- Member of Parliament
- Member of the Joint Interparliamentary Council
- Conservative
- St. Albert—Edmonton
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $119,185.60
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-56, the Liberals' so-called affordable housing and groceries bill. I say “so-called” because nothing in the bill would make housing affordable or reduce grocery prices.
After eight long years of the Liberals, Canadians are facing an unprecedented affordability crisis. Let us look at the facts. After eight years of the Liberals, housing costs have doubled; rent has doubled and mortgage payments have more than doubled, up 150% compared to eight years ago. After eight years of the Liberals, Canadians have seen 40-year-high inflation. Meanwhile, interest rates are rising at the fastest rate in Canadian history and have reached a 22-year high. Interest rates are projected to be hiked even further. When it comes to essentials like groceries, prices have gone up a staggering 70%, resulting in nearly two million Canadians a month going to the food bank. What Canadians are facing after eight years of the Liberals is a dire situation in which Canadians are struggling to put food on the table and to keep a roof over their head.
This begs the question “Why is it that Canada faces an affordability crisis?” There is one person who bears primary responsibility, and that is the Prime Minister. It is the Prime Minister who has created an affordability crisis as a result of eight years of reckless spending. This is the Prime Minister who, in eight years, has run up the largest deficits and has managed to double the national debt. So reckless and so out of control is the spending on the part of the Prime Minister that he has managed to do the seemingly impossible: rack up more debt in eight years than all of his predecessors over the previous 150 years combined. This is the Prime Minister who thought it was a good idea to pay for his out-of-control reckless spending by printing, through the Bank of Canada, $600 billion. As a result, the money supply has increased eight times faster than economic growth. Is it any wonder that, in the face of that, Canadians have seen 40-year-high inflation and interest rates rising faster than ever before?
That is the record of the Liberals after eight years. That is what they have to show. They have manufactured a cost of living crisis, and everyday Canadians are hurting. In the face of that, what have the Liberals done and what are they doing to address the issue of affordability, the mess they have created? Earlier this week, Canadians got the answer, and that is based upon the finance minister's presenting the government's fall economic statement. What did we get from the finance minister? We got $20 billion in new deficit spending on top of the more than $100 billion of deficit spending that the finance minister has racked up in the three years that she has held the portfolio. There is $20 billion in new deficit spending that pours fuel on the inflationary fire and is sure to keep interest rates high. There is $20 billion in new deficit spending, notwithstanding the fact that even the Bank of Canada is calling on the Liberals to rein in their spending, and has made clear to the Liberal government that its reckless spending and money printing are contributing to inflation.
There is $20 billion in new deficit spending, notwithstanding Scotiabank's issuing a report recently that confirmed that a full 2% of interest rates is directly attributable to the government's inflationary spending. Canadians have been hit, after eight years of the Liberals, with a double whammy: high inflation and high interest rates. They are now also being hit with a third whammy by way of the Liberals' punitive carbon tax. It is a tax that the Liberals falsely sold as a means to reduce GHGs, but we know, after eight years of the Liberals, that GHGs have gone up and not down. I would remind Liberals across the way, who talk so much about climate action, that the COP27 rankings ranked Canada, after eight years of the Liberals, at 58 out of 63 countries.
However, I digress. The carbon tax is nothing more than another tax, but I qualify that because it is not quite that. It is, after all, a tax that disproportionately impacts lower- and middle-income Canadians. It is a tax that increases the cost of everything, including essentials such as food, fuel and heating. It is a tax that, according to both the Bank of Canada and the Parliamentary Budget Officer, is exacerbating inflation. Despite that and despite the fact that Canadians are facing an affordability crisis, with nearly half of Canadians $200 away from insolvency, the Liberal government's plan is to quadruple its punitive carbon tax for hard-working, everyday Canadians.
I say to the Liberals across the way that I would be keenly interested to see whether one of them can stand up in their place and explain to Canadians how the policies of the government, namely money printing, massive deficits and the quadrupling of the carbon tax, all of which are exacerbating inflation and increasing interest rates, are a policy prescription that is going to make life more affordable for Canadians. Very simply, those policies are making life less affordable. Canadians are paying a very dear price after eight years of the costly policies of the Liberal Prime Minister.
After eight long years of the Liberals, costs are up. Rent is up, taxes are up and debt is up. The government's time is up.
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Madam Speaker, I rise to speak to the government's fall economic statement, a fiscal and economic blueprint that falls short.
