44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 9, 2024 10:00AM
- May/9/24 2:36:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the NDP-Liberal government has made life even more unaffordable for Canadians by raising the wacko carbon tax by 23%. Gas, groceries and everything else is more and more—
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- May/9/24 2:36:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the NDP-Liberal government has made life even more unaffordable for Canadians by raising the wacko carbon tax by 23%. Gas, groceries and everything else is making life more and more expensive, especially for those living in rural, small-town communities, where driving farther for longer is just a fact of life. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has confirmed that Canadians would be better off without the carbon tax.
Will the Prime Minister stand today and admit to Canadians that he is just not worth the cost?
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- May/9/24 2:45:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, northern Canadians are going hungry and it is getting worse because of the carbon tax.
In 2018, 57% of Nunavut families lived with food insecurity versus the national average of 12.7%. That number now is a whopping 69% and is among the worst in the developed world. Almost 70% of Nunavummiut are going hungry every single day.
The Prime Minister knows the carbon tax is making northerners go hungry. Why does he not just axe the carbon tax?
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- May/9/24 8:09:50 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Lethbridge for her speech. Unsurprisingly, she spent a lot of time talking about the carbon tax.
Now it is important to look at the objective of pollution pricing. The aim is to get people to change their habits. When too much greenhouse gas is generated, it has an impact on the climate and on health, and it puts the financial system at risk too. I always use the example of cigarettes. When we wanted young people to change their habits and smoke less, we raised the price of cigarettes and we also stopped advertising cigarettes.
Given the climate challenges we are facing, what does the member propose to ensure that people change their habits and try to adopt behaviours that are more in line with environmental protection?
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- May/9/24 8:10:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member just compared the carbon tax to advertising against cigarettes. In the same way advertising against cigarettes helped bring down the usage rate, I believe the argument she is making is that a carbon tax would also bring down the usage rate of fuels.
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- May/9/24 8:11:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this way of thinking put forward by the Liberal government is absurd. We have folks across Canada, about 96% of them, who are dependent on natural gas for heating, which is not exactly an option in this country.
I come from Alberta, and we need to heat our homes in the winter. I think most other places, if not all other places in this country, need to heat their homes in the middle of winter. I think that is just a basic necessity of human life. Further to that, I come from a riding that is largely rural. Getting on a city bus or transit train is not really an option, so they depend on being able to drive a vehicle in order to provide for themselves or to get from point A to point B. Further to that, the transportation of goods in this nation is reliant on transportation units, such as semis and trains.
If we continue to attach a carbon tax to these necessities, these things that are just a part of our way of life, it is not going to bring down carbon emissions; it has been in place for eight years now. It clearly—
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- May/9/24 8:13:44 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, again, I am not sure what fictitious world the hon. member comes from.
In Canada, we very much rely on natural gas to heat our homes, and the Liberal government has attached a carbon tax to that. We rely on using transportation in order to get our goods to market, and the Liberal government has attached a carbon tax to that. Farmers do tremendous good to actually take carbon from the environment and use it to produce food, and yet they are penalized with a carbon tax. Further to that, grocery stores have a carbon tax applied to them just for simply hosting the goods that we need to purchase.
Then all of that lands on the backs of Canadians. A carbon tax is an absolute farce.
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- May/9/24 8:55:41 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have been paying keen attention to gas prices in my riding. From February to March of this year, the price jumped by 30¢ a litre, from $1.59 to $1.89. When the British Columbia carbon tax came into effect on April 1, it jumped up by only three cents. Only a week later, it jumped up a further 10¢.
I wonder if my colleague could talk about the extreme disconnect the Conservatives have over their obsession with the carbon tax and completely ignoring their political masters, the oil and gas lobby. They will not say a single word on behalf of their constituents to confront their real masters in this place.
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- May/9/24 9:10:01 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member knows the Bloc Québécois's position on that. Yes, there have been improvements and we are not saying that we need to start from scratch. We never said that. What we are saying is that it does not make sense to be giving oil companies billions of dollars, like we are doing now.
It is funny because we were talking about greenwashing recently at the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. The commissioner gave a really good definition of it in one of his reports. It is a shame that I do not have it here with me, but I will give an example of greenwashing. Whether we are talking about carbon capture and storage for oil companies or the much-talked-about SMRs, it is ridiculous to think that nuclear energy is clean energy. That is absolutely ridiculous. Nuclear energy has never been clean energy. The more elected members buy into that idea, the further we will sink into another form of greenwashing.
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- May/9/24 9:38:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, at the tail end of the member's speech, he was talking about LNG. Let us call it what it is: It is methane, CH4. No one here will argue that, when burned, it is cleaner than coal. That is a scientific fact. I do not think people have a problem with the burning of it; it is the unburned methane that is a very real problem. When that escapes into the atmosphere, it is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is.
I think the real problem is that Canada has many abandoned and leaky wells. Often, the companies that have exploited that gas have left it to the people of Canada and our tax dollars to clean up. I want to hear a serious response from the Conservatives on how they address that problem. We are not disputing the fact that it is cleaner-burning than coal, but what do we do with the leaky wells that we have often had to pick up the tab for?
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- May/9/24 9:50:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would note that my hon. colleague comes from northern Canada, as do I. Where we come from, the distances are large and the climate is cold, and the carbon tax is costing all of our constituents a lot of money just to live.
Would the hon. member agree with us that it is time to axe the carbon tax, so that our constituents can afford to live?
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- May/9/24 9:54:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do believe the member is an honourable member, but when he stands up in this place and he says that more Canadians are getting back more from the carbon tax than what they are paying, nobody believes it.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer says that is not true and that more Canadians are paying more in the carbon tax. In the province of Ontario, it is $600 more. Canadians are paying more for gas and to heat their homes, and businesses are paying more in the carbon tax. How can he stand up here and say that to Canadians when the information out there is contrary to what he says?
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- May/9/24 10:52:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I know we hear, every day, the misleading statements of Conservatives when it comes to climate change. They do not acknowledge that climate change is real. They do not want to fight climate change. They do not believe in the economic prosperity that comes with it. The fall economic statement bill offers investment tax credits for carbon capture, utilization and storage, as well as clean technology. It also doubles the rural top-up for the Canada carbon rebate, which puts more money in Canadians' pockets. I wonder if my colleague could speak to the importance of those measures for his region of the country.
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- May/9/24 11:06:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I certainly commend that member for continually getting up on the issue of affordability.
In fact, when I was on the finance committee, we had a former premier of Nunavut come and discuss concerns around the carbon tax, specifically how, in Nunavut, the Nunavut government was essentially subsidizing much of the diesel that supplied power for people to keep themselves warm during the winter, 90%.
The question I asked the premier at the time was how it worked, if they were subsidizing the fuel that people use, when the federal government put on a carbon tax. He said it just means they have to subsidize more, and they will use less to support people on low incomes with new housing and other supports. Since then, the Liberal government has said it will triple the carbon tax. No region in the country will feel it as acutely as Nunavut. If there are things that we can do to make food more accessible, I will certainly be looking to support those things.
Let us start with the most basic of fundamental things. Let us stop the federal government from making life impossible in northern Canada.
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