- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sarnia—Lambton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $118,419.33
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, over the holidays, I heard how after eight years of this NDP-Liberal government, Canadians are struggling to pay their bills and keep roofs over their heads. They know that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
Our leader, my Conservative colleagues and I are back to show Canadians they have a simple choice in the next election. On the one hand they can have a costly coalition of the NDP and Liberals that takes their money, taxes their food, punishes their work, doubles their housing costs and unleashes crime and chaos in their communities or they can choose the common-sense Conservatives and our common-sense plan.
We are back to address the priorities facing Canadians, starting with a focus on passing Bill C-234 to take the carbon tax off farmers and to bring food prices down.
Our priorities are clear: axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
Let us bring it home.
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- Oct/24/23 2:37:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, announcements do not build homes. The government has built fewer homes than were built in 1972. However, in my riding, I have people who are both working, yet are not able to have any heat in their house for the last two months, because of the price that the government continues to drive up with its inflationary spending. The Liberals are so out of touch, they are pouring money on the inflationary fire and causing misery.
Will the Prime Minister rein in his inflationary spending, or is the truth that the government and the Prime Minister are just not worth the cost?
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Madam Speaker, I am rising today to express my serious concerns about Bill C-50. This bill is called the sustainable jobs act, which is typical of what Liberals do. They pick a name that sounds good. Who does not like sustainable jobs? I like sustainable jobs. I think all Canadians want sustainable jobs. It sounds really good, but the problem is that in this bill there is no plan to create sustainable jobs. This is a plan to get a plan.
The bill outlines how the Liberals are going to put together a council. Based on past behaviour, I suggest that it would be highly paid Liberal insiders who will get these jobs and advise on what the plan ought to be. As to the timeline of when they are going to come up with what the plan ought to be, it be should by 2025, coincidentally just after the next election.
The Liberals do not have a plan. Nothing says there is no plan like a bill that is introduced to get a plan. That is the first thing.
The second thing is the Liberals have another role, a secretariat, that is going to do some coordination, with another highly paid Liberal insider when they get the plan. The problem is that is it; that is all. It is a plan to get a plan, with some principles that are motherhood and apple pie and that we would all agree on, such as well-paying jobs, caring about the environment and the need to respect labour, all of these good things. They are all motherhood and apple pie, but the bill does not have a specific action that is going to help.
On the other hand, it is going to hurt. The analysts of the government have said that Bill C-50 would kill 170,000 direct Canadian jobs, would displace 450,000 workers directly and indirectly working in the energy sector and would risk the livelihoods of 2.7 million Canadians across all provinces. The bill would destroy as many as 2.7 million jobs when there is not a single action in it to create any sustainable jobs at all. That is a problem.
The other thing is that it is going to cost a lot of money. Right now the energy sector provides 10% of Canada's GDP and pays over $20 billion in taxes to all levels of government every year. Last year, $48 billion in royalties and taxes were contributed by the energy sector. This bill purports to get rid of that by eliminating the sector.
We can look at other places in the world that have come up with a sustainable jobs plan and are starting to implement it, Scotland being one example. If we took the cost per person of its plan and did the equivalent thing here, it would cost $37.2 billion. The Liberals are taking away as much as $48 billion and adding a cost of another $37 billion. If we do the math, they are increasing by greater than $70 billion the loss to the Canadian economy.
I do not know why the Liberal government cannot learn the lesson when countless people can, like former Liberal John Manley, who said that when it runs these huge deficits, it is putting a foot on the inflationary gas pedal, which is causing the Bank of Canada to put its foot on the brake with higher interest rates. This raises the cost of mortgages. Canadians are suffering from coast to coast, so definitely not only is the bill not going to create jobs, but it will come with a huge cost.
It is not like this is the first time there has been an attack on oil and gas and the energy sector. This has been a continual theme from the time I got elected in 2015. Let us start with the tanker ban, Bill C-48, to keep Canadian oil from getting out there when everybody else's ships are out there full of oil. Then we had Bill C-55, which created marine protected areas so we could do no oil and gas development there. Then there was Bill C-69, the “no more pipelines” bill, which was just called unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. All of these things were intended to be a war against creating oil and gas projects.
