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Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24

Mr. Scot Davidson (York—Simcoe, CPC)

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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Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24

Mr. Scot Davidson

Apr/18/24 4:57:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, to bring this back to York—Simcoe, it is the farmers, the working class and the middle-class people who are paying for these deficits. Let us look at this. There is $50 billion in new spending. That is more than we bring in through GST alone. I alluded to the fact that York—Simcoe does not have a hospital. We still do not have a hospital. To my NDP colleagues, I would say that we are spending more on the debt than we are on health care. It is unbelievable.

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Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24

Mr. Jean-Denis Garon (Mirabel, BQ)

Apr/18/24 4:58:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague from York-Simcoe belongs to a party that has been saying for weeks that the Liberal government is corrupt, that it is mismanaging the public purse and that it is managing everything all wrong. Yesterday, in an interview with Le Téléjournal on housing, the member's own leader said that he wants to use federal public funds to give money for housing to Trois‑Rivières and Victoriaville, where his party hopes to win seats. Meanwhile, he plans to penalize Montreal, where he will likely not win any. Does my colleague think it is right that his leader is already starting to buy votes with public funds, even before taking office? Does he not think that his leader should wait until he is in power before he starts using public money for partisan purposes?

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Context: House Hansard - 302 - Apr/18/24

Mr. Adam Chambers (Simcoe North, CPC)

Apr/18/24 5:01:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise in this space on behalf of the people of Simcoe North. To those watching at home, “hello, Alice”. Before I start my comments today on the budget, I just want to take a moment, with the Chair's indulgence, to make a tribute a former staff member in my office who passed away a couple of weeks ago. Diane Bell had been a staff member of mine since I was elected. She was a fabulous woman, the first person I talked to in my circle of friends when I decided to run for office. She was a wonderful human; she cared a lot about kids and her small communities. In fact, the mayor of Ramara said, “On the school board, when there was a busing issue, she was always there for the kids.... She was a very strong advocate for the small schools in Ramara, that they don't get closed and that they stay open.” To her husband, Rob, and her son, John, I want to say that we are going to miss Diane very much. We look forward to celebrating her life on the weekend with all her friends and family. On the budget, it is a shell game of accounting, and I will get back to that later. However, one of the smartest people I worked with was named Fabrice, and he said that we cannot make a house bigger by thinning the walls. That is exactly what the government is trying to do. It has no vision and no plan. It is at the end of all its ideas, and to grow the economy, or make the house bigger, it is resorting to thinning the walls. I looked through the budget very carefully. Everyone says we are in a productivity crisis. The government acknowledges it. I went through the budget, and there is no GDP per capita chart. We are in a productivity crisis, and the government does not care to tell Canadians how we are doing in GDP per capita. One of my mentors, Hugh Moncrieff, said that what gets measured, gets done. Obviously, the government does not care about making Canadians wealthier every year. I do not expect anyone to just take my word for it. Let us go to some experts. Don Drummond, a former senior civil servant and a very smart man, said that he would grade this budget as a D, but that it is very close to an F. He said, “I actually thought given the lead-up there were going to be more tax gimmicks”. Maybe we dodged that a bit, but he would leave it on a D. Bill Morneau said, “This was very clearly something that while I was there, we resisted.” He was referring to the capital gains changes. He said, “We resisted it for a very specific reason: [We were] concerned about the growth of the country”. Robert Asselin, another very smart individual and someone who has written a lot about fiscal policy and government spending, said, “I'm worried the government is overspending again, in a pre-election setup, [with] higher interest rates and debt servicing cost being very high already and rising fast”. Andrew Coyne of The Globe and Mail wrote, Indeed, there is not a single measure in the budget aimed at boosting investment generally.... Having spread itself so thin, budget after budget, on less urgent matters, the government finds itself without the capacity to act on the two or three things that really demand its attention. Assuming it even had any intention of doing so [in the first place]. Sahir Khan says the government is high on “aspiration” and low on “perspiration”. I could not agree more. Let us talk about a few measures in the budget. On housing, the government wants to increase demand measures by helping individuals take more money out of their RRSP. It is also helping wealthy developers. I am surprised to learn that my NDP colleagues will be supporting the budget, because the only people who can max out their RRSPs are very wealthy individuals. The NDP is going to end up voting for a budget that supports the most wealthy in the country and wealthy developers, except that the government vastly under-delivered on its disability benefit. Let us talk a little about the accounting tricks, shall we? The Bank of Canada has been losing money, lots of money, billions and billions of dollars a year. Last year the government told us it was a few billion dollars. This year, we do not actually know. The government is trying to hide that from Canadians; it does not actually disclose it in the budget. It actually buries it in another line with the Canada mortgage bond program and consolidates the two together. The truth is that interest rates have not come down, because government spending has gone up. Therefore, Bank of Canada losses are higher this year than the government thought they would be last year. I want to spend a minute on the capital gains trick, an accounting facade. The government expects it will get $7 billion in new revenues because of those who transact between now and January 25. This is very convenient. It sets a date in the future to change the capital gains tax, it forces a bunch of people to transact, and it gets a bunch of revenue that goes to the bottom line. If the government did not get that revenue, it would be offside its debt-to-GDP ratio and missing its other fiscal anchor, which is the commitment to keep the budget deficit below $40 billion. There is a big risk to the fiscal framework just sitting there in that budget if people decide not to transact, if for some reason they think a future government might change its mind or if the government has made the wrong assumptions on how many people will transact. Let us talk about extra money for the Canada Revenue Agency, with $336 million over two years and another $180 million to write cheques to small businesses for the carbon credit rebate. I have a lot of faith and confidence in the people at CRA, who work hard, but there is something wrong over there or in the system of government. Let us take the bare trust fiasco. On the very last day, it reversed its decision after all these taxpayers hired accountants, did the paperwork and spent thousands of dollars. The people at CRA are doing a great job, but the agency, the CRA itself, does not need more money; it needs to be visited by a proctologist. We need to figure out why we continually have implementation problems. The government's idea is to give the CRA more to do. People are not waiting on hold long enough, so let us give it more programs to deliver. The government has a massive capacity problem. It does not need to find more things to try to do, it actually needs to be better at doing what it is supposed to do. We need to make government simpler, not bigger. The hon. colleague before me talked about the rural top-up. It appears that some individuals in Simcoe North are not getting the rural top-up. We are investigating this, but it makes absolutely no sense. While we are on “what makes no sense”, there is not a single country in the world except Canada that has raised taxes on energy over this inflationary period. For some reason, the government wants to make energy more expensive when people are having a problem paying their bills. It absolutely boggles the mind. It leaves one bewildered. On the capital gains tax, the government wants us to believe there is a pool of people, the one percenters, and they are the same one per cent and are the worst people ever, except guess what: That one per cent changes every year, because people end up in the top 1% or 10% for various reasons. They might sell a business, or something might happen; they might come into some extra money. They are not the same ugly people; the top 25% are not the same nasty, money hungry, greedy people. They change from year to year. We need to be careful about how far we try to squeeze people before they start leaving this country. I look forward to the questions from my colleagues and from the NDP members, who might be able to enlighten us on how they can vote for a budget that is going to help wealthy individuals save more money for their RRSP for a home but not for the disabilities benefit.

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