton whose cars just vanished in the middle of the night. The cars go over to Montreal where they are put on a ship and sent off to the Middle East, Africa or Europe where they are resold at a profit. They are not even inspected as they go onto the ships in these containers.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister spends billions of dollars trying to buy back the legitimate property of licensed law-abiding firearms owners. He believes that the problem is the hunter from Nunavut or the professional sport shooter from Nanaimo, when in fact the real problem is the criminals.
Common-sense Conservatives are going to put an end to this madness. We are going to bring home the country we know and love. Let us go through the common-sense plan.
We are going to bring home lower prices by axing the carbon tax. It starts with passing Bill C-234 to axe the tax on farmers and food so farmers can make the food and Canadians can afford to eat it. Let us pass the bill unamended today and let Canadians eat affordable food. It is very easy. The House of Commons passed it once before. The Senate, under duress and pressure from the current Prime Minister, then sent it back with unnecessary amendments. Now the other opposition parties are flip-flopping and wavering. They agree in principle with the Liberal plan to quadruple the carbon tax, but say they might consider giving farmers a break on it. Now they are not so sure. They are siding with the costly Prime Minister again on keeping the tax on our farmers. Every time our people go to the grocery store and see those rising prices they will know that the NDP has betrayed working-class people in favour of greedy government with higher taxes on farmers and the single moms who are struggling to feed their families.
We are going to axe the tax on home heat not just for some or for a short time, but for everybody, everywhere, always. Common-sense Conservatives call on the Prime Minister to be consistent and not just temporarily pause the tax in regions where his polls are plummeting and his caucus is revolting, but rather let us axe the tax for every Canadian household to heat their homes in this devastatingly cold winter. It is incredible how cold it was in Edmonton, -50°C, and the Liberal member for Edmonton Centre voted to tax the heat of Edmontonians. Not only that, the Liberal member for Edmonton Centre wants to quadruple the carbon tax on the home heat of Edmontonians, so over the next several years, as the winter cold comes in and people crank up their heat, their bills will rise increasingly faster. In some places now the carbon tax is more expensive than the actual gas that people are buying. We are going to be sharing the bills that some of my caucus members have so that everybody knows how badly the Prime Minister and his NDP coalition are ripping off Canadians for the crime of heating themselves in -50°C weather. We are the only party that will axe the tax for them and for everyone, everywhere, always.
Our common-sense plan to bring home lower prices includes capping the spending that has driven inflation, the $600-billion increase in spending and debt, which means printing money. Printing money bids up the goods we buy and the interest we pay. In fact, government spending is up 75% since the Prime Minister took office. He has nearly doubled the cost of the government at a time when the economy has barely grown at all. In fact, it is shrinking while the government is expanding, which means it is gobbling up an increasing share of a shrinking pie and there is less left for everyone else. Right now the government is rich and the people are poor, because the Prime Minister cannot stop spending, and his greedy NDP coalition counterparts push him to spend even more of other people's money. Our common-sense plan would cap spending and cut waste. We would get rid of the $35-billion Infrastructure Bank, the $54-million ArriveCAN app and the billion-dollar so-called green fund, which is really a slush fund.
We would cut back on the money wasted on consultant insiders, who now consume 21 billion tax dollars a year, an amount that is equal to $1,400 for every family in Canada. We would cut back on this waste to balance the budget, and bring down inflation and interest rates, so that Canadians can eat, heat and house themselves.
We are going to unleash the growth of our economy. Instead of creating more cash, we would create more of what cash buys. We have the most powerful resources, perhaps the greatest supply of natural resources per capita of any country on earth, and we are very good at harvesting those resources to the benefit of our people and our environment at the same time.
The Prime Minister, with the help of the NDP, has been driving the production to other countries, where they pollute more, burn more coal and add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The Prime Minister would drive the production away from Canadians, who use among the cleanest electricity grids on Planet Earth, instead of bringing it home to this country. Our common-sense plan would repeal Bill C-69 and replace it with a new law that would not only protect the environment and consult first nations but also get projects built so that we can bring home paycheques for our people and take the money away from the dirty dictators of the world.
