Pursuant to order made earlier today, the House will now proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded divisions on the motions at report stage of Bill C‑47.
The question is on Motion No. 1. A vote on this motion also applies to Motion No. 2.
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The recorded division on the motion stands deferred.
Normally at this time the House would proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded divisions at report stage of the bill. However, pursuant to order made Thursday, June 23, 2022, the recorded division will stand deferred until Wednesday, June 7, at the expiry of the time provided for Oral Questions.
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The recorded division on the motion stands deferred.
The question is on Motion No. 730. A vote on the motion also applies to Motions Nos. 731 to 749 and 751 to 904.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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The recorded division on the motion stands deferred.
The question is on Motion No. 441. A vote on this motion also applies to Motions Nos. 442 to 455, 684 to 689 and 691 to 729.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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The recorded division on the motion stands deferred.
The question is on Motion No. 233. A vote on this motion also applies to Motions Nos. 234 to 440.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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The recorded division on Motion No. 122 stands deferred.
The question is on Motion No. 126. A vote on this motion also applies to Motion Nos. 127 to 232.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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The recorded division on Motion No. 112 stands deferred.
The question is on Motion No. 122. A vote on this motion also applies to Motions Nos. 123 to 125.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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The recorded division on the motion stands deferred.
The question is on Motion No. 112. A vote on this motion also applies to Motion Nos. 113 to 121.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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The recorded division on the motion stands deferred.
The question is on Motion No. 15. A vote on this motion also applies to Motions Nos. 16 to 111.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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The recorded division on the motion stands deferred.
The question is on Motion No. 3. A vote on this motion also applies to Motions Nos. 4 to 14.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals pat themselves on the back for their 2023 budget, but they should not. It is a budget that, at the end of the day, will hurt Canadians, it is short-sighted, irresponsible and ultimately incompetent.
Members do not have to take my word for it. The former finance minister, Bill Morneau, said the Liberals' fiscal policy was about “scoring political points” over good policies, specifically financial ones. He said the Ministry of Finance recommendations were disregarded in “winning a popularity contest”. Policies were made “on the fly”. Some things do not seem to be changing. That is to be expected from a Prime Minister who told reporters that he did not concern himself with fiscal policy because budgets balance themselves. It is incomprehensible.
Can members imagine what would happen to a small business or a family where there is no concern about how much is spent and how much is made? It would lead to hard times for them. They would go deeper into debt, and possible foreclosure and bankruptcy. The Liberals do not seem to care. They have doubled down on national debt. The Liberals and the Prime Minister have more than doubled the national debt since coming into power.
Canadians might ask what difference it makes. It very much affects the lives of all Canadians. We can look to how much everything costs and how much smaller the packages are. Everything has gone up. A family of four will spend $1,000 more after tax dollars on food alone. Even for those receiving rebates, they will spend many hundreds more on bread, fruit, vegetables and everything else.
The Liberals, when they saw the inflationary numbers and how they are impacting Canadians, said this was not good for them politically, so they raised interest rates by over 1,000% to cool things down.
What has that accomplished? Let us ask those who have been renewing their mortgages. It is thousands of dollars more per year just on mortgages because the interest rates were increased. I live in the greater Vancouver area. Homes cost $1 million, $2 million and up, and mortgages over $600,000 are just the standard. The fiscal policies of the Liberals are putting a squeeze on taxpayers.
The standard of living for Canadians is deteriorating. Canada has been sliding in the rankings as far as wealth is concerned. In 2019, we were in 10th place. In the past three years, we have gone down to 14th and are sliding. If we compare that to Taiwan, Israel and Ireland that are equal to us or have surpassed us in their per capita incomes, they do not even have the resources we have. We are a wealthy nation, but our fiscal policy is destroying us.
The government is more interested in the redistribution of wealth, making us dependent on government and killing wealth creation through taxation and regulation. There is a word for that and it is socialism. The regulations, red tape and bureaucracy are killing us. It is fiscal foolishness.
