44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 18, 2024 10:00AM
- Apr/18/24 11:07:22 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
The same approach that will allow us to unleash energy, abundance and affordability is the approach we will take to build the homes; that is to say getting the government gatekeepers out of the way.
Why do we have the worst housing inflation in the G7 after nine years of the Prime Minister? Why have housing costs risen 40% faster than paycheques? It is by far the worst gap of any G7 country. Why did UBS say Toronto had the worst housing bubble in the world? Vancouver is the third most overpriced when comparing median income to median house price according to Demographia. Why? Because we have the worst bureaucracy when it comes to home building.
After nine years of the Prime Minister, Canada has the second slowest building permits out of nearly 40 OECD countries. These permitting costs add $1.3 million to the cost of every newly built home in Vancouver, and $350,000 to every newly built home in Toronto. Winnipeg blocked 2,000 homes next to a transit station that was built for those homes. The City of Montreal has blocked 25,000 homes in the last seven years. Literally hundreds of thousands of homes are waiting to be built, but are locked up in slow permitting processes.
What do we have as a solution? The Prime Minister has taken the worst immigration minister in our country's history, the guy the Prime Minister blamed for causing out-of-control temporary immigration to balloon housing prices, and put him in charge of housing. Since that time, the minister has said that his housing accelerator fund of $4 billion does not actually build any homes.
Since he has doled out all of this cash to political friends in incompetent city halls across the country, home building has dropped. In fact, home building is down this year and, according to the federal government's housing agency, it will be down next year and again the year after that. That is a housing decelerator not accelerator.
That is what happens when a minister is chosen because he is a media darling and a fast talker, rather than someone who gets things done, as I did when I was housing minister. The rent was only $973 a month for the average family right across the country, and the average house price was roughly $400,000. That is results. There was less talk and less government spending, but far more homes. That is what our common-sense plan will do again.
Our plan will build the homes by requiring municipalities to speed up, permit more land and build faster. They will be required to permit 15% more homes per year as a condition of getting federal funding, and to permit high-rise apartments around every federally funded transit station. We will sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land to build. We will get rid of the carbon tax to lower the cost of building materials.
Finally, we will reward the working people who build homes, because we need more boots, not more suits. We will pass the common-sense Conservative law that allows trade workers to write off the full cost of transportation, food and accommodation to go from one work site to another, so they can build the homes while bringing home paycheques for themselves.
These homes will be in safe neighbourhoods. We will stop the crime by making repeat violent offenders ineligible for bail, parole or house arrest. That will mean no more catch and release. We will repeal Bill C-5, the house arrest law. We will repeal Bill C-75, the catch-and-release law. We will repeal Bill C-83, the cushy living for multiple murderers law that allows Paul Bernardo to enjoy tennis courts and skating rinks that most Canadian taxpaying families can no longer afford outside of prison.
We will bring in jail and not bail for repeat violent offenders. We will repeal the entire catch-and-release criminal justice agenda that the radical Prime Minister, with the help of the loony-left NDP, has brought in. The radical agenda that has turned many of our streets into war zones will be a thing of the past.
We will also stop giving out deadly narcotics. I made a video about the so-called safe supply. I went to the tragic site of yet another homeless encampment in Vancouver, which used to be one of the most beautiful views in the entire world. Now it is unfortunately a place where people live in squalor and die of overdoses. Everyone said it was terrible that I was planning to take away the tax-funded drugs and that all of the claims I made were just a bunch of conspiracy theories, but everything I said then has been proven accurate, every word of it.
I noticed that the Liberals and the pointy-headed professors they relied on for their policies have all gone into hiding as well. Why is that? It is because the facts are now coming out. Even the public health agency in British Columbia, which has been pushing the NDP-Liberal ideology, is admitting that the tax-funded hydromorphone is being diverted. The police in Vancouver said this week that 50% of all the high-powered hydromorphone opioids are paid for with tax dollars and given out by public health agencies supposedly to save lives. Now we know that those very powerful drugs are being resold to children, who are getting hooked on them, and the profits are being used to buy even more dangerous fentanyl, tranq and other drugs that are leaving our people face-first on the pavement, dying of record overdoses.
