- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $135,225.85
- Government Page
- May/23/24 2:35:04 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years of the NDP-Liberal government, Canadians are hungry and homeless. It is becoming more clear: The more inflationary spending the Liberals do, the worse it gets for Canadians. We need look no further than the Ottawa Food Bank report that came out this week, which said that half a million visits were made to the food bank in our nation's capital last year. That is a 95% increase in the last five years and a 22% increase in the last year alone, and 36% of them were children. How many more times are the Liberals going to hike the carbon tax before they realize it is driving millions more people to food banks?
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- May/7/24 1:50:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, after nine years, it does matter. The member passively mentioned they have only been in office for the last nine years, as if suddenly now there is something the Liberals can do about fixing the mess our country is in. As a matter of fact, they are the ones who caused the mess in the first place. In that casual little nine years he talked about, they have doubled our national debt. They have doubled housing prices, and they have sent millions more Canadians to food banks each and every year. They have been taking more of people's paycheques, when they have been trying to stretch it out. Inflation has been at a 40-year high. Everything the Liberals have touched in that nine years has been a disaster. They try to forget about their record, but trust me; we are going to hold them to it.
Conservatives did balance the budget. We had a plan to balance the budget, and that has been the common-sense Canadian consensus for years. We are going to keep doing the same to bring down inflation, to control spending and to stop the out of touch and just reckless financial approach the Liberals have had for far too long.
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- Feb/26/24 2:17:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost, the crime or the corruption. The details and cost of the arrive scam app, at $60 million and counting, get worse by the day.
Now the NDP is pretending to be outraged by the facts being uncovered. However, when the Prime Minister needed to approve the millions of dollars he funnelled to companies such as GC Strategies, the truth is that his costly coalition partners in the NDP and the Bloc voted to prop him up and allow this spending to take place, further enabling all this corruption and incompetence. GC Strategies did no actual work and got $20 million of taxpayers' money.
The record shows that the NDP voted with the Liberals to allow the arrive scam spending to continue, with all these money-for-nothing contracts, at least eight times. It gets worse the more we know. The truth is this: The NDP refused to block this spending and is complicit in it. After eight years, the Prime Minister and his NDP buddies are not worth the cost or the corruption.
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- Jun/21/23 2:21:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of Liberal scandals and ethics issues, there is a laundry list of wasteful spending growing by the day: $27 million in bonuses for federal housing bureaucrats as housing costs double and the building of new homes is dropping; $116 million in consulting fees to the Prime Minister's buddies at McKinsey; $210 million to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which we will never see again after the Liberals have admitted the bank is being controlled by Beijing; and $54 million for the arrive scam app. How can we forget the stunning $4.6 billion in COVID program abuse that the Liberals could not be bothered to recover?
After eight years, the wasteful spending has added to endless Liberal deficits and painful inflation, and now to skyrocketing interest and mortgage rates for Canadians who are struggling to get by.
Conservatives will bring down inflation, get spending under control and scrap the Liberal tax hikes punishing Canadians. After all, it is just common sense. Let us bring it home.
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Madam Speaker, people on Vancouver Island do not want to see the carbon tax triple in terms of what we are having over the course of the next little while.
What I will say about this is that we are in this cost of living crisis, in the name of that bill, because of the spending habits of the Liberals and New Democrats for the past seven and eight years and it is only going to get worse. We are in this crisis and we are in this problem because we have two parties working together that do not care about balancing a budget or our economy or managing it. They are printing new money. They are adding debt and deficit, and they are leaving it to future people to actually pay the bill. Every single dollar of this program is going on a credit card. It is driving inflation and it is driving the very problem we are facing in this House of 40-year-high inflation and no date and no timeline to ever balance the budget again. The Liberals will just leave that for people in a good strong Conservative government to finally fix when we get around to it.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague and I served at the public accounts committee together for a while. The Auditor General concluded that the government is spending more money but getting less service for it. We saw it recently with the report tabled last week on services for veterans' disabilities.
I would like him to comment, from his time at public accounts, about the frustrations. It is one thing to spend money; it is another thing to manage it properly, which the government is not doing.
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Madam Speaker, I would say this move today is hypocritical of the government, but I am not surprised, because we have a Liberal-NDP group that does not want to talk about the economy. The Liberals and New Democrats do not want to talk about inflation and they do not want to talk about the cost of living. They surely do not want to talk about the carbon tax and the price of gas that they are backtalking to their constituents every day, so it is not a surprise that they are trying to ram this budget through.