I have a couple of examples. One is the TransCanada pipeline. Kinder Morgan projected it to cost $6.7 billion. The Liberals got involved and the new cost for Canadian taxpayers is approaching $40 billion. It is like the Liberals have written a blank cheque. There is no fiscal responsibility.
A local example in my riding is the Harris Road underpass. It is an agreement between the CPR, Transport Canada and the port authority. It was projected four years ago, with an agreement, to make this underpass for $63 million. It has skyrocketed to $200 million and the project is on the verge of collapsing because of cost increases. Less than half of that cost is for actual construction. The rest is for management, enabling and management contingency. The bureaucracy is killing us.
There is one thing where the prices have been driven down, and that is the cost of street drugs with Liberal drug policies by both the Liberals and the NDP. It is killing lives. The price of hard drugs has gone down 70% to 95%. People are getting addicted and they are dying.
We need a change of government to get some fiscal sanity.
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Mr. Speaker, the answer is yes. We would support treatment on demand and that is one area where we see some collaboration between two parties in the House of Commons.
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Mr. Speaker, I share the member's concern about the opioid crisis, as does everyone in this Parliament. I was pleased that he did not repeat some of the misguided falsehoods that his leader has been putting out there in the media when it comes to safe supply in the province. I am sure, as a British Columbian, he is familiar with the words of the chief coroner and the provincial health officer who have said there is no evidential basis for linking an increase in opioid deaths to the safe supply that we are seeing.
Where the member and I really strongly agree is the need for treatment programs, that one of the pillars of responding to the opioid and toxic drug crisis is having free treatment on demand. Would he support a federal fund directed to establishing those kinds of treatment centres in our province?
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Mr. Speaker, I will not be making any excuses for the Conservative Party. We are here to stand up to the government in order to help Canadians maintain their ability to enjoy a high standard of living. We must oppose this budget because it is not good for Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague has some complaints about the budget. Members of the official opposition do not like the budget, and neither do we. We think there are many things missing from this budget.
What are we going to do? We are going to respect Parliament and vote against the budget.
The Conservatives have been wrapping themselves in a cloak of virtue for some time, telling us that they have one, two, three or four conditions, that the carbon tax must be abolished, and so on. They are saying that as long as the government refuses to meet their conditions, not only will they not vote for the budget, they will filibuster it.
Everyone knows that this is all for show, just to waste time, and that they will never vote in favour of the budget. All they are doing is wasting parliamentarians' time.
To prove my point, I wonder if my colleague can give me just one example of a single time in Canadian history when the official opposition ended up supporting a government's budget, in one way or another.
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Mr. Speaker, let me address the first and third questions to begin with.
The reason we have so much foreign direct investment is because of LNG Canada. In fact, much of the manufacturing and investments we are seeing in western Canada are related to pipelines and natural gas development. The natural gas development, which was the largest private sector investment in the history of Canada put forward by the Liberal Prime Minister, was exempt from the carbon tax. That is the only reason Liberals built it. It was because they knew that with carbon tax, it did not make economic sense for that project to go ahead. The Prime Minister and the premier of British Columbia decided not to apply the highest carbon tax in our country when that project went forward.
When that project is completed in the next five years, we are going to have an exorbitant number of skilled workers in northern British Columbia who will not have another project to go to because under the government's Bill C-69 from the 2015 Parliament, barely any single natural resource development project has been approved. We have to get more natural resource projects approved to supply Asia with clean LNG from Canada that is going to reduce global emissions and fight climate change.
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Mr. Speaker, I regret having to play fact check. First, on foreign direct investment, the five-year snapshot of the foreign direct investments in the last five years is upward of $1,141 billion, so over $1 trillion is an average. In the Harper years, it was almost half of that, $617 billion over a five-year period per year. On foreign direct investment, there is really no comparing the federal Liberal government to the Conservative government. The Conservatives were just not able to attract the same level of investment.
