SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 304 - Apr/29/24

Hon. Pierre Poilievre (Leader of the Opposition, CPC)

Apr/29/24 2:18:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the current numbers are tragic: 25% of Quebeckers live below the threshold for a normal standard of living. This poverty is the direct result of the centralizing, inflationary and bureaucratic spending by the Prime Minister. That spending is fully supported by the Bloc Québécois. When will the Bloc Québécois and the Prime Minister stop impoverishing Quebeckers?

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Context: House Hansard - 304 - Apr/29/24

Mr. Pierre Paul-Hus (Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, CPC)

Apr/29/24 2:52:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this morning the Journal de Montréal reported that 25% of Quebeckers cannot afford to live with dignity, and that even working 50 hours a week is not enough to ensure they do not end up in a precarious situation. This is what we have come to, after nine years of this government. The statistics are clear. The Bloc Québécois claims to promote the interests of Quebec, but voted with the Liberals on every budget allocation to support this exorbitant, inflationary spending. Do the government and the Bloc Québécois have the courage to admit that they have failed Quebeckers and must stop their out-of-control spending?

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Context: House Hansard - 304 - Apr/29/24

Mr. Blake Richards (Banff—Airdrie, CPC)

Apr/29/24 6:04:19 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, what is the legacy of the current Liberal Prime Minister? Sadly, his entire legacy amounts to one thing. The Prime Minister has grown the national debt more in nine years than under every other prime minister in Canadian history before him combined. That is his legacy. That is the end of it. That is the only thing that he stands for and has as a legacy. That debt now stands at $1.3 trillion, which is an enormous number. It is actually hard to comprehend or even imagine for just about any Canadian. It is really hard to visualize how much money we are even talking about there, so I want to break that down just a little bit. First of all, our national debt of $1.3 trillion is relative to a $2-trillion national economy. For every dollar the Canadian economy generates, about 65¢ of it has an obligation attached to it. Now, a trillion dollars is a massive amount of money. If we cashed it into $100 bills and stacked those bills into billion-dollar piles, we would have 1,000 piles, each climbing about a kilometre high. That is what we are talking about in terms of what this money would look like. However, that is still viewing the situation from 20,000 feet, so let us zoom in at the ground level for a little better perspective. For Canada's population of about 39 million people, the share of the total national debt is now about $34,000 for every person in the country. For every family of five in Canada, there is about $170,000 in debt. We can think about what that could mean for the average Canadian family of five and what they could do with that $170,000, if they had that for themselves instead of it being their share of the national debt. Let us say a person has kids in hockey. A good, reasonably decent youth composite hockey stick, which everyone uses nowadays, is about $90 or so. The kids in that family of five would certainly never have to worry about breaking a hockey stick ever again. In fact, every one of their friends would never have to worry about it again either, because that $170,000 would buy about 1,800 hockey sticks. A family of five can easily spend $400 or more a week on groceries these days with all the inflation, which means that $170,000 would cover food for that whole family for over eight years. Instead, under the Liberals, Canadian families are struggling to feed themselves. Food banks in Canada received a record two million visits in a single month last year, with a million additional people expected this year. Examples of what Canadians could do with their own money is endless, but those dollars are not enriching Canadian families at all under the Liberal government. Those dollars represent the money that is owed to bankers and bondholders as their share of the Prime Minister's debt. It is interesting to be able to visualize that, but it is not a theoretical exercise. It is actually having real impacts on Canadians right now here today. The Prime Minister's inflationary deficits are driving up interest rates. He is endangering our social safety nets and our jobs by adding more inflationary debt. His government has caused rent and mortgage payment costs to double and made it harder to save for a down payment for so many young families who are just dreaming of getting into the housing market for the first time but wondering how that will ever be possible. Those are the problems facing Canada right now, but what is the fix? Common-sense Conservatives have solutions. In fact, we have offered the Liberals a starting point to fix it. We told the Prime Minister that we would support his budget if he would just take three very simple, small little steps towards addressing the affordability issues that are plaguing Canadians by starting to address the debt. We needed to see the Liberal government, at minimum, axe the Liberal tax on food, focus on building homes and not building up more federal government bureaucracy and cap the out-of-control government spending by finding a dollar in savings for every new dollar in spending. The Liberals did none of that. Instead, they went further down the road of recklessness, adding $40 billion more to the growing federal debt. Common-sense Conservatives cannot support a budget that continues to further indebt Canadians. We will vote non-confidence in a Prime Minister that has driven this country into the ground. I want to know this: Will the NDP have the backbone to do the same? The government needs to be run in the same way that people have to run their households. A Canadian family that found itself paying more on their credit card debt and on interest than on their necessities would quickly realize that they had to address their debt load. The government, in a similar circumstance, chooses to open new lines of credit to keep on spending. If the government approached budgeting the way Canadian households have to, with actual needs weighed against available resources, the craziness of paying more to bankers and bondholders in one year than what it funds the provinces for health care would be apparent to every single other Canadian, but not to the people sitting on those benches over there in the Liberal government. Under this government, the promise of Canada has become a promissory note to its debt holders. The Liberals have tried to rebrand their undisciplined fiscal policy as equal to the aspirations of Canadians, but let us look at the real promise of Canada. It is not the agenda of bigger government that the government promotes. It is certainly not about transforming society to reflect Liberal ideology, despite what Liberals would have people believe. The promise of Canada is, in fact, about the opportunity and freedom to forge one's way in life. Canada has long held out the hope of achievement and prosperity for those who do the work and follow the rules, that a comfortable, secure, middle-class existence is open to anyone from any walk of life, from anywhere in the world, who works to earns it. In year nine of the Liberal government, life in Canada has never been more unaffordable. The middle class is just a distant dream for far too many. Canadians looking for the Liberals to change things in their budget this year must be feeling incredibly disappointed, with reckless spending, deeper debt and deficits and, of course, the harmful carbon tax. With these and other policies, Liberals are fuelling inflation and an affordability crisis, pushing middle-class aspirations even further out of the reach of many. Struggling families cannot afford more inflationary spending that drives up their cost of living. They cannot afford the interest rates on their mortgages, their taxes, all of these things. Even Liberal spending on social programs is not as it actually seems. Many of the measures announced in the budget are deferred, so that the government can make feel-good promises now and then try to find loopholes to get out of them later. We have seen that with dental care and the other social spending Liberals have rolled out that did not quite come anywhere near as advertised. We are seeing it with defence spending promises that stretch out 20 years into the future, when they are needed now. After nine years, the Liberals' budget is just more of the same that brought us into this mess in the first place. The Prime Minister is proving that he is not worth the cost for any generation, and it will be generations well into the future that will have to repay all of his debt. It is clear that only common-sense Conservatives have a plan to stop the inflationary deficits that are driving up interest rates. We will protect Canada's social programs and jobs by stopping the piling-on of more federal debt. Only common-sense Conservatives have a plan to bring down the cost of energy, food and everything else. We will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. Conservatives will govern with common sense for this country, for all its people, in all its regions. Canada's middle-class dream can once again eclipse the Liberals' debt and deficit nightmare.

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