44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 18, 2024 10:00AM
- Apr/18/24 4:46:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my hon. colleague and friend, the member for Simcoe North who we actually meet out in the middle of Lake Simcoe in rural Ontario.
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to the 2024 budget on behalf of the hard-working residents of Bradford West Gwillimbury, the soup and salad bowl of Canada; East Gwillimbury; Georgina; and the Chippewas of Georgina Island.
After nine years of the Liberal government, Canadians are worse off than ever before. Sadly, this failure of a budget will only make things even worse. The Prime Minister and finance minister have refused to listen to common sense and have presided over a shrinking middle class and record-low levels of national productivity.
Prior to releasing this budget, the finance minister promised it would be a plan to unlock pathways to the middle class for the next generation. Wow, can members believe that? The Liberal government used to brag about its ambition to grow the middle class. The first chapter of the Liberal Party's 2015 platform was entitled “Growth for the Middle Class”. The 2019 platform emphasized “Forward: A Real Plan for the Middle Class”. Now, here we are in 2024, and instead of looking to grow the middle class, the Liberals are admitting that because of them, the middle-class lifestyle, which used to be a reasonable and attainable expectation for living life in this country, is now something that few Canadians will ever enjoy. It seems that, over nine years, the promise of Canada is gone.
This is the day-to-day reality facing Canadians. Two-thirds of young Canadians have resigned themselves to being worse off than their parents. Can members imagine that? With this budget, instead of restoring that promise for our citizens, the Liberals are sending a clear message to millennials, to zoomers and to everyone else left behind, saying that it's tough luck and that they should have been born sooner or in better circumstances. However, Canadians, both young and old, are well aware that it is the punishing taxes and the high-spending agenda of the Liberal government that are to blame, and the policies have locked Canadians out of so many of those pathways that people used to join the middle class.
The cost of living is out of control. It has left half of Canadians living paycheque to paycheque. After paying for their everyday expenses, Canadians just do not have money left over to save, and others are resorting to charities and food banks just to get by. It did not need to be this way. Common-sense Conservatives have been calling on the Liberal government to restore the promise of Canada and to bring home lower costs by axing the tax, building the homes and fixing the budget. Unfortunately, the Liberals did not axe the tax. In fact, the Prime Minister increased it by 23% on the first of the month, making it so that families, rural residents, farmers and small businesses suffer even more.
For months, I have been calling on the Liberal government to address the unfairness that has excluded rural communities, like York—Simcoe, from the rural top-up. The Liberals insist on classifying them as Toronto, making them pay more in carbon taxes than other Canadians. After ignoring this problem for years, budget 2024 finally says that the government will look to better define rural areas, but it only commits to put forward a proposal to do so later in the year. Let us talk about a day late and a dollar short. This is just further proof of why we have to axe the tax for everyone everywhere.
The Liberals also have not built the homes, after nine years of the Liberal government. The government promised to lower the price of housing, but now rents and mortgages in Canada have doubled, and middle-class Canadians are forced to live in tent encampments in nearly every city across Canada. Even small towns like mine are seeing the impacts, as all forms of shelter have become unavailable and unaffordable.
Budget 2024 will not make things any better. It will certainly give more opportunities to Liberal ministers to pose for photo ops, but it will not help Canadians who cannot buy a home or who cannot afford to renew their mortgage.
With $40 billion in new spending in budget 2024, it is obvious that the Liberal government has failed to fix the budget. The Prime Minister has failed to put a stop to the inflationary deficits and has failed to rein in spending. He will continue to make life worse for Canadians. The Liberals are now spending more on interest and more on the debt than on health care. There is more money for bankers than for nurses. It is no wonder there is still no hospital in York—Simcoe.
To protect our social programs and to lower costs, Conservatives have called on the government to cap the spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down interest rates and inflation. That would require the government to find a dollar in savings for every new dollar in spending.
Instead, the Liberals are misleading Canadians, pretending that the rich would pay for the Prime Minister's spending. We all know that it is the everyday Canadians, the extraordinary Canadians, not the Liberal bigwigs and Bay Street billionaires, who have been paying the price. The government even admitted in its response to Order Paper question 2407 this week that it does not even know how many wealthy Canadians have fled the country and no longer paying taxes.
When Canadians look around at what this country has become, they see abysmal failures of the Liberals to address the problems that the Liberal government created. It is more clear now than ever that the Prime Minister is just not worth the cost.
I recently received a letter from a constituent of mine, Laura. I will read it into the record so that the government can finally understand the pain it is inflicting on Canadians.