Second, I am not sure why the member wants to compare COVID-19 to opioid deaths. However, more Canadians did die from COVID-19, tragically, than opioids. Opioids have consumed far too many lives in this country and we need to find solutions for both treatment and more safe supply. It is not a simple solution. It is complex.
Last, the member opposite lives in a province with carbon pricing, which has effectively demonstrated an ability to reduce carbon emissions. He ran on it in the last election. Will he stand up and tell his constituents that he no longer believes in carbon pricing?
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Mr. Speaker, it is another great night for democracy. It is always an honour to rise on behalf of Canada's number one riding, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, and share a few words in the people's House of Commons.
In this year's budget, Conservatives asked for a couple of things, or three things to be exact: to bring home powerful paycheques, to bring home lower prices on homes and to build more homes that Canadians can afford.
Budget 2023 does none of these things. It fails to create the good-paying jobs Canadians need to keep up with the ever-rising cost of living. It fails to stop the government's reckless spending and punishing tax hikes, which are driving inflation, and it fails to deliver a real plan to address the housing supply crisis and ensure Canadians can find a safe and affordable place to call home. Further, it fails to address the labour shortages that are holding small businesses back. It fails to cut the mountains of red tape that have made Canada an unattractive place to do business, and it cuts away the fiscal anchor the finance minister so proudly touted in budget 2022, a declining debt-to-GDP ratio.
For these reasons, I will be joining my colleagues and voting against the budget.
On bringing home powerful paycheques, paycheques are not keeping up with the cost of living. I hear this from constituents every single day. Canada's inflation rate for April 2023 sat at 4.4%. Groceries are seeing some of the highest increases. In April, food prices rose 8.3% over the same month last year. “Canada's Food Price Report 2023” predicts the average family of four will spend $1,065 more on food this year. All the government can offer Canadians is a grocery rebate that will not come close to covering the substantial increase to their most important expense every month. The average family of four will still be out $598.
The Prime Minister's advice to Canadians who cannot keep up with this inflation is to just put big, important purchases on their credit cards. With the cost of a home reaching all-time highs, does the Prime Minister think Canadians should put their down payments on their credit cards too?
Budget 2023 doubles down on the failed $70-billion national housing strategy. Since its implementation, we have seen a doubling of the cost of an average family home in this country.
Conservatives have a different plan. We are going to get municipal gatekeepers and nimbys out of the way. In fact, we are going to do what the provincial NDP government in British Columbia is doing and work with municipalities to incentivize them to get more homes built. We are going to tie infrastructure dollars to increased housing development, and we are going to sell off 15% of the federal government's buildings to be converted into affordable housing.
Turning to small businesses, the housing supply crisis is also preventing small businesses from attracting new workers, particularly in rural communities. Ashcroft and Lillooet in my riding have raised this repeatedly. On top of this, businesses struggle to bring in workers from abroad thanks to massive backlogs in our broken immigration system. In fact, just last week I had the pleasure of attending the B.C. Chamber of Commerce's 2023 AGM and conference, where it called upon the federal government, as one of its key policy planks, to address the immigration shortfalls.
A recent CFIB report highlighted that small business owners are working 54 hours a week on average, largely to make up for staffing shortages. Labour shortages have had a particular impact on small businesses in the hospitality and agricultural sectors, where 84% and 82% of owners report working more hours respectively.
On top of labour shortages, most businesses are having trouble simply staying afloat. Many took on large amounts of debt to survive the pandemic. However, they have yet to fully recover to 2019 levels and are drowning in debt payments. According to Restaurants Canada, there has been a 116% increase in bankruptcies among restaurants over the last year, and 51% are only breaking even or losing money every day.
Small businesses asked for no more carbon tax hikes, a reduction of the small business tax rate and action to address labour shortages. Instead, they got continued carbon tax hikes, no tax relief and no action to clear the immigration backlogs we face.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the Village of Lytton in my riding. We are coming up on the two-year anniversary on June 30, when Lytton was consumed by wildfire. Nearly two years later, the rebuild has yet to begin. Residents of Lytton have been unable to return home, and businesses have been unable to reopen their doors. Many businesses took out CEBA loans during the pandemic to stay afloat, but without the ability to reopen many are unable to repay them. With the deadline for repayment coming up this December, these businesses are running out of time and are desperate.