I was able to recently announce our new candidate in the Skeena—Bulkley Valley riding, the great Ellis Ross, former chief of the Haisla Nation. He is responsible for bringing Canada the biggest-ever investment in its history, which is the LNG Canada project. It is a project that was approved by the former Harper government, and the only reason it was able to go ahead under this government is that it gave the project an exemption from the carbon tax. Had the tax applied, the project never would have occurred. Had Bill C-69, the anti-resource law, been in place, the project never would have happened.
By the government's own admission, this project will reduce greenhouse gas emissions around the world by millions of tonnes because it will displace dirty, coal-fired electricity in Asia by sending clean, green Canadian natural gas, liquefied using hydroelectricity and our natural cold weather, and sent abroad on our shortest shipping distance, which means burning less fossil fuels to get it to market. This will displace more emission-intensive forms of energy in countries where they need to cut back. That is a solution to fight climate change and protect our environment, and thank God we had the visionary leadership of the great Ellis Ross to make that project happen, along with that of Stephen Harper.
Unfortunately, the Prime Minister has blocked every other LNG project from coming to fruition. There were 18 of these projects on the table when he took office, not one of them is completed. Only the aforementioned—
An hon. member: Hear, hear!
Hon. Pierre Poilievre: Mr. Speaker, we got a cheer over there. It was the Marxist member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie. He took that Marxist comment as a compliment, by the way. Believe me, he has told me that off the record. He tells us that he is speaking on behalf of the NDP. He cheers when he hears that the Prime Minister has blocked every LNG project.
That is going to be very interesting news for me to take to northern British Columbia and the first nations people, such as the Nisga'a. He cheers at the thought that the Nisga'a will lose out on their proposed liquefied natural gas project. That is the NDP of today. They used to stand up for the workers who had lunch buckets. They used to stand up for first nations people. That is a bygone era. Now, they cheer every time a working-class person loses a job and a community loses its industry. Shame on them. The good news is that they will not be part of my government.
We will stand with the Nisga'a. We will stand with the Haisla. We will stand with the other first nations of northern Ontario that want to see the ring of fire go ahead. The first nations people want to harvest our resources to empower their people and end poverty. We, as Conservatives, will remove the government gatekeepers and the radical ideologues, such that NDP member and the current environment minister, so we can get things built and bring it home to our country.
Those powerful paycheques would fund schools, roads and hospitals. They would improve our finances. That is what I mean when I say, “Fix the budget”. Yes, we have to cap spending and cut waste. That is the spending side of the income statement. However, we also have to bring in more revenue at lower tax rates.
How would we we do that? We would allow more production. We would have bigger and more powerful industrial projects and resource achievements, and we would have more paycheques for the people in the communities who would work on those job sites. We would generate the tax revenue at a lower cost to the overall population so that we could fund our cherished social safety net, with real money, sustainably into the future. That is how one fixes the budget: make more and cost less to deliver better results for the Canadian people.
The most basic result, though, would be for people to have rooves over their heads. After eight years of the Prime Minister, that is not possible. We would remove the bureaucracy that stands in the way of homebuilding. The reason we have the fewest homes per capita in the G7 is that we have the worst bureaucracy and the slowest permitting. My common-sense plan would require local bureaucracies to permit 15% more homes per year as a condition of getting federal money. Those who beat the target would get more money, and those who miss the target would get less, in exact proportion to their success or failure. We pay realtors based on the homes they sell, and we pay builders based on the homes they build. We should pay local bureaucracies based on the homes they permit. That would speed them up and get them moving. By the way, we would do it in a non-prescriptive way.
There are countless different ways a municipality could allow more housing. For example, today we learned one of the ways that cities block housing is by making renovations harder to permit. People might think, “What does a renovation have to do with new homes?” If one wants to renovate their home to create a basement suite, an over-the-garage suite or perhaps a guest house converted from an old garage or something like that on their property, they would need a renovation permit. That might be holding up housing. My plan would give a credit to the city, and therefore more federal money, if it were to allow a rapid conversion of one house into two or of a basement into a suite.
The reason I focus on this is that the Prime Minister has a proposal right now that he calls the “housing accelerator”, where he is having federal bureaucrats assess the processes of municipal bureaucrats, and the bureaucrats talk about the way things work. That would be like scoring a hockey game by having the referee go to the practices of the players to test whether they are doing the right skating drills, whether they are doing the right pre-game stretching and whether their diet plan is the best plan, rather than the simple and obvious way we score hockey games, which is by counting the number of pucks in nets. I want to judge a municipality's results based on keys in doors. There are pucks in nets and keys in doors.