She wrote that her family lives in Pefferlaw in a small bungalow. They are a single-income family. She is a stay-at-home mom of two, and her husband works 60 hours a week, just so they can survive financially. They received their gas bill, and over the months, the carbon tax has steadily increased up and up. Now, it has officially become more than their actual usage. They, like so many others, are struggling after the bills are paid and the groceries are purchased. Her grocery shop one day was $167 for just four bags of groceries. They have nothing left over.
She does not pretend to know the intricacies of big government, but she is also not a fool. She really feels like they, and everyone else, are being cheated by the Liberals, who rob from the poor to feed the rich because they lack the ability to budget taxpayers' money. They do not go on vacations. They do not eat out or take their kids to the movies. They live like that, apparently, because the Liberals need their money more than her family does.
The Liberals can choose to keep ignoring the common-sense proposals put forward by Conservatives, but it is shameful that they continue to ignore the plight of everyday Canadians like Laura. Every Canadian knows what a budget is and what it is supposed to do. By definition, it is a means to determine financial goals. With budget 2024, it is evident that the Liberals have no financial goals, no vision, no plan to bring back balanced budgets to our country and affordability to the people. Their only objective is to spend as much of Canadians' money as they can before they are sent packing. The needs of ordinary Canadians be damned.
Canada is broken. Canadians are broke. I will be voting, alongside my common-sense Conservative colleagues, against this budget.
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- Apr/18/24 4:56:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I was really quite happy to hear the member talk about the fact that the government is not actually making the ultrarich pay their fair share. That is fascinating. I do agree that in terms of what we are seeing in this budget, it certainly does not go far enough. The increase of the inclusion rate for capital gains simply is not enough. New Democrats have been calling for an increase of the excess profits tax, the corporate book tax and other taxes.
Would the member be willing to work with New Democrats, and maybe put forward an amendment, to ensure that the government, within this budget, would actually increase the corporate tax rate, like what we are seeing in the states, so that we are competitive as opposed to being the lowest in the OECD?
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- Apr/18/24 5:12:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, $1 billion is a considerable amount of money, believe it or not, for the member across the way.
At the end of the day, I find it a little confusing. I am trying to understand the Conservatives' policy on the Canada disability benefit. That should not surprise anyone, because we do not know what their policy is on the pharmacare plan or the dental plan. We assume, based on their voting patterns, that they are against those initiatives.
Does the member support the allocations in the budget for programs such as the dental program, the pharmacare program and the disability program?
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- Apr/18/24 5:12:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe the government is applauding the disability program. It over-promised and under-delivered.
If we want to talk about line items in the budget, let us talk about debt servicing costs. Debt servicing costs are now the exact same amount that the GST is to require. I have a bunch of friends I like to see on Fridays at Frank's compound, Waxy and Frank. Those guys go for lunch once a week. Now, every time they get a bill that has GST on it, they are paying interest on the debt.
There might be some good things in the budget, but people do not buy a house because they like the curtains.
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- Apr/18/24 5:15:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague's financial acumen is renowned in our party.
What does he think is missing from this budget that he would like to see?
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- Apr/18/24 5:15:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, a year and a half ago, the government tabled a fall economic statement that showed a balanced budget in five years. Now the deficit is $20 billion. Since everyone started telling the government to slow down its spending, it has added $103 billion of new spending. That is net. The gross number is $156 billion. What I would like to have seen in this budget is some kind of plan.
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- Apr/18/24 5:16:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, when I reflect on the budget, what I see is a government that is committed to the issue of fairness, fairness for every generation. What I see is a consistency that has been clearly demonstrated since 2015. As a government, we have a responsibility to be there in a very real and tangible way, in many different ways, to support Canadians.
We saw that in the first budget we presented back in 2015-16, shortly after the 2015 fall election, where we made it very clear that fairer taxation was important. That is the reason why we put a special tax on Canada's wealthiest one per cent back then, which the Conservative Party voted against. We also reduced the tax on Canada's middle class, which the Conservative Party also voted against.
We have not been discouraged with respect to moving forward and have supported Canadians in many different ways. I can talk about the supports for the poorest seniors with the guaranteed income supplement, the GIS, which was greatly enhanced back in 2016 because of a budget measure. We can go through the years that followed, where we have consistently seen the government take actions to support Canadians in a very real and tangible way. That is the consistency we have demonstrated.
This budget is a reflection of what Canadians are telling the individual Liberal members of Parliament from coast to coast to coast. We are not saying that everything is perfect. We recognize that Canadians have very real needs. This budget, much like the fall economic statement, is there to support Canadians.
