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Context: House Hansard - 50 - Mar/31/22

Oct/18/22 7:18:18 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-31

Madam Speaker, let me begin by saying that I will be splitting my time with the member for Peace River—Westlock. This motion and the underlying Bill C-31 are effectively an admission of failure by the Liberal government when it comes to the economy and fighting inflation. To be very clear, Bill C-31 is setting up a national dental care program focused on children; it also provides for 500 dollars' worth of rent relief, which does not go very far nowadays in most of our cities. That is what this does. I want to focus on the term “relief”. Why is relief even required in the first place? Something went wrong in the economy, so that the government decided, “Listen, we are going to have to borrow more money and send out cheques, because Canadians are suffering and falling behind.” Why are they falling behind? There is a very clear reason. Inflation is rampant. The government did not get hold of the problem of inflation in a timely way. I will be the first to recognize that there are different things that have affected the inflationary pressures within Canada. We know the global community has suffered from a COVID pandemic, which has disrupted everything in our lives. Our lives have been changed, actually, forever by the COVID pandemic. A pandemic had not been experienced for over 100 years, and suddenly it was at our doorstep. Sure, that contributes to inflationary factors. Supply chain disruptions that occurred, the war in Ukraine and weather-related challenges, whether they are drought and famine, storms and hurricanes, or heat domes in British Columbia, all contribute to inflation. However, there is one big factor that is very clearly in the control of the Liberal government, and that is its spending and its borrowing. Here is a factoid that a lot of Canadians are not aware of. Are members aware that over the last seven short years, the Liberal government has spent more money than all previous governments in Canadian history combined? That's going back from 1867 all the way to 2015. The Liberal government, in the subsequent seven years, has spent more money than all of those governments combined. Now we know there is a problem. Some of that money was required to support Canadians in their time of need during the COVID pandemic. That was a crisis that required a government response, but much of that spending was not actually COVID-related. We know that because the Parliamentary Budget Officer said so. The spending this government did has now accumulated a national debt somewhere in the order of $1.5 trillion. If the spending that has brought us to that point, much of which was not COVID-related, was effectively money that was pumped into the economy, then more dollars are chasing the same number of goods and services, and that drives inflation. Every credible economist will tell us that. If a nation's productivity is not improving, which in Canada it is not, but it is pumping more liquidity into the marketplace, that is going to drive inflation. I challenge the government to show me the steps it has taken to discipline and to restrain spending, and the borrowing that was required to sustain that spending, much of which was not COVID-related. That is the first challenge I throw out to my Liberal friends. I ask them to explain to me where the plan is to control spending, that reckless spending that has taken place. Also, by the way, where is the plan to return to balanced budgets? Where is the plan to start repaying that massive debt that we have accumulated over the last few Liberal years? I ask them to explain to me how they justify to future generations of Canadians this massive debt, in an environment of increasing taxes and increasing interest rates, that their children and grandchildren are going to have to repay. I cannot defend that to my children. I cannot. What is even worse is that much of this COVID spending, the amount that was invested in relief and support programs, came through programs like CERB. They were poorly designed, so yes, fraud took place, much more fraud than should have taken place. The programs were designed in such a way that people who did not need the support got the support. I can speak from personal experience. I have had constituents come into my office to tell me they applied for some of the benefits, such as that loan program of $60,000 that they did not actually need, and that now they have to pay only $40,000 back, because $20,000 is forgiven. They asked why they would not apply for it if they qualified. Why did Canadian businesses and individuals who actually did not need them receive benefits during the COVID pandemic? During the COVID pandemic, because people had to stay at home, some businesses catered specifically to that kind of situation and made a ton of money. They had never made profits like that before, yet they applied for these benefits and received them from the Liberal government. That is a failure. Then there is a question that has to be asked about a government that cannot fix its passport system, a government that cannot deliver passports on time, a government that botches the ArriveCAN app and pays $54 million for that app when the private sector says it should not have cost more than $1.5 million or $2 million, and a government that came up with the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank and the CERB program. I could go on and on about these programs that were absolute failures and that the government could not deliver in an efficient and accountable manner. How is it that the government now expects to roll out a $10-billion national dental care program? Nobody in this country trusts the government to manage that, to do it in a coherent and accountable way. Bill C-31 is effectively a band-aid solution to an underlying problem that is much more significant, which is a failure of the Liberal government to address the underlying causes of inflation. Effectively, Bill C-31 camouflages the real problem, which is incompetence on the part of the government on the economic file, its inability to understand that it needs to control its wild borrowing and spending because that is what is driving inflation, at least in part. I will be fair, as I said at the beginning. Some of the influences on inflation are not within Canada's control, but a very significant component is, which is its spending. My challenge to the Liberal government is to get its borrowing and spending under control. Then it might gain some credibility with Canadians when it rolls out these expensive programs, multi-billion dollar programs that are going to saddle future generations with permanent obligations. It should not do that to future generations. Canadians expect better.