No, we have not had adequate time. At report stage on Friday, we heard from one member from the Conservatives and one member from the Liberals, the member for Winnipeg North, who I always enjoy hearing from, but Liberals do not even want to get up and talk about their own budget. They try to shut the debate down. I do not blame them, given how things are going and how their plan is not working.
I want to ask a specific question of the minister about the budget. I will use what the Auditor General agreed with me on in the public accounts committee last week, when she said that this government is spending more and getting less when it comes to results, particularly on customer service levels, particularly when it relates to the timely Auditor General's reports last week. Service levels are absolutely collapsing at airports, Passport Canada, CRA, immigration and Veterans Affairs. NEXUS cards are an absolute disaster. They say they are spending x dollars of more money. We want to know specifically what and when Canadians can expect in getting proper customer service levels back and why we cannot have more time to debate those issues and frustrations that Canadians have.
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- Apr/4/22 4:38:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, after listening to the commentary and speech from my colleague across the way, I have to say that with respect to our responsibilities as members of Parliament, there are two things. One is to talk about all the things we would advocate with respect to spending, and the member went through a litany of what that would be. What was completely absent from all of that discussion was how we are going to pay for it.
In these conversations we are having this week in the lead-up to the budget and in the report we have here from the committee and in numerous other factors, the government does not tell us how it is going to pay for that spending because it is not going to. It is adding to our federal debt and our annual federal deficit. We were already projected to have that before the recent NDP-Liberal deal or coalition agreement, whatever the budget may be this week. If the government is saying it is going to spend on A, B, C or D, I think it is important for Canadians to know how it is going to pay for it.
The member has been quiet on that because there is no way to do it. It is adding to the country's credit card and letting somebody else have to deal with it down the road.
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- Mar/28/22 12:23:59 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure, as always, to rise in the House to represent what I feel are the views in my riding of Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry, in eastern Ontario, in response to the government's economic plan. Since it tabled this legislation, which we have been debating over the last couple months, last week's circumstance of the surprise but unsurprising deal between the NDP and the Liberals blew up the fiscal framework, several parts of which are in the bill and are going to be in subsequent budgets over the course of the next couple of years.
This specific piece of legislation has $70 billion in new inflationary spending. One thing I say to constituents very often when we are talking about support for and the funding of various programs is that it is very easy to say that we are going to fund programs A, B, C and D. That is the motherhood and apple pie of our job. The difficult part, which I believe Canadians are paying more attention to, is the financial situation and stability that our country faces.
Every single dollar in this bill, if not every single part of it, is new debt and deficit to our Canadian treasury. Canadians hear the statistic, as confirmed in the bill, that our national debt is now $1.2 trillion and growing, and one of the things we hear about is ideas. Parliament is for proposing ideas, and we are all here to make life better for Canadians. However, like in many of these bills, discussions and debates, putting the paid-for aspects on the Canadian credit card, for lack of a better term, is not talked about by the NDP and Liberal deal.
I have to laugh as I say that. As an aside, we ask if it is a coalition, an agreement, a friendship, a pact or a Kumbaya. Whatever it is, there is a framework and deal when it comes to the fiscal policy of this country over the course of the next few years. I would argue that from a technical perspective, the parties have a right in Parliament to come up with this agreement. I will not deny that. However, I think there is an ethical challenge here in terms of the openness and transparency of it. Millions of people voted for the NDP and did not vote to give the Liberal government, when it comes to committee or other measures, a free pass. Alternatively, there are many people who voted for Liberal candidates across the country who did not agree, on top of already having a deficit, to billions and billions of dollars of additional money.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer, who does great work, has had a couple of great reports that I think show a few things when it comes to the fiscal framework proposed by the government and NDP team. When it comes to the proposed stimulus spending, the PBO said, “It appears to me that the rationale for the additional spending initially set aside as ‘stimulus’ no longer exists.” He also said, “Yes, they can” in response to being asked if government deficits can contribute to inflation.
Given the bigger picture here when we look at the economic situation and this economic bill, there is a clear contrast between us on the opposition side as Conservatives and this proposed bill from the Liberals and the NDP. There are a few things I want to talk about in my comments today that provide the contrast. Other ideas are better solutions for moving this country forward, getting back to normalcy, getting our fiscal house in order and addressing many of the growing challenges and situations I am hearing about in my riding and beyond.
