44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 18, 2024 10:00AM
- Apr/18/24 10:52:19 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not finished.
I will continue in English. I want to share this great speech with English-speaking Canadians.
After nine years of the Prime Minister's deficits doubling the national debt and doubling housing costs and a new budget that brings in $50 billion of new unfunded spending on promises he has already broken, this budget, just like the Prime Minister, is not worth the cost, and Conservatives will be voting no.
Before I get into the reasons, and my common-sense plan to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, I would like to pay the Minister of Finance a compliment for a page in her speech I thought was extremely illustrative. She said, “I would like Canada’s one per cent—Canada’s 0.1 per cent—to consider this: What kind of Canada do you want to live in?”
Before I go any further, let us point out the incredible irony that, as she and her leader point out, Canada's 0.1% are doing better than ever after nine years of the Prime Minister promising to go after them. Yes, they have benefited from the tens of billions of dollars of undeserved corporate welfare handouts and grants, ironically supported by the NDP; of corporate loan guarantees that protect them against losses in cases of incompetence or dishonest bidding; of contracts, of which there are now $21 billion, granted to outside and highly paid consultants, many of them making millions of dollars a year in taxpayer contracts for work that could be done inside the government itself if that work if of any value at all; and finally, of those grand fortunes that have been inflated by the $600 billion of inflationary money printing that has transferred wealth from the working class to the wealthiest among us. That 0.1% is doing better than ever after nine years of the Prime Minister pretending he would get tough on them.
Let me go on. I am interrupting myself. The Minister of Finance asked, “Do you want to live in a country where you can tell the size of someone’s paycheque by their smile?” Wow. How many Canadians are smiling when they look at their paycheque today? People are not smiling at all because a paycheque cannot buy them a basket of affordable food, according to Sylvain Charlebois, the food professor. He has said that the cost of a basket of food has gone up by thousands of dollars per year, but the majority of Canadians are spending hundreds of dollars less than is required to buy that basket. That means they are not getting enough food. We live in a country now where the average paycheque cannot pay the average rent, so nobody is smiling when they look at their paycheque.
The minister went on to ask, “Do you want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry?” According to the Prime Minister, one in four kids are going to school hungry after his nine years. I look here at a press release his government released on April 1, on April Fool's Day of all days, where he says, “Nearly one in four children do not get enough food”. In fact, it says that they do not get enough food “to learn and grow.”
No, we do not want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry, but according to the Prime Minister's own release, we do live in a country where one in four kids do go to school hungry. The Minister of Finance then said, “Do you want to live in a country where the only young Canadians who can buy their own homes are those with parents who can help with the downpayment?” No, we do not want to live in that country, but we do live in that country today.
According to data released by RBC Dominion, for the average family to afford monthly payments on the average home in Canada, the family would have to spend 64% of its pre-tax income. Most families do not keep 64% of pre-tax income because they pay so much in taxes. Therefore, most families would have to give up on eating, recreation, clothing themselves and transportation to be mathematically capable of making payments on the average home. For young people, it is even worse because they do not have a nest egg. They cannot afford a down payment that has doubled in the last nine years. That is why 76% of Canadians who do not own homes tell pollsters they believe they never will. Do we want to live in a country where the only young people who can afford a down payment are those whose parents can pay it for them? No. However, that is the country that we live in today.
“Do [you] want to live in a country where we make the investments we need in health care, in housing, in old age pensions, but we lack the political will to pay for them and choose instead to pass a ballooning debt on to our children?”
Are we living in the twilight zone here? These are the minister's words: Do we want to live in a country where we pass the bill on to our children with “ballooning debt”? She asks this as she is ballooning the debt by adding $40 billion to that debt. She asks this while giving a speech about the perils of passing ballooning debt to our children. She is the finance minister for the government that has added more debt than all previous governments combined in the preceding century and a half. It is worth noting that the Prime Minister has added his deficits as a share of GDP that are bigger than we had in World War I, in the Great Depression and in the great global recession of 2008 and 2009.
I should also note that the majority of debt that has been added under the Prime Minister was unrelated to COVID. The “dog ate my homework” excuse, of blaming COVID for all that is wrong in Canada, no longer works. I will add that we are now three years past COVID and the deficits and debt continue to grow, putting a lie to that entire endless, nauseating excuse that the government has made.
The Prime Minister has added so much debt that we are now spending more on interest for that debt than we are spending on health care; $54.1 billion in debt interest this year; more money for those wealthy bankers and bondholders who own our debt; and less money for the doctors and nurses whom we await when we sit for 26 hours in the average emergency room right across the country.
No, we do not want to live in a country that passes on a ballooning debt to our children, but after nine years of the Prime Minister, that is exactly the country in which we live.
The Minister of Finance asks, “Do [you] want to live in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury?” Who does that remind us of? Somebody who flies around in a private jet to stay on secret islands on the other side of the hemisphere, where they treat him to $8,000 and $9,000-a-day luxuries, and he pays for it with the tax dollars of Canadians and emits thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, somebody luxuriates in that way at the expense of everyone else. He shall remain unnamed because we cannot say the Prime Minister's name in the House of Commons, so I will not break that parliamentary rule. However, I do point out the irony.
