- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Lethbridge
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 65%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $131,565.29
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to stand in this place and to address a very important issue. That issue comes down to affordability. It comes down to the well-being of Canadians from coast to coast, to those who live in rural areas, in urban areas, in my province of Alberta and in Atlantic Canada.
The debate tonight has to do with being able to buy the very basics of life, including fuel for a person's vehicle so that they can drive to work or take their kids to sport practice. It is a conversation about being able to put food on the table, whether that is fruits, vegetables, grain or dairy. Whatever a family chooses to consume, they should be able to afford those choices.
Furthermore, Bill C-234 is about being able to heat one's home. I do not know about others, but where I live in Alberta, we can get temperatures down to -53°C with the wind chill. I cannot imagine trying to heat my home with a heat pump, as the Liberals would like to suggest is possible, nor can I imagine relying on wind or solar as my sole source of electricity, because we had a proof point, just a few weeks ago, that it just does not work.
Instead, what people rely on to heat their homes in my part of the country is largely natural gas. The Liberal government has attached something called a carbon tax to those very necessities of life, whether it is the food we eat, the fuel that we put in our vehicles or the energy that heats our homes. The carbon tax is punitive in nature, and it is driving up the cost that Canadians have to pay just to survive.
Bill C-234, which we are discussing here today, has to do with taking the carbon tax off the fuel that farmers use for the very necessities of the jobs they do. Imagine putting all of one's time and energy and all of one's labour into producing food for the nation of Canada and for the entire world. Imagine doing that, and then imagine having a government in power that, rather than expressing gratitude toward them, actually punishes them. That is exactly what the Liberals have done for the last eight years.
The carbon tax is extremely punitive in nature. It goes after those individuals working hard to produce food. It does that by applying this tax to the very necessities of production. Whether it is using natural gas to heat a barn in order to keep chickens alive or dairy cattle alive, or whether it is using propane to be able to dry grain, let us say, those are things farmers do on a day to day basis. Those things are necessary to produce food for Canadians and for the world. Those things are required to keep us, as humanity, alive and to drive our economy forward. Rather than celebrating the incredible contribution that farmers are making, the Liberal government has chosen to go after them and to be extremely punitive.
On this side of the House, members got together and came up with an idea. That idea is brilliant. It is supported by producers all across the country. That idea is to remove the carbon tax from fuel, from natural gas and from propane so that farmers can produce food at less expense.
Here is what happens when farmers are empowered to produce food with little expense attached to it. Those savings get passed on to Canadians. Then, when Canadians go to grocery stores and buy food for their families, they are able to pay a little less. However, when the government attaches that tax, it actually drives up the cost of food, so Canadians then have to spend more.
What will happen when Canadians have to spend more? Headlines across this country will show us exactly what will happen. Families are struggling. Millions are lining up at food banks every single month across this country. In my riding, in Lethbridge, Alberta, the food bank use has doubled under the Liberal government. It has doubled.
It is not just folks who maybe do not have homes or who live in low-income housing. It is folks who have full-time jobs and live in middle-class neighbourhoods. It is seniors who rely on fixed incomes, who have worked incredibly hard for 65, 75, maybe 80 years of their lives. It is the students studying at Lethbridge College or the University of Lethbridge who are investing in their education and, because of the government, cannot afford to make ends meet, so they have to go to the food bank. It is the veterans who fought for this country, the country that we love. It is the men and women who sacrificed a great deal, and are now not supported by the government, who are lining up at the food bank.
That is a problem that was created under the watch of the Liberal government, but it did not have to be that way. The government has created policy after policy that has punished Canadians and held them back from achieving greatness, from being able to bring in income and stretch it to cover their costs of life. It is the government that has prevented people from being able to do that.
On this side of the House, there is a concerted effort to give Canadians control of their lives back. There is a concerted effort to make sure they can afford the very necessities they require. Of course, top of mind is to axe the tax, and that is exactly what Bill C-234 would do. Bill C-234 is all about getting rid of this punitive tax, taking it off of farmers and allowing all Canadians to benefit because, when farmers benefit, so do the people who go to the grocery store to buy food. That is what this bill is about.
Here is what the government did. This bill was discussed in this place and then went to the Senate, which started out with some good common-sense thinking. At first, it seemed that the majority in the Senate was going to support this bill because it just makes sense, but then the Liberal government, in particular, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Environment, caught wind of this. What did they do? They got on the phone, asked for meetings and applied pressure. They applied pressure to the senators, who are supposedly independent, and eventually those senators caved. The bill ended up being gutted to the point of being meaningless, and that is what we are now debating in this place.
Canadians deserve better. For starters, they deserve better behaviour from the government, and second, they deserve better policy. They deserve policy that would allow them to work hard for a paycheque, bring that money home and be able to cover the cost of things they need to purchase, whether it is groceries, fuel for their vehicles or their heating bills. Canadians need to be empowered to cover those expenses, and a big part of that is axing the tax.
In my riding, a producer was willing to share his natural gas bill with me. He has a few different parts to his farming operation, but just for one of them, the beef operation, he spends $62,000 a year on the carbon tax. He was willing to share some his bills with me, which I reviewed, and month after month the carbon tax is more than the amount he spent on the actual natural gas used. That is crazy. It is ludicrous that a farmer would have to spend more on the tax than the product itself.