The municipality can figure out how to do it. It is not our job to micromanage how cities increase their housing stocks. Some might sell land. Some might get rid of zoning procedures. Some might get their bureaucrats working faster and smarter. Some might allow more renovations of homes into duplexes. Some might find any other manner of creative ways to do it. It is not the federal government's job to micromanage. What we would do would be to pay for the result. That is how we would get the homes built so that, just like when I was minister and housing was affordable, it could once again be affordable in the future, and our young people could hope to get married and start families, which is something that has become next to impossible in most of our big cities.
These homes would be in safe neighbourhoods. The Prime Minister has unleashed crime and chaos with his catch-and-release system, which allowed the same 40 violent offenders to do 6,000 crimes in one year in the city of Vancouver. A common-sense Conservative government would make repeat violent offenders ineligible for bail so they would stay behind bars rather than reoffend. We would bring jail, not bail. We would bring in treatment, not more drugs, for our addicts, so we could bring our loved ones home, drug-free.
We would also reverse the Prime Minister's ban on our sport shooters and our lawful hunters. Instead, we would go after the real violent criminals and seal our borders. We would put the billions of dollars the Prime Minister is wasting going after lawful hunters and put them into scanning the boxes that come into our country, which bring in the drugs and guns, and scanning those shipping containers that are taking away our stolen cars, so we can stop them from leaving the country and keep our cars here, getting our insurance rates down so people can afford to drive again and do not have to sleep with one eye open during this looting of our vehicles the Prime Minister has allowed to happen.
The Prime Minister wants to protect turkeys from hunters. I want to protect Canadians from criminals. It is common sense. That is the common-sense agenda of the Conservative opposition in this forthcoming Parliament. We would axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
To axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime are things on which we should all agree, so I call on the other parties to dispense with their radical ideologies and plans and unite around this common-sense effort to set four clear priorities. Who is ready to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime? Is everybody ready to do that? Let us bring it home.
I would like to introduce the following amendment. I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:
“the House declines to give second reading to Bill C-59, An Act to implement certain provisions of the fall economic statement tabled in Parliament on November 21, 2023 and certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 28, 2023, since the bill fails to repeal the carbon tax on farmers, First Nations and families.”
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Madam Speaker, that member is once again misinforming his constituents. Actually, I should not say that because they do not believe him, so he is not informing them of anything. He has misinformed himself because, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, 60% of Canadians pay more in carbon tax costs than they get back in these phony rebates.
Now we have their big solution. They are going to give it a new name. They are going to rename the carbon tax. They think people will not notice their heating bills, gas bills and grocery bills are going through the roof under this tax if they just give it a new name. This is a carbon tax that rips off the people of Winnipeg, and he should be ashamed for allowing a temporary pause on the tax for some people in other regions while denying the people in his own riding, one of the coldest major cities in this country, that same pause. We will axe the tax in Winnipeg. We will axe the tax for everyone, everywhere, forever.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her question and for being honest enough to say that the Bloc Québécois wants to keep this government in office for another year and a half. Her leader has said before that he wants to keep this Prime Minister in office. The Bloc Québécois voted for all of the economic policies that led to this increase in inflation and the doubling of housing costs. The Bloc Québécois completely agrees with the Prime Minister.
With regard to the environment, I did mention it in my speech. I said that the best way to protect the environment is to repatriate mineral and energy production to Canada. We have the highest standards in the world. The Bloc Québécois and the Liberals want to give that money to China, where they burn coal and use other processes to produce electric batteries.
I believe that we should repatriate production by giving the green light to projects such as hydroelectric dams in Quebec, carbon capture in western Canada and nuclear energy, which is emission-free. We should give the green light to those projects so that we can produce more emission-free electricity.
That is common sense.
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The first point I would make, Madam Speaker, is that the member seems to be suggesting that corporations were not greedy eight years ago because food prices were much lower then and that suddenly now, maybe it is something in the water, the level of greed in the country has grown dramatically over the last eight years, and that is the sudden cause of food price increases.
The reality is that big corporations always do well in an inflationary environment, and the reason is very simple. If we have stuff, then we get richer when stuff goes up in price; if we need stuff, we get poorer when stuff goes up in price. That is why inflation is always a tax on the poorest people to the benefit of a tiny minority on top. It is not just those who sell stuff, but also those who own assets who become better off.