One of the other things that has been consistent is the Conservative Party of Canada's approach. Its members are not there to serve the needs of Canadians. They are more interested in filibustering and being a destructive force. One member just moments ago was talking about rural Canada and how he wanted to see a certain area get a larger percentage of the carbon rebate. There is irony in that. The fall economic statement includes a doubling up of the rural carbon rebate. Why has that not been implemented? It is because of the Conservatives. They are preventing the legislation from passing, which would enable more money going into the pockets of rural Canadians, yet they criticize the government for not providing supports. That is only one example of many I could share with the House.
Unlike the Conservative Party, when we talk about a sense of fairness, we mean it. One only needs to take a look at what happened during the pandemic as a great example. We created programs that saw literally millions of dollars put into the pockets and purses of Canadians so they would have disposable income to buy the groceries necessary, pay for their mortgage and so forth. We were there to support small businesses by providing things such as the wage loss subsidy, which also helped Canadians from coast to coast to coast. We can talk about how we were there for our seniors and people with disabilities with one-time payments.
We could talk about infrastructure and what we have built over the last number of years. If I were going to give a Homer Simpson award to the leader of the Conservative Party, it would probably be, at least in part, for his position on the Canada Infrastructure Bank. We invest billions of dollars and, as a direct result of that investment, it levers virtually $2 billion for every $1 billion we invest, and we have infrastructure projects happening across the country.
What do the Conservatives say about that? They want to get rid of the Canada infrastructure program. What kind of stupid idea is that? Do they not realize the positive impact it has on Canadians every day? That is just one program about which they have no idea what they are talking about.
Today, one of the needs we are facing is the issue of housing. During the nineties, no Conservatives, New Democrats or Liberals, and I am not sure about the Greens because they were not in the House at the time, but not one political party inside this chamber was advocating for the national government to play a role in non-profit housing. There was not one political party doing that.
If we fast-forward to 2016, under the current Prime Minister's leadership, we saw a government begin to take an active interest in housing. When the leader of the Conservative Party was responsible for housing, we know what he did. He was in the position to develop a housing strategy or build houses. We barely need more than one hand to count it. He built one, two, three, four, five, six houses. That was it. His total contribution was six houses.
It is literally a joke when the Conservatives stand to be critical of the government. No government in the last 50 years has done more proactively to deal with housing than this government has. We can look at the programs. There are supports for housing co-ops and organizations such as Habitat for Humanity. We are working with different levels of government to ensure the dream of owning a home is possible.
No government has demonstrated more leadership on the housing file than this government, which is the absolute opposite of what the current leader of the Conservative Party did when he was the minister responsible for housing. We understand the importance of the issue, and that is why we are seeing literally hundreds of millions of dollars being spent in every region of this country. We understand the best way to build more homes is by investing in it, unlike the Conservative Party.
Members can look at the contrast. Today, after the leader of the Conservative Party spoke, I asked him a question. I asked him about the fact that he only built six houses. What did he do? He stood up and attempted to mislead Canadians. He said he had built 90,000 homes. That is absolute garbage, but it is consistent with what we see coming from the Conservative Party.
It does not matter. The Conservatives will say things in here and they will use social media to mislead Canadians. When the leader was called out on it, I cannot say whether he stayed in the House, but he sure vacated his seat. He might have still been in the chamber, but he did not like being called out on the truth. The truth is, as a government, we recognize that there is a role for the national government, and the Leader of the Opposition does not recognize that. There is the contrast.
I believe if Canadians were to understand who the leader of the Conservative Party is, they would turn their backs. They want to see a national government that is prepared to work with municipalities, provincial governments, non-profits and social enterprises, or anyone who has ideas to assist in bringing in more houses. That is what it is going to take. It is not just the federal government. It is going to take a lot more co-operation, and the federal government is prepared to provide leadership. That is what we see in the budget.
One member stood up and spoke about how the government does not have anything regarding innovation and that we are not trying to encourage companies. I pointed out that we do have the accelerated investment tax credit, and the member just did not realize that. They did not hear what the Minister of Finance had said. He was being critical because he thought we did not have anything like that.
Again, here is the contrast. As a national government, we recognize that there is a role for the national government to play in encouraging innovation and encouraging investment, and we are not alone. Even Progressive Conservative Doug Ford in Ontario recognizes that, which is why we landed, for example, the Volkswagen electric battery plant. Members can imagine a plant the size of 200 football fields. It is likely going to be one of, if not the, largest manufacturing plants in North America. It will provide thousands of jobs, and this is not just in Ontario. This is the type of thing in which we believe. We think of the future green jobs, and there will be a lot more coming because we have a national government that has taken an interest in developing an economy that is going to be there to continue to build jobs into the future.