The Conservatives called on the Liberals to do two important things. First was to stop the deficit spending that is fuelling inflation and driving up the cost of living for everyday Canadians. Second was for the government to commit to no new tax hikes. After all, Canadians are facing a cost of living crisis as a result of 40-year-high inflation being driven by the Liberal government's reckless spending. Food inflation has hit double digits. One in two Canadians is $200 away from insolvency, and an astonishing 1.5 million Canadians are going to a food bank every month, which is a 35% increase from last year.
The Liberals often say that they have the backs of Canadians. Well, in the face of a cost of living crisis, the least one would expect from a government that truly had the backs of Canadians is for it to commit to no new tax hikes. However, what we learned is that those are just more empty Liberal words, because they did not do that; they did the opposite, with tax hikes that are going to hit workers, seniors, families and small businesses.
This starts with a payroll tax hike on January 1, not to be outdone by a carbon tax hike on April 1, which will further drive up the cost of essentials, including gas, groceries and home heating. The carbon tax, by the way, has done nothing to reduce GHGs, which have gone up not down under the Liberals' watch. It is a carbon tax that the Governor of the Bank of Canada has determined exacerbates inflation, causing a 0.4% increase in inflation, further worsening the cost of living crisis.
When it comes to spending, the government doubled down on its failed inflationary policies. We saw $20 billion in new inflationary spending, and that is on top of half a trillion dollars in new deficit spending over the past two years.
The Liberals will claim that this is as a result of COVID, except the Parliamentary Budget Officer has clarified that it is not and that 40% of the half a trillion dollars in spending pertains to non-COVID-related measures. The evidence of this is that after all the COVID programs and supports expired, government spending increased an astonishing 30% in just two years. The government has a spending problem.
Why all the spending? Simply put, the government measures its success on how much it has spent, as opposed to what it has delivered, and the results are not positive. Let us look at a few Liberal lowlights.
It gave $35 billion to the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which was supposedly going to leverage private sector investment to get infrastructure projects completed. However, after six years, not a single infrastructure project has been completed. After $35 billion and six years, there is not a single infrastructure project. Talk about taxpayers not getting value for their money.
The Liberals brag about spending $40 billion on housing. Has that increased the housing supply? Has that made home ownership more accessible? No. Housing prices have doubled on the Liberals' watch.
Then there is the $54-million app, the ArriveCAN scam, as it has become known, that should have cost $250,000 instead of $54 million to complete. It should have never been built in the first place given that it caused travel chaos and resulted in more than 10,000 healthy Canadians needlessly having to quarantine.
Today, there was a shocking Auditor General report that determined that $32 billion of the Liberals' COVID spending went to recipients who should not have received the money. It was $32 billion out the door and wasted. To put $32 billion in perspective, the government spends $45 billion on the Canada health transfer, so nearly three quarters of what the federal government spends on health care annually was wasted, out the door and gone.
We talk about waste and mismanagement, but the Liberal government is not one to learn lessons, because in the fall economic statement, $14.2 billion was found to be unannounced by the Parliamentary Budget Officer. There were no details about where that $14.2 billion is going. When my colleague, the member for Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, asked the finance minister where the $14.2 billion was going, she could not say or would not say. All we know is that it is a blank cheque to who knows what. Talk about a lack of transparency. Talk about a lack of respect for the sweat-soaked tax dollars of hard-working Canadians.
For all of this spending, what do we have? We have 40-year-high inflation. If we listen to the Liberals across the way, they act as though they are bystanders to the 40-year-high inflation, except they are not. Their policies have driven it. Let us look at the facts.
To pay for half a trillion dollars of deficit spending, the Liberals, through the Bank of Canada, embarked on a policy of quantitative easing, something the Canadian government has never done before. It is essentially money printing. What happened over two years? The money supply increased by half a trillion dollars, on par with the Liberal government's half a trillion dollars in deficit spending. This is not a coincidence. What we have seen is a 27% increase in the supply of money at only a 2% rate of economic growth. We cannot have cash outbid goods and services tenfold and not have inflationary pressures, and that is precisely what has happened as a result of the government's out of control spending.
The finance minister is fond of saying she will not take lessons from the Leader of the Opposition. I would say to the Minister of Finance that she should start listening to the Leader of the Opposition, because it was the Leader of the Opposition who was among the first to sound the alarm that all of this spending was contributing to inflation. Had the finance minister listened to the Leader of the Opposition, we would not be in this inflationary mess that is pummelling everyday Canadians.
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