I will start again. The Minister of Finance asks:
Do [you] want to live in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury but must do so in gated communities behind ever-higher fences using private health care and private planes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less-privileged compatriots burns so hot?
She says that the wrath of the majority of less privileged compatriots burns so hot. She is right that some people do not have the ability to live in gated communities, behind armed guards. Those people are told that they should leave their keys next to the door so that the car thieves can just walk in and peacefully steal their cars.
Communities across the country are being ravaged by crime, chaos, drugs and disorder. What she has described is exactly what is happening after nine years of the government. We have nurses in British Columbia hospitals who are terrified to go to work because the Prime Minister, in collusion with the NDP Premier of B.C., has decriminalized hard drugs and allowed the worst criminals to bring weapons and narcotics into their hospital rooms, where they cannot be confronted. We have 26 international students crammed into the basement of one Brampton home. We have a car stolen every 40 minutes in the GTA. We have 100% increase in gun killings across the country.
We have communities where people are terrified to go out. We have small businesses across Brampton and Surrey that are receiving letters weekly, warning them that if they do not write cheques for millions of dollars to extortionists, their homes will be shot up, and their children will have bullets flying through the windows as they are sleeping.
That is life in Canada today. Do we want to live in that country? No, we do not want to live in that country. After eight years of rising costs, rising crime and rising chaos, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. We will replace him with a common-sense Conservative government that will bring home a country we love.
What does that country look like and how will we get there? Fortunately, we have a common-sense plan that will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
Let us start with the carbon tax that went up 23% on April 1. Now we see the raging gas prices at the pumps across Ontario. There is chaos as people are desperately trying to get to the pumps and fill up before the latest hikes go ahead.
The Prime Minister celebrates, saying that high gas prices are his purpose, and he has the full support of the NDP leader on most days, when the NDP leader can figure out what his policy is. The NDP leader has voted 22 times to hike the carbon tax. Both parties, along with the help of the Bloc, have voted for future increases that will quadruple the tax to 61¢ a litre, a tax that will also apply on home heating bills and, of course, a tax that applies to the farmers who produce the food, the truckers who ship the food and therefore on all who buy the food.
That is why common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax to bring home lower prices. We take exactly the opposite approach of the Prime Minister when it comes to protecting our environment. His approach is to raise the cost on traditional energy we still need. Our approach is to lower the cost on other alternatives. We will green light green projects, like nuclear power, hydroelectric dams, carbon capture and storage, mining of critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt, copper and others. We will do this by repealing the unconstitutional Bill C-69 so that we can approve these projects in 18 months, rather than in 18 years.
Here is the difference, the Prime Minister wants taxes, I want technology. He wants to drive our money to the dirty dictators abroad, I want to bring it home in powerful paycheques for our people in this country.
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- Apr/18/24 11:55:47 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleagues for actively listening to my speech—
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- Apr/18/24 1:54:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I had the joy of listening to my colleague one more time. He spoke about a different speech than the one he was giving, because he did not seem to have much to say about the budget. He only had criticisms of other things that were said on this side of the House about the budget. It is a critique of a critique.
I wonder if there is anything in the budget that the member actually knows about and whether he could speak positively about in the House of Commons.
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- Apr/18/24 1:54:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would ask the member to please go back and review the first four minutes of my speech. It seems that he did not actually listen like he said did. Apparently the Conservatives only listen to the parts when I start to critique them. I spent four minutes talking about the national school food program that would be introduced and how not only did I applaud the government for doing this, but I applauded the local champions in my community. They went from school to school to get people to sign multiple petitions, which I presented in the House.
I am very proud of the fact that our government is bringing in, for the first time ever, a national school food program to help kids get an early start in life.
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- Apr/18/24 4:14:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, just because I like the drapes in a house, it does not mean I would buy the whole house. The reality is that, if the member's comments were not put in context, they might have more merit.
We have had nine years of the Liberal government. We see the record food bank usage. I wrote this speech because I field the calls from my constituents about not being able to make it to the end of the month and not being able to feed their kids. This has real consequences. This is the real world. We need real change.
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- Apr/18/24 4:43:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there are some very interesting things in my colleague's speech, including converting government buildings or commercial buildings into housing. I think that is truly interesting and there are some great examples of that.
My question is much broader and much more existential than that. There is a Constitution that exists and we are working with it. In any case, we are working with the Constitution, and I am talking about areas of jurisdiction, unfortunately. We might want to restore some order to all of this because the power-grab that the federal government is attempting here is becoming abusive, excessive and shameful. It is widespread. Does my colleague think that it is time to reopen the Constitution to restore a bit of order in this and determine what belongs to whom?
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- Apr/18/24 5:47:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, with all due respect to my colleague, I have to say that he gave a rather odd speech to Parliament. He spoke for almost 10 minutes about paper straws. In any case, my understanding is that my colleague and the Conservative Party want to reverse the ban on plastics. I never thought I would hear such a thing in an institution like ours, in Parliament.
At the same time, he had a lot to say about the fact that there is so much plastic in our oceans. That strikes me as a paradox. Is my colleague simply trying to highlight the relevance of oil, since we know very well that plastics are primarily made from oil?
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