There is evidence. When the Liberals took power, there were 18 LNG projects on the books and there were four pipelines. Zero pipelines have been built and all the LNG projects but one are cancelled. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, our friends in Germany were going to give us $59 billion to replace their Russian oil and coal with our green LNG. The Prime Minister said there was no business case, so Australia took that deal.
Then Japan came up with a similar deal and again we would not take the deal, so Saudi Arabia took it. Then came France and the Netherlands. There were all these opportunities for Canada to be a leader, supplanting higher-carbon fuels with our green LNG, the most responsibly produced product in the world with the best human rights record, but again the Liberal government refused. Instead, it is focused on its own ideology and things that it wants to do that continue to destroy the economy.
We can talk about the electric vehicle mandates. That was another great idea. Let us give away $31 billion to create 3,000 jobs. For those who can do the math, if we just gave each of those 3,000 people $10 million, they would never have to work again and there would not be any footprint. There is a total misunderstanding of how to create a growing economy.
Then there is the clean electricity standard, another hugely divisive bill that was introduced by the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, clearly not understanding that where the Liberals want to go with all the electric vehicles, electricity and the grid would require building the equivalent of 19 nuclear facilities, like the one from Bruce Power. They cannot build anything, so I do not know where they get the idea that they are going to be successful in achieving that.
At the same time, they are ignoring the fact that only 7% of the public even wants an electric vehicle because the technology is not there. No one wants to be trapped in a snowstorm at -30°C because the batteries do not work. They catch fire. In addition to that, they do not have a very long range. Instead, the government decided to pick a winner and loser with the battery plants that are being built.
Now Toyota has come out with a solid-state battery, with a 1,275-kilometre range, that works at -20°C and does not catch fire. That will make our technology obsolete, with $31 billion after the fact. Maybe the Liberal government needs a few more engineers so that it can actually make science-, fact- and data-based decisions, but that is not what is happening today.
The Liberals continue to move ahead with the carbon tax and the second carbon tax, putting punishment on the backs of Canadians and achieving nothing. Emissions have gone up under the government. At the 2005 level, we were at 732 megatonnes. We needed to get to 519 and now we are at 819. They are not achieving their targets and keep putting bills like this in place, talking about sustainability, the environment and creating jobs. They are not actually achieving that.
Sarnia—Lambton has a huge oil and gas sector, but it knows how to do a transition and is doing a transition. It is creating good-paying, sustainable jobs like the ones at Origin Materials, a net-zero plastics plant in my riding. My riding has one of the largest solar facilities in North America. There is a whole bio-innovation centre that is growing different kinds of bio-facilities that are all either carbon sinks or carbon-neutral. These are the kinds of actual solutions and actions we need. That is not what is in Bill C-50. It is a plan to get a plan with nothing else. For that reason, I will not be supporting Bill C-50.
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- Oct/16/23 2:13:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister said that he would get groceries prices down before Thanksgiving. Well, the turkey has come and gone, and groceries prices are not down. Another broken promise from a Prime Minister who is not worth the cost. Maybe he was talking about American Thanksgiving.
I can tell members that putting together a committee of Liberals to recommend how to bring prices down is a wasted effort. They have no plan. After eight years of this NDP-Liberal government, Canadians are out of money and this government is out of ideas.
Our Conservative leader would axe the tax, the second carbon tax, the tax on the tax and the tariffs on Canadian farmers, and cut the regulations that are adding cost to the food chain. Conservatives know how to talk turkey and Canadians need the hope that we are bringing.
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- Apr/18/23 3:03:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, maybe the minister should do something because he has never met an emissions target.