The so-called experts always tell us to ignore the bumper stickers and look at the facts. The facts are in. In British Columbia, where this radical and incomparable policy has been most enthusiastically embraced, overdose deaths are up 300%. They have risen in B.C. faster than anywhere else in Canada and possibly anywhere else in North America. The ultraprogressive state of Oregon has reversed decriminalization, recognizing the total chaos, death and destruction the policy has caused.
What does the radical Prime Minister, with the help of his NDP counterpart, do? They look at the death and destruction that has occurred in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and other communities and say we should have more of that. They took a walk, or better yet, these two politicians probably drove through the Downtown Eastside in their bulletproof limousines. They looked around at the people who were bent over completely tranquilized by fentanyl, saw the people lying face-first on the ground, saw the tents that the police would have pointed out are filled with dangerous guns and drugs, saw all the small businesses that were shuttered by this policy and said that we should have more of that. They want to replicate all the policies that have created it so that we can have tent cities and homeless encampments in every corner of the country.
That is exactly what they have done. In Halifax, there are 35 homeless encampments in one city after nine years of the Prime Minister, his NDP counterpart and the Liberal mayor of Halifax. If we look at every town in this country, we will find homeless encampments that never existed before the last nine years. This policy will go down in infamy as one of the most insane experiments ever carried out on a population. Nowhere else in the world is this being done. The Liberals gaslight us. They love to say that all the civilized people believe that giving out these drugs will save lives, but nowhere else is this being done. When we tell people this is happening, they have a hard time believing that we are giving out heroin-grade drugs for free to addicts and expecting it to save lives.
Now they spill into our hospitals, where nurses are told by the NPD government in B.C. and the Liberal government in Ottawa that they are not allowed to take away crack pipes or knives or guns. They are just supposed to expect that someone is going to consume the drugs, have a massive fit and start slashing up the hospital floor. This is something out of a bad hallucination and a hallucination that will come to an end when I am prime minister. We will end this nightmare.
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- Apr/18/24 3:10:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as a former small business entrepreneur myself, I know the importance of affordability for entrepreneurs. I am glad that, through budget 2024, our government is committed to delivering $2.5 billion to 600,000 small businesses across Canada through the Canada carbon rebate.
Reports say that 60% of small businesses are directly impacted by climate change, and while the official opposition continues to want to cut the Canada carbon rebate, on this side of the House, we are going to continue fighting climate change while putting money back into the pockets of Canadians and small businesses.
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- Apr/18/24 4:03:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a privilege to rise in the House. We are talking about the budget today, and I think it is important to start with some context as to where the country is. The member who preceded me did an excellent job. Hopefully, I will build on his strong work.
Canadians are experiencing difficult times from coast to coast. Millions of Canadians are finding that, after nine years of the NDP-Liberal government, there is simply more month than money. They are unable to feed themselves, and food bank usage is off the charts. Over two million families will go to the food bank each and every month in Canada. The food banks in Otonabee-South Monaghan in my riding have seen the number of families with children using food banks double just in the last six months.
The suffering is a result of Liberal policy failures. There is no two ways about this. The Liberals' policies are responsible for driving people deeper and deeper into financial crisis. Financial crises and financial issues generally have two different sides to them, as does the affordability crisis. We have income on one side and expenses on the other. There has been a lot of talk in the House about the expense side, the ever-increasing inflation, interest rates and taxes, and for good reason. It is causing considerable pain for Canadians.
My focus will be on the other side, which is the income side or the growth side of the economy. I believe this is as serious, if not more serious, than the expense side, the reason being that history shows us that, when incomes rise, increasing costs can be managed by economies. There are a number of examples, but there has never been a time, not once in human history, where there has been prosperity in the absence of economic growth. For thousands of years, when the economy has grown, we have had prosperity. When it does not grow, we do not.