Earlier this week, I received a reply to one of my petitions in which the constituents of Lytton had pleaded with the government to give them some reprieve. We are only talking about a dozen businesses here. The government said no. It said no to the village that has been referenced in every conversation on climate change and every conversation on natural disasters. To the very people who want to be able to go back and rebuild the community, the government said no. Shame on it.
I will acknowledge the minister for Pacific economic development, who did follow through on some housing supports, but rental housing was excluded from that as well. I really hope the government revises its program on housing grants to include rental housing moving forward.
In British Columbia, we are also facing the opioid crisis. In 2016, an increase in the number of overdose deaths in B.C., particularly those linked to fentanyl, led the medical officer of health to declare a public health emergency in the province. In the seven years leading up to that declaration, 3,002 British Columbians lost their lives to a drug overdose, an average of about 430 a year. Since 2017, there have been 10,396 deaths from opioid overdoses, an average of more than 1,700 per year. At the federal level, more than $6 billion has been spent since 2017, yet the crisis worsens. Conservatives are committed to turning hurt into hope for those battling addiction.
A few weeks ago, I hosted a number of people who have combatted addiction in their lives and overcome it. They talked about the need in the Fraser health region to put more money into detoxification beds. The Fraser health region, my health region in British Columbia, has the highest number of overdose deaths in this country. We only have eight detox beds. Moving forward we need to be in a position, and the Government of Canada needs to support a policy position, such that, if someone who is suffering from an opioid addiction feels that they can enter treatment, it is available on demand.
The number of people who die from opioids far surpasses the number of people who die from COVID–19. We spent hundreds of billions of dollars on COVID–19, yet not a fraction of that for the people who are suffering from opioid addiction. Canada must do better. British Columbia must do better. Our children and the parents of those who have lost a child are pleading with us to do better. We have not done well enough.
In conclusion, budget 2023 will not address the ever-increasing cost of living we are facing in British Columbia and across Canada. It will not create the good-paying jobs that Canadians need to keep up with the cost of inflation. It fails to address the number one issue in my riding, the rebuilding of Lytton, as well as the overdose crisis that is plaguing my province at an alarming rate.
We have so much work to do in the House and the Conservative Party, His Majesty's loyal opposition, is going to fight every day to make sure that Canadians see a future for themselves and their communities that is drug-free and where people have hope to live their best lives once again.
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Mr. Speaker, there are several things one could say about my colleague's great question. One is that he knows in British Columbia there were something like 15 LNG projects that could have been built when the Prime Minister came into power, and not one of them has ever been completed. Those dollars could have been used for what natural resources have been used for in this country, and that is to build the coffers of the federal government to make those transfers in education and health care back to the provinces so that we can all have the same level of health care across the whole country.
The other thing is that the profits from those companies are being used to make those transfers, but the member knows full well that the government has stymied the development of those industries with Bill C-69. If we want to talk about percentages of profit increases, we are talking about $40 barrels of oil a number of years ago that are now $80 a barrel. There is a doubling right there. It is very hard to compare percentages when we have a product that has doubled in price over the last five years.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to push back on the hon. member's earlier interaction with the member for Fleetwood—Port Kells. Conservatives like to be oblivious to the fact that, since 2019, oil and gas companies have seen their net profits go up by over 1000%. To suggest that this has absolutely no role in driving inflation for consumers, when everything that families depend on is driven by trains or trucks, which rely on diesel fuel, is being completely oblivious to the elephant in the room.
Surely, my colleague could offer some commentary on the gross profiteering that is happening on the backs of constituents like his and like mine, right across Canada. Why do Conservatives continue to ignore this, to the detriment of all Canadians?
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