What also needs to be driven home is that we have to remember that all Canadians, including farmers, are not just paying the carbon tax, but the tax on top of it. They are paying a government tax and a provincial tax on top of the carbon tax. It is the greatest scheme for the government to make money, but it is on the backs of Canadians, and the government should be ashamed of itself.
Conservatives are going to work hard. We are going to fight for Canadians. We are going to make sure their paycheques stay powerful. We are going to axe the tax.
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- Oct/31/22 5:17:36 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-5
Madam Speaker, the bill we have in front of us today, Bill S-5, has to do with environmental protection. It has to do with updating important documentation having to do with how we define toxins, which is long overdue. We know that; it has been mentioned here in the House before. It has been true since the 1990s. Unfortunately, though, the government across the way will claim that it wants to get the bill through quickly and that the Conservatives are stalling it, when the fact of the matter is that the Liberals have had five years to work on legislation and get it through the House. They have not taken that seriously. They have been slow.
Further to that, in the middle of those five years there were several elections, one of them called completely unnecessarily. Of course, that was in the fall of 2021 in the middle of a pandemic, when individuals were concerned for their health, safety and well-being. Interestingly enough, part of the bill has to do with health, which I will get to in just a moment, yet the Liberals decided that would be a good time to call an election.
Of course, elections have a way of stalling things. They have a way of putting aside legislation and making it so that it is no longer standing. It has to be called back once Parliament resumes, so here we are talking about Bill S-5. Again, it is something that has been in process for about five years. It did not need to be that way, but it was. Nevertheless, let us jump into the bill and discuss it.
There are a couple of things I want to draw attention to. Certainly there would be some new definitions brought about through this legislation, and I think overall my colleagues and I can agree to that. We see where there is some simplification achieved and we can get behind it. That said, there were many amendments made in the Senate before the bill came this way, which is the opposite of how things normally work, and we have some issues with those amendments. We will be looking to create some change around them to make sure Canadians are better advocated for going forward, but of course that will come at a later stage.
For today, I wish to speak to a part in the preamble of the bill. The preamble of the bill says that it is committed to prioritizing a healthy environment and that this is a right Canadians should have guaranteed for them. Here is the thing. First off, instead of putting this in the preamble, it should have been in the body of the legislation if it is going to have teeth, because we know that when it comes to courts of law, a judge does not make a decision based on a preamble; a judge makes a decision based on what is in the actual bill. If the current government is looking to truly be held accountable in making sure Canadians enjoy a healthy environment, it should have the courage to put this into the main component of the bill rather than in the preamble. Putting it in the preamble is simply another nicety, another platitude.
Speaking of that, we already have many examples. Let us look at the carbon tax, for example. With the carbon tax, there is a lot of fluffy language with regard to how the it is somehow making a difference or will make a difference, yet when we look at the actual facts, we see carbon emissions have not been reduced in our country. Actually, they have increased, so we have to ask this question: Why is there a carbon tax? We do not know, yet it continues to be in place. In fact, it is not just to be maintained but is actually increasing year over year every single April 1. That is April Fool's Day, but no one is really laughing because it is expensive to pay the carbon tax.
Canadians are reasonable people, and I think they can get behind something, even if it penalizes them a bit, if they know it is going to make a measurable or meaningful difference for them. However, the fact of the matter is that we have a report from the commissioner of the environment that says the current government has been given a failing grade on its environmental goals or objectives. It has not met any of them. This is coming out of reports that are at arm's length. I did not make this up.
Here is the government using platitudes, niceties and language that appears to do something but actually does nothing. Therefore, here we are again. We have this piece of legislation and in the preamble is this commitment to a healthy environment. However, the courage is lacking to give it teeth and to ensure that it happens.
Let us talk about that. If we were to truly define this vague term “healthy environment”, what might that look like in Canada? What might Canadians be able to anticipate if we were to create a healthy environment? Perhaps it would mean that we take a look not only at the thing but also at the context. For example, with plastics, those opposite me would like to put out language, and have put out language, that demonizes plastics.
However, to consider plastics in context, let us look at plastics in the way that they were used during the pandemic. During the pandemic, they were used to cover instruments in hospitals. Today they are used to cover instruments in hospitals. They are used for equipment in hospitals. They are used in daily practice to ensure that people are kept healthy. In a hospital are they toxic?
Further, during the pandemic when people were given plastic forks or plastic spoons because they could not eat in a restaurant but still needed to consume food, was that toxic? Perhaps it is, but maybe there needs to be a further conversation around context. Perhaps it is not adequate to demonize something altogether without considering time and place.
Furthermore, let us talk about a healthy environment and LNG or liquefied natural gas. Let us talk about, if we were to move entirely over to LNG and off of coal, the incredible difference it would make in terms of creating a healthy, vibrant Canada. However, the members opposite do not want to talk about that because to them oil and gas is bad. We would rather turn a blind eye to the truth that we continue to use coal because to talk about that is inconvenient. We do not want to talk about that.