Housing is an example. I have spoken nearly every time I have risen in the House for the past couple of months about the growing crisis, not only in the housing market but in the rental market in the city of Cornwall, the united counties of SDG and parts of Akwesasne as well. That is a microcosm of what is happening nationally.
What is in this legislation is not a ban on foreign buyers, which was promised. We believe they should be banned for two years. That could help cool the market, particularly in larger cities.
One of the other things we talked about, and a new motion coming up is proposing ideas on it, is the government's proposed fiscal policy when it comes to housing and the first-time homebuyer shared equity program. It has been an abject failure, number one because of the participation numbers in it. The idea that the government would help give shared equity to Canadians to buy their homes may be admirable at face value to some, but all that is going to do is further inflate an already expensive housing market.
If we provide an extra $100,000 or $200,000 to help people afford a home, all that will do is to let sellers know, when there are 13 or 14 people bidding on a house in the city of Cornwall, that they have an extra $100,000 or $200,000 more in leverage to inflate the market. This is more government debt and more government printing. It is not actually lowering prices and making home ownership more affordable. It is increasing debt and increasing prices and not addressing the fundamental aspect.
I have to call out another slap to Canadians, which is the bonuses that were given at the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which were released a few weeks ago. CMHC is an organization that has a literal mandate to make sure Canadians have housing affordability. I do not need to summarize where we are with that in this country. Housing prices, nationally, have doubled. In our riding, housing prices are over $400,000. That has doubled in the past five years of this housing crisis.
The very benchmark of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation is to make housing affordable. The absolute opposite has happened. For more people, the dream of home ownership and affordability is out the window, but CMHC, the Liberal minister responsible for housing and the Liberal government gave $40 million in bonuses to employees at the organization. That is a slap in the face to the 30-year-old who is living in their parent's basement because they cannot afford their dream of home ownership and who cannot afford rent because we do not have supply. I do not know what shows more of the contrast in what we are doing.
The cost of living and inflation is at a 30-year high, the highest in nearly my entire lifetime of 34 years. At the rate we are going, when we get there, we will set another record in the coming months.
When we talk about contrast, I say each time that our job as opposition is to hold the government to account on what they have proposed but also to put our money where our mouth is. If we were on the other side of the aisle, since this is Parliament and we can propose ideas, what would we do?
I have to say, I have been very proud of my Conservative colleagues over the course of the last couple of weeks. They have highlighted a few issues that, I believe, provide a direct contrast with the plans proposed by the Liberals and the NDP.
First of all, we need to get opened back up. We need to end federal mandates, vaccine mandates and travel requirements. We have heard from employers, and we have heard from the travel and tourism industry, that they are very nervous about the year ahead. Based on where the science is at, not where it was two years ago, but here today at the end of March 2022, we can lift those mandates and get our country opened up. We can be back for business. We can be welcoming international visitors safely and smartly and get our economic engine firing at 100% again.
We lost that battle. We proposed that idea and, again, the Liberal and NDP coalition, friendship, team, pack or whatever we call them, did not agree with that.
Last week in our opposition day motion, which was one of the days last week, when we had the debate and then the vote right afterwards, was something we tried to put on record and did get on record. Unfortunately we were unsuccessful, again because of the other parties, but we talked about the high price of gas and many other goods in the country.
There are two things here. Number one is that we asked for a break on GST on fuel. I came into Ottawa last night from the riding. I stopped in Monkland to fill up with gas. It was over $1.70 a litre. I know there are a lot of people in Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry who have to drive to work. There is not a subway or LRT option in Monkland or Iroquois or Crysler. I do not think there is one coming anytime soon. Driving a car to get to work or to go to hockey practice is essential when living in a rural area.
We called for a gas tax break. It was voted down. It would not solve the affordability problem, but it could have given some tax relief at a time when Canadians truly need it.
The other problem we have to confront, which the government is not doing through their economic policies, is that the carbon tax is set to increase again later this week. We are saying that, if we are not going to give a break to Canadians at the pumps when prices are high, at least do not increase taxes on everybody on April 1. That was declined.
In a democracy, there are going to be contrasts. Our contrast is quite clear. We understand the cost of living. We understand the need for relief for Canadians. When it comes to housing, we have a fundamentally different approach.
For those reasons, again, I do not support the economic and fiscal update tabled by the government. I have a feeling that with the new deal between the Liberals and the NDP, I do not see ourselves doing so in the coming years either. We will see, here on the floor of the House of Commons, further constructive ideas from Conservatives.
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