For those who are following the debate, I will give a clear indication of success. It took Stephen Harper almost nine years to generate just under a million jobs. Well, we are at just over eight years today, and we have actually generated over two million jobs, and that was while going through a pandemic. It is because we understand that the Government of Canada has a role to play in increasing opportunities into the future, which is why we will find that there is no government in the history of Canada that has actually signed off on more trade agreements than this government has. We have done that because Canada is a trading nation. Trade creates jobs.
I was so pleased to be with the minister of agriculture in the Philippines where we opened up a trade office for agriculture and agriproducts. Why did we do that? We can take a look at future opportunities in the Asia-Pacific. I am glad that it is located in metro Manila in the Philippines. This is going to create more jobs into the future. It highlights industries that are very important to us. This is a government that cares, whether it is the larger cities, the smaller municipalities, our rural farms and all regions of the country, which is why we will see there are investments to support Canadians in every way.
We can take a look at what a progressive government can do to make a difference. We can think of child care. There is a national child care program, the first ever, which enables more women to participate in the workforce and improves the quality of life for so many. We can think of the Canada pharmacare program, which would take steps towards complementing the Canada Health Act and the health care services that Canadians have grown to love and cherish. We can think of the national food program. For many years, as an MLA, I used to talk about kids going to school on an empty stomach. This is a national government that would address that issue. We are supporting children because we understand the need for it.
However, what kind of response do we get from the Conservative Party, from the members opposite? They say, “Well, the federal government should not play in roles like that. Maybe just hand over money, but do not care how that money is spent.” That is not good enough. Canadians' expectations are that the government will be there to support them.
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- Apr/18/24 6:43:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member opposite for the very entertaining diatribe she went on. The member opposite claims that she is not being partisan, but every part of her comments today seemed like a partisan attack. I know she specializes in conspiracy theories on her nightly news show, but I will endeavour to answer her question. Before I do, I will just clarify something on the defence spending. Obviously the member has not taken the time to read the document yet, but budget 2024 includes considerable increases to defence spending.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak about the work our government is doing to address affordability issues in Canada, while continuing to manage our country's finances responsibly. First of all, I would like to remind my hon. colleague that Canada has the lowest deficit and net debt-to-GDP ratios in the G7, which is recognized in our AAA credit rating. Canadians know how important it is to manage a budget responsibly in the face of rising costs, and that is exactly what we are doing. As noted by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance when she tabled the budget earlier this week, we are maintaining our fiscal anchor. Our federal debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to decline over the medium term.
In budget 2024, our government is moving forward with measures that foster the kind of economic growth that will enable every generation of Canadians to reach their full potential. For example, budget 2024 includes many ambitious measures to address the housing crisis. We want to ensure that people, especially young people, are better able to pay their rent or mortgage. To do this, we are investing in building more rental apartments and more affordable housing from coast to coast to coast. We are topping up the housing accelerator fund and making it easier for Canadian homeowners to add a basement suite or a laneway house so middle-class Canadians can be part of the housing solution too.
For first-time home buyers, we will be extending the maximum amortization period of a mortgage to 30 years on new builds, including condos. We are also making changes to ensure that renters who pay on time can have the rent payment count toward their credit history when it comes time to get a mortgage. This means lower monthly payments and greater opportunity for young people to buy their first home.
We are also moving forward with measures to make life in Canada cost less. Inflation is now way down, and in fact, it now has been back within the Bank of Canada's target range for three months in a row. We said we would continue to invest in Canadians, reasonably manage our finances and control inflation, and that is exactly what we are doing.
We understand that many Canadians, especially younger people, need support. That is why we are making transformational enhancements to Canada's social safety net. That social safety net is being increased through $10-a-day child care, the Canadian dental care plan, a national drug insurance plan and, now, a national school food program, which I am very proud to see in the federal budget.
These are just a few of the measures we are putting forward to help Canadians.
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- Apr/18/24 6:47:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, our government has a plan to drive the kind of economic growth that will ensure every generation of Canadians can reach their full potential. It is a plan to ensure that everyone gets a fair chance to build a good, middle-class life in Canada.
The government believes in investing in Canadians and in creating economic growth, not in cuts and austerity as the Conservatives do. We are building a modern economy with jobs for the future and are investing today so the generations of tomorrow can have a fair shot at success.
Canadians can count on our government to make life more affordable, while continuing to manage our public finances responsibly, and that is what we are proposing in budget 2024. It is about fairness for every generation and an economy that works for all Canadians.
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