We want to talk about all this greenism over here, all these plans over here and all this nice language that we have over here. Look over here at the shiny item. However, we do not actually want to acknowledge the truth, which is to say we have something incredible called LNG. We could use it to get off coal, clean up the environment and contribute to health.
Here is another one. The government wants to impose a carbon tax and it is tripling by 2030. That will have a huge impact on Canadians. The government has said that this is going to make a meaningful difference. We have already discovered that it has not and it will not.
Meanwhile, if we were to develop oil and gas in our country, to get pipelines into the ground and to get product to market, that would be a huge help in creating a healthy environment. Do members want to know how? The growing demand would then be met domestically, rather than having to bring it in from Saudi Arabia or Russia.
Let us talk about Saudi Arabia or Russia for a moment. There are no environmental standards. There are no human rights standards. Instead, the current government is deciding to ship in blood oil because the demand for fossil fuels is not going anywhere. It only continues to grow. Is that contributing to a healthy environment? We will just bring all the blood oil over from Saudi Arabia. Let us continue to fund Putin and his war machine against Ukraine. Is that a healthy environment?
I look forward to the government giving a definition to what it means by the right to a healthy environment. It certainly should be a lot broader than the niceties or the platitudes that it uses to describe its carbon tax.
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- Sep/29/22 4:34:51 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, more and more Canadians are struggling to get by because their dollars are valued less and less due to inflation.
Let us talk about charities for a moment. Many charities have filled the gaps we have had in this country, but because Canadians are so hard done by right now, they do not even have enough left at the end of the month to donate where they normally would. This is then leaving an increased gap in social services and the ability to care for one another. That is shameful.
We have an affordability crisis that is actually destroying people's lives, but the government can play a role. It can if it chooses to. It is simple. It needs to axe the tax. It needs to stop its out-of-control spending, and it needs to be a responsible government that brings in investment rather than pushing it out.
There are other things, too. We have an opportunity in the realm of agriculture. We are incredible at producing food. We literally feed the world. My riding of Lethbridge does this incredibly well. The bounty that comes from there should be celebrated, but instead we have a government that wants to put policies in place that would reduce crop yield. We have a government that wants to punish our farmers and producers, those who bring life, rather than celebrate them or give them credit for the incredible superpower they hold.
There is another superpower too: energy. We have the third-largest oil reserve in the world, and we are the fifth-largest producer of natural gas. Just like food, the world needs energy. It is what keeps us going, and Canada has the potential to be the solution to the world's needs in this regard. We could be stepping up and taking our place on the world stage, but instead we are shrinking back. We could displace the reliance, currently in existence, on regimes that we should not be supporting, but instead we continue.
We have an opportunity to be the answer to Europe's need for LNG, as the chancellor of Germany asked us to be, but the Prime Minister responded by saying there is no business case. How is there is no business case? Of course there is a business case. There are people in need of energy, and we have energy. The government should figure out the infrastructure and make it happen. It simply takes political will.
The NDP and the Liberals love to rail against profitable organizations, but in their attempt to foster an environment of hostility and demonize those who would generate wealth, they forget about a few facts. One is that, in the generation of wealth, jobs are created. In the generation of wealth, taxes are paid and, ultimately, those taxes come full circle and help support the very social programs that we value. It is crucial to understand that without the generation of wealth, there is no safety net for those in need.
Let me say that again. Without the generation of wealth, there is no safety net for those in need. Therefore, instead of demonizing the businesses that are producing jobs, generating wealth and helping our country do well, let us celebrate them. I am confident that, if we can get government out of the way to provide the freedom for Canadians to reach their greatest potential, our nation would not only thrive but also be a leader among nations. It just takes a bit of political will.
We have the opportunity to foster an environment of entrepreneurship, to remove unnecessary boundaries and red tape, to scrap excess taxation, and to draw investment into our country. That is what Conservatives are calling on the government to do.
Yesterday, we gave the folks opposite an opportunity to vote with Conservatives and for Canadians. We asked them to do this by halting their plan to triple the carbon tax. Sadly, they chose themselves instead of the Canadian people, so today we are giving them another opportunity to stand with millions of Canadians. Millions of Canadians are struggling to get by. Millions of Canadians are struggling to feed their families, pay their rent, afford their mortgages and fuel their cars. That is real.
The folks across the way can pull out whatever sorts of charts, graphs and “statistics” they want. It is not going to convince Canadians that somehow they are better off just because the Liberals told them so.
Canadians know the reality. They feel the reality, day in and day out, when they have to make hard choices about where they will spend their last dollar.
In the midst of an affordability crisis, we are calling on the government today to stop their planned tax increases on the paycheques of Canadians so they can keep more of the money they earn.
Canadians and Conservatives are hoping that the government will finally demonstrate some compassion, do the right thing and vote in favour of this motion today. It is time to give Canadians back the control of their lives that they always should have had because the potential is within the people. The future of this country is within the people. They are the problem-solvers. They are the solution makers. They are the wealth generators. They are the ones who are going to take us toward a prosperous future. They are the ones who deserve for the government to get out of the way to allow them to move forward in the direction they wish to go.
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