Another day and another billionaire island boondoggle. This time, the Prime Minister jets off to Jamaica and costs the Canadian taxpayers over $160,000. Of course, he stays with a friend who has donated to the Trudeau Foundation because he is so independent from that foundation. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Canadians cannot afford a vacation. They cannot afford to eat and heat.
Will the Prime Minister end this double standard of living and axe the carbon tax?
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- Feb/13/23 2:34:10 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the reality is the Liberals have never met a single one of their emissions targets. They do not have an environmental plan; they have a tax plan.
The minister's answer is no help at all to John in my riding. John is struggling with the rising cost of gas, groceries and home heating. At 74 years old, on a fixed income, he has had to go back to work.
Will the Prime Minister axe the tax so John can keep the heat on?
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Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to speak to the fall economic statement, and I am lucky I got the chance before the government shut down debate, which it is doing today. In my usual format, I will look at the different sections of the fall economic update and tell members what I think about them.
To start off, the first section is called “Sound Economic Stewardship in Uncertain Times”. That sounds like something everybody would want. These certainly are uncertain times, so sound economic stewardship sounds like just what we need. The problem is the document has nothing to do with sound economic stewardship.
We have more inflationary spending, after economists and experts have said that more inflationary spending is just going to cause more inflation. We have the highest levels of inflation we have had in 40 years. I am not sure why, but I expected more from a Prime Minister who has spent more money in his term in office than all other prime ministers have spent put together. The earning power of Canadians is at the lowest point it has been in decades, and I am very concerned that we have not taken the appropriate actions in the fall economic statement to address sound economic stewardship.
Our debt is so large that we will pay $22 billion of interest on the debt next year. In two years, we will be paying $44 billion for interest on the debt. That is not the debt itself; we are not paying the debt down. Just the interest on the debt will be $44 billion. That is more than all of the health transfers to all of the provinces. I really think that was a missed opportunity.
Let us move on to the second part: “Making Life More Affordable”. Again, it sounds like a really good idea. I think Canadians would say they need life to be more affordable. However, this is what the Liberals always do: What they say sounds good, but what they actually do is not that good.
Fifty per cent of Canadians cannot pay their bills. Personal debt is at an all-time high. What do the Liberals do? They increase the tax that is going to drive up the price of groceries, gas and home heating. Is that going to make life more affordable for Canadians? No, it is not; it is just going to make it worse. I really think the government needs to listen to what Canadians are saying and understand the dire straits that many Canadians are facing in losing their houses and having to choose between heating and eating. Something needs to be done and the “something” is not what was in the fall economic statement.
There is a lot of wasteful spending going on, and I was shocked to find out about the $450 billion we pumped out the door during COVID. Some supports were definitely needed during the pandemic, but I heard the Parliamentary Budget Officer say that 40% of them had nothing to do with COVID. That is an incredible amount of money. We have to stop wasting it.
I agree that climate change needs to be addressed and I agree we need to reduce emissions, but we have spent $100 billion and the Liberal government has failed to meet any of its emissions targets. We are number 58 out of 60 on the list of countries that went to COP27 with Paris accord targets. We spent $100 billion, but what do we get for it? We get absolutely nothing.
We have to do better about spending taxpayer money to get results. Members today were saying that it is a real emergency; we have flooding and wildfires. They can ask themselves how high the carbon tax in Canada has to be to stop us from having floods or stop us from having wildfires here.
As a chemical engineer, I will say that Canada is less than 2% of the footprint. We could eliminate the whole thing and we are still going to have the impacts of floods and wildfires until the other more substantive contributors in the world, such as China, which has 34% of the footprint, get their act together. We can help them get their act together. If we replace with LNG all the coal that China is using and the coal plants they are building, it would mean jobs for Canadians and would cut the carbon footprint of the whole world by 10% or 15%. That would be worth doing, but it was not in the fall economic update.
I do not know if there are problems with math on the opposite side, but the Prime Minister ordered 10 vaccines for every Canadian. I do not know if he knew that two or three vaccines, or four or five maximum, were all we were going to take. Now all the rest of the vaccines have expired and have all been thrown away. What a huge waste that is. They could have gone to countries that do not have vaccines or that cannot afford to buy them. That is just one example of the wasteful spending.