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Mar/31/22 10:16:26 a.m.
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moved: That, given that, (i) excessive government spending has increased the deficit, the national debt, and fuelled inflation to its highest level in 31 years, (ii) taxes on Canadians continue to increase, from the carbon tax to escalator taxes to Canada Pension Plan premiums, (iii) the government refuses to provide relief to Canadians by temporarily reducing the Goods and Services Tax on gasoline and diesel, the House call on the government to present a federal budget rooted in fiscal responsibility, with no new taxes, a path to balance, and a meaningful fiscal anchor. He said: Mr. Speaker, I want to let you know that I am splitting my time with the member for Mégantic—L'Érable. Excessive government spending; deficits as far as the eye can see; the largest national debt this country has ever seen, in fact doubled in a short six years; inflation running rampant; skyrocketing housing prices; seven years littered with broken promises: that is the record of the failed Liberal government. The motion before us today is hoping to right the ship somewhat. As members know, next week on April 7, the Minister of Finance is going to be tabling in the House a budget that is intended to chart the pathway forward for this country when it comes to our finances and how we spend taxpayers' money. Given the fact that the last six years of the Liberal government has been such an unmitigated financial disaster, we would like to make some suggestions for what it could do to actually restore some sanity and probity into our fiscal situation here in our country. Let me begin by talking about what Canadians have come to expect. Over the last two and a half years we have been fighting the COVID pandemic. Rightfully Canadians have been concerned about their health and the health of their neighbours, so we were asked to be vaccinated. Remember that? We were told if we were vaccinated we would not pick up the COVID virus. Of course, now we find out that is not true. I am triple vaccinated and I have not had the COVID virus. My wife is triple vaccinated. After she was triple vaccinated, she got the COVID virus and we live together, so the health authorities had that wrong. I support vaccination, but the Liberals told us if Canadians got vaccinated we will have life return to normal. Lockdowns will be gone, mandates will be lifted and life will be back to normal. What happened? It was quite the opposite. We are still under lockdowns. We are still under vaccine mandates at the federal level, which is the Prime Minister's responsibility. Now we are faced with an even greater challenge and that is inflation. Today, our inflation rate is somewhere in the order of 5.7%. House prices are up a whopping 30% in just this year alone, so how does the government expect young Canadian families who have this dream of home ownership to ever fulfill that dream? Millions of Canadians have lost that dream of home ownership. We have seen gas prices at the pump go up 32% since February of this past year, 2021. Of course, those gas prices continue to climb in my region of Abbotsford and the greater Vancouver area. Some gas stations were charging $2.09 per litre of gas and right now there is no prospect of that going down at all. In fact, the prospect is that those prices will keep going up. In order to address that issue, we as Conservatives, presented solutions. One of those solutions was tabled in the House a week ago, which was to, temporarily at least, lift the GST on gasoline purchases. Give Canadians a break. We had a debate in the House and guess what. Our NDP-Liberal friends voted against relief at the gas pumps. We brought forward another proposal, which was, why do we not lift the carbon tax? Let us get rid of the carbon tax and give motorists a break. We know the NDP-Liberal coalition is opposed to that. In fact, it is the government of high taxes. Inflation is being driven by a number of factors. I have already mentioned taxes. Every time the current government raises taxes, whether it is carbon taxes or the rising GST revenues that it gets because of the rising gas prices, every time it imposes an escalator tax like it did for alcohol and every time it raises CPP premiums, that is a burden on Canadians and it is driving inflationary pressures in Canada. However, it gets worse. Less than a year ago, the Minister of Finance was given a mandate letter from the Prime Minister in which she was instructed to engage in no more new permanent spending. Do