That is why I warned, in the House of Commons, in the fall of 2020, that printing $600 billion was going to lead the billionaire class to become extremely wealthy, and it did. The gap between rich and poor has grown. I knew this would happen because when hundreds of billions of dollars are funnelled into the financial system, it balloons the assets of the people who have, and it increases the costs on those who have not.
Inflation is the most immoral tax. It is the tax that takes from the have-nots to give to the have-yachts. Not only will Conservatives get rid of the carbon tax on food, but also we will get rid of the inflation tax on everybody.
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Madam Speaker, that is the story I hear from the farmers in my constituency. I stood and mentioned the Medeiros farm in south Carleton. I read their bills into the record and asked the Prime Minister how he expects them to pay those bills when he quadruples the tax. This is the worst part of the Liberal-NDP carbon tax. They plan to quadruple it.
As bad as one's bills are today, if they get re-elected, the NDP and the Prime Minister will quadruple the tax to 61¢ a litre for gasoline. Similar proportional increases on natural gas, propane and oil heating will follow. That is their plan.
To be very clear, the choice in the next election will be between the costly coalition, which will tax one's food, punish one's work, take one's money, double one's housing cost and unleash crime and chaos in one's community, and the common-sense Conservatives who will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
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- Jan/29/24 2:17:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today is a difficult day for the Muslim community in Sainte‑Foy and across Canada. In fact, it is a difficult day for all Canadians, as we mourn the six lives stolen by a heinous terrorist at the Centre culturel islamique de Québec on this day seven years ago.
Our thoughts are with their families, with the 19 people who suffered injuries in addition to those who were murdered and with the many others who are left with mental scars that will never fully heal.
As we reflect on the tragic fate they suffered as a result of this evil monster, we must also reflect on the promise of freedom, peace and safety that they were guaranteed as Canadians and that was viciously stolen by the forces of hate and Islamophobia.
It must never happen again. We must stand on guard for our Muslim friends and neighbours, for all Canadians, to have the right and the freedom to worship in peace and security.
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- Jan/29/24 2:21:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let me begin by welcoming the Prime Minister back to Canada after his big $80,000-plus free vacation. It was a gift he received. He said the situation was like that of every other Canadian who has had a similar vacation.
Apparently, he has not spoken to the two million Canadians forced to use food banks to eat, or the students in Montreal who have to resort to alternative types of housing now that his policies have tripled the cost of rent in his hometown.
Will the Prime Minister reverse the inflationary policies that are preventing construction, so that our students can—
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- Jan/29/24 2:23:17 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, some two million Canadians are having to turn to food banks. Students are being forced to live in homeless shelters.
The cost of housing has doubled in Quebec City and tripled in Montreal. Across Canada, the cost of housing has doubled since this Prime Minister promised to reduce it.
Will the Prime Minister finally reverse the policies that are creating more bureaucracy and causing inflation, so that home builders can give Canadians an affordable place to call home?
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- Jan/29/24 2:24:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to welcome the Prime Minister back from his $80,000 vacation, which he got for free. He said, like most Canadians, friends welcomed him for that vacation. He took not one but two private jets paid for by the taxpayer, burning 100 tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. He wants to tax the heat and the food of Canadians.
Did he pay the full carbon tax on each of the 100 tonnes of emissions that he put into the atmosphere as part of his $80,000 vacation?
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- Jan/29/24 2:25:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister says that greenhouse gas emissions are driving up grocery prices. He put 100 tonnes of emissions into the atmosphere for his personal vacation. This is high-tax, high-flying, high-carbon hypocrisy. Meanwhile, Canadians in Edmonton were facing -50°C temperatures on which they were paying carbon taxes just to heat their homes and to stay alive.
Given that he gives himself a free vacation at other people's expense, will he at least allow Canadians to heat their homes without his tax?
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- Jan/29/24 2:27:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this one is just too easy. He walked into it. He had to muzzle a member from Newfoundland who called for an end to his leadership, joining another senator who did the same. They understand that their constituents are literally starving and unable to heat their homes because the Prime Minister is quadrupling the carbon tax, doubling housing costs and giving the worst inflation in 40 years.
Why will he not listen to, instead of intimidating, his member from Newfoundland and put his leadership of the Liberal Party up for a review?
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