Let us be clear that the income side of the ledger in Canada is bleak. We have experienced what Conservatives call, and what economists are starting to call, a lost decade in Canada. GDP per capita in Canada has barely grown. By this metric, we are in the worst economic time since the Great Depression, and quite frankly, there is no sign of relief. This is not getting better. We have had seven straight quarters of a decline in GDP per capita. If we measured recessions on a per capita basis, we would now be in one of the longest recessions in our lifetime.
Liberals, of course, will attempt to obfuscate by blaming the lack of growth on other factors beyond their control, like the weather or other things, and their having no control over a weather front coming in, but the failure is distinctly Canadian. In this last decade, the American growth of GDP per capita, or the measure of each individual economic contribution of every American, has increased by 47%. In Canada, over that same period, it is 4.73%.
An hon. member: It's not the weather.
Mr. Philip Lawrence: No, it is not the weather. It is because of the failures of the Liberal government.
Mr. Speaker, underpinning the failure of our economy to grow are our productivity issues. We have heard numerous commentators talk about this, Liberal and Conservative alike, from Bill Morneau to Lisa Raitt and commentators on all sides of the political spectrum. The productivity issue is crushing our Canadian economy. “Productivity” is a fancy word, but all it means is our ability to produce goods and deliver services efficiently.
We can think of productivity as a three-legged stool. There are three key elements to productivity. The first is capital, and I will talk about that right now. Capital investment is incredibly important. A simple analogy is two workers competing with different levels of capitalization. One worker is trying to dig a foundation for a new building using a backhoe, and the other worker is using a shovel or even bare hands. We can see that the individual who is well capitalized, even if he or she is the inferior worker, will always win that victory. The individual who is not capitalized will never be able to compete. That is where Canada is right now. We are decapitalizing our economy right now. This will have tragic impacts, not just for the near term, but for the long term as well.
We have, over the last 15 years, the lowest rate of investment growth into our economy in the G7. We are predicted, by many international organizations, to have the lowest investment rate in the OECD over the next 40 years. When we do this, unfortunately, we undermine the Canadian economy and the Canadian worker.
A second key and equally important leg of that productivity stool is innovation. Innovation is incredibly important, and the good news is that we have great minds and great ideas here in Canada. We also have great post-secondary education here in this country. The challenge is that, after nine years, we do not have a framework in place to successfully and efficiently capitalize and exploit those ideas, turning them from an idea formed in a university dorm room to building products and solutions on the factory floor. Unfortunately, what happens far too often in our economy is that these great ideas come up and then dissipate, or more truthfully and more accurately, they go across the border as individuals who have great ideas simply do not have the framework to market, exploit and grow their ideas here in Canada. Instead, they end up improving the wealth of the United States of America, Europe or other places in the world. Meanwhile, Canadians fall further and further behind.
Third, it comes down to workers, and I am proud to say that we have the best workers in the entire world right here in Canada. Unfortunately, they are being undercapitalized, and there is an absence of innovation due to the poor regulatory framework here in Canada. The challenge is that we have untapped resources. We have thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands, or probably millions of newcomers who are not able to access the Canadian dream because there are various organizations that are unwilling to recognize their education and hard work across the world. They have the ability to be doctors, engineers and scientists to help our economy in this time when we need to enhance our productivity. That is why our leader would bring in a fantastic blue seal program that would allow newcomers to gain access to the Canadian dream.
With this is mind, if we look at the expense side of the ledger, this budget did not deliver. We need it to have, as is the growing consensus out there, fiscal restraint and a path to a balanced budget, but that is not there. This will continue to push along inflation and higher interest rates. Of course, we have seen higher taxation as a result of this budget as well.
However, as we look at the income side of the ledger, I was hoping to see a focus on economic growth, and I am not the only one. Bill Morneau said that he was very disappointed in the government's lack of attention on economic growth. David Dodge was also discouraged by the lack of focus on economic growth. The CFIB and numerous organizations from coast to coast to coast were disappointed to see the lack of focus on economic growth.
We can see that economic growth is the magic bullet to economics. If we have an economy that is growing, we will have jobs, standard of living increases and a stronger social safety net. Instead, the government has chosen to ignore growth, and unfortunately, we will all bear the cost for that.
Conservatives will proudly be voting no on this budget.
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