The next section was called “Jobs, Growth, and an Economy That Works for Everyone”, and I think that sounds like something everybody would like. Every Canadian wants jobs, growth and an economy that works for everyone. However, in the fall economic statement we saw that we have only half the GDP growth we expected and predicted earlier this year, so we did not get the growth, and we have lost a lot of jobs and gotten a few jobs back, but it did not work for everyone.
If someone was unable to take a vaccine due to a medical issue or because they made a personal choice, they got fired, lost their job. Just to make the pain double, even though they had paid into an employment insurance program, paid the premium and should get the benefit, the government made sure that nobody who refused a vaccine could get that, so it does not work for everyone.
The last section is called “Fair and Effective Government”. Again, who could disagree with fair and effective government? I want the government to be fair. I want to live in a fair democracy, and I want the government to be effective. That would be wonderful, but today we have passports taking seven months to process, and there are 2.5 million immigrants caught in the backlog at IRCC. The average wait time for some of those types of permits is 82 months. We have the Phoenix pay system and the ArriveCAN app. Everything is broken all over the government. There is not any effective government happening. Yes, I think we should have it, but it is not in there.
With respect to a fair government, this is the Liberal government that brought in the Emergencies Act. We are waiting for the final word on it, but a lot of people have said there was no threat to national security and there was no emergency. The law enforcement people did not ask for it and the provinces did not ask for it, yet the government froze the bank accounts of Canadians without any warrants. That is not a fair democracy.
There is a freedom of speech war going on in our country. Bill C-11, Bill C-18 and all the bills the government brings forward whereby the government is going to get to control the speech of Canadians and the media, are not fair. We have evidence that CSIS talked to the Prime Minister and said Chinese money from Beijing was funnelled to 11 election candidates, with no transparency on who they were, and that there was interference in the 2021 election, again with no transparency. That is not a fair, democratic government.
I could go on about rental and dental, where the government has driven up the cost of housing. The average cost of housing rental was $1,000 in Canada, and now it is $2,000. With one hand the government is going to give a cheque for $500, but with the other hand its policies cost an increase of thousands of dollars, $12,000 a month on average in Canada. That is the way the government is working. It gives a little but takes a lot back, and that is not what we want to see, so I cannot support the bill that goes with the fall economic statement. I think we have to do better.
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Madam Speaker, I take umbrage at the comments about the Conservatives, but let us talk about something we can agree on.
The member talked about the price of bread. He said it is unthinkable that people fix the price of bread and it is important to Canadians. I think that is true. However, why does the member support the government putting a tax in place that increases the cost of growing wheat, milling wheat, cooking wheat into bread and shipping bread to the grocery store? Why is he supporting the government in raising the cost of bread in Canada?
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- Nov/18/22 11:33:59 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, that is the Liberals: Give a little with one hand and take a lot with the other. Half of Canadians cannot pay their bills. They have lost hope. The Liberal government is out of touch and Canadians are out of money.
Again, will the Liberals end their inflationary spending and cancel their plan to triple taxes on gas, groceries and home heating?
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- Nov/18/22 11:32:45 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, this is from the woman who said that we would have deflation and interest rates would remain low for decades. The highest inflation in 40 years means Canadians cannot pay their bills, yet this costly coalition continues their out-of-control tax-and-spend agenda.
Will the Liberals have some compassion, end their inflationary spending and cut their plan to triple taxes on gas, home heating and groceries?
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- Nov/16/22 3:09:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, winter is here and Canadians will be paying thousands more dollars to heat their homes because of the inflationary Liberal carbon tax. They will paying more for everything because of the out-of-control spending of this greedy NDP-Liberal costly coalition. Canadians need help now.
Will the Liberals end their inflationary spending and cancel their plans to triple taxes on gas, groceries and home heating?
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- Oct/25/22 3:02:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member is in deficit fantasy land.
Our leader and our party have been calling for weeks for the Liberals to cancel taxes on Canadians, yet the Liberals are still planning to triple the carbon tax. I am going to ask this again today: Will they stop their punishing plans to increase the carbon tax and drive up the cost of gas, groceries and home heating, yes or no?
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Mr. Speaker, here we are again. The Liberal government, which promised Canadians that it would not shut down debate, is doing it again.
It is shameful. These are important measures to get right. There are concerns that have been expressed on this motion, as well as the bill that it pertains to, and the government is not listening. I am very disappointed to see, once again, a lack of transparency and Liberals not keeping their promises, which is what we have come to expect from this government.
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- Oct/17/22 2:50:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, analysts are saying that home heating prices in some places will increase by 300% this winter. That is triple. The Prime Minister's planned increases to the carbon tax and the payroll tax are cold-hearted actions. The Liberals are literally freezing Canadians out.
Is it just inflation or will the government cut its planned taxes?
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Madam Speaker, the Conservatives agree that oral health is very important, but the measures in Bill C-31 cover children under 12 who are mostly covered by other provincial programs, adding $500 or $600. Then there is the one-time $500 payment for rent. At the same time, the government is taking away more than $1,500 from Canadians by increasing the carbon tax and increasing payroll taxes.
Does the government not recognize the hypocrisy that it is taking more money away than it is actually giving? If it wanted to do something instantly, it could cut the carbon tax and stop payroll taxes. Will the minister commit to doing that?
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- Oct/3/22 2:10:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the new Conservative leader will put the people first: their paycheques, their savings, their homes, their country.
The carbon tax is an utter failure. The Liberal government would have us believe that it will drive emissions down, but emissions have gone up under its tenure. B.C. has had a carbon tax for 14 years and its emissions have gone up four megatonnes. Quebec has had a similar program for 12 years and its emissions have gone up four megatonnes as well.
The reality is that the carbon tax drives the price of everything up and it is punishing on Canadians who can least afford it. The Liberals would have us believe that they will get more money back than they pay, but the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said this is false and many Canadians will pay more. Still the Liberals are planning to triple the carbon tax in April of 2023. Clearly the Prime Minister is experiencing the carbon tax differently than hard-working Canadians.
Help is on the way. A Conservative government with its new leader will scrap the carbon tax.
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Madam Speaker, I am puzzled by my hon. member's speech. NDP members have said that they want dental care for all Canadians who currently do not have coverage, so I do not understand why they have agreed to this program that only covers children under 12 in some families, when many provinces already cover that, and that the rest will be post-2025 after the election when the Liberals do not need the NDP anymore. Why did he support it?
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank the member for his speech. I am not certain that the $500 is an effective solution for those who cannot afford their rent.
Does the member believe that it is a good initiative?
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Madam Speaker, I have two questions for the parliamentary secretary.
My first question is as a person who was formerly on a board of a homeless shelter. We are seeing across the country and in my riding an increase in homelessness and an affordable housing crisis. How is $500 going to help the many people who are losing their homes in this affordability crisis? It is more like a band-aid on a gaping wound.
Second, my understanding of the deal that the NDP signed with the Liberal Party was that the Liberals were going to put in a dental care program that would cover everyone. This one covers children under 12. With respect to the amounts we are talking about, I just got my teeth cleaned and it was almost $300. Seventy per cent of the folks are covered by programs and the rest who are on social assistance already receive this. How is this anything like the promise that was made? Why did the government break its promise to its partners?
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- Sep/21/22 3:08:36 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, how is the tree planting going?
Before the pandemic, half of Canadians were within $200 of not being able to pay their bills. During the pandemic, the Liberals increased taxes on home heating, gasoline and workers' paycheques. Now, when Canadians are falling further and further behind, they want to triple the tax on home heating and gasoline and take more money from workers' paycheques. Canadians cannot afford this.
Will the Liberals finally listen to struggling Canadians and cancel these punishing taxes?
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