members remember that? It was a directive to the finance minister for no new permanent spending. Guess what happened. Today, we are looking at pharmacare. That is new permanent spending. We are looking at dental care. That is new permanent spending. We are looking at transit. We are looking at numerous new spending programs, including child care for example. It goes on and on with broken promises. By the way, in the most recent mandate letter, less than a year after the original one that prohibited new permanent spending, suddenly the mandate letter had no reference at all to new permanent spending. It is a government that loves to virtue signal on finances, on deficits, on debt and on spending, but it never delivers. It gets worse. April 1, tomorrow, is April Fool's Day, and of course the Liberals are going to treat Canadians like fools. What are the Liberals going to do? They are going to increase the carbon tax by another $10 per tonne. Do members know what that means? For those provinces that have the carbon tax backstop it means another 11¢ at the pump. That is on the current Liberal government. They cannot blame that on anyone else. It gets worse. Do people remember the last budget, a year ago, when the Minister of Finance talked about the stimulus that she was going to pump into the economy to get the economy going? The economy was already starting to grow and bounce back, but she insisted that she needed over $100 billion of additional money to pump into the economy. Guess what happened. There was so much money pumped into the economy that it has caused inflation, especially in the housing market. As I already mentioned, in one year alone, there was a 30% increase in housing prices. How are Canadians supposed to cope with that? How are Canadians supposed to cope? We are facing an inflation crisis. We are facing a tax crisis crisis in this country. We are facing a spending crisis in this country. That is why today we are calling upon this finance minister, this Prime Minister and the NDP-Liberal government to do the right thing, which is to rein in spending. In this coming budget next week, we are calling on the government to make sure that there is a clear pathway toward balanced budgets, where we return to living within our means. That is what responsible governments do. We have not seen that for the last six years. We are solution-oriented. We are asking the government to come up with a defensible, firm fiscal anchor that has a clear pathway to a balanced budget in the medium term. In the motion before them, members see that we are asking the government to address inflationary pressures, to address taxation that is going through the roof and to address the needs of Canadians. Canadians are really struggling. They have lost their dream of home ownership. They cannot pay for gas for their cars to take their kids to hockey lessons, to school and to music lessons. They cannot afford life anymore. They cannot buy groceries. My goodness, we are living in one of the richest countries in the world and the current government has made it virtually impossible for many families to even afford groceries. I am asking the government to do the right thing in its upcoming budget. I am asking it to find a pathway to balance, restrain spending and control the urge to spend. I know Liberal tax-and-spend is the way of this country whenever we have a Liberal government. However, I ask the Liberals to listen to us. We are solution-oriented.

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Feb/20/22 10:51:48 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I believe the hon. member and I have a very different perspective on what may have happened with the injunction against the truckers using their horns. Remember, I live in the middle of that protest zone. The trucks are right outside my doorway. When that injunction was issued, the truckers, for the most part, did comply with that injunction. I think anybody who would have walked through that area, post-injunction, would affirm my version of the events. Does this have anything to do with racism? I would say to her, listen, when this convoy started out, when this protest started, it was about vaccine mandates being compelled by the Prime Minister. It is the Prime Minister's mess. What happened, of course, like many protests, was that it evolved. Protests are like magnets, and they attract people who may not be desirable, who will have views that are very antithetical to Canadian values. We disavow those views. We have said that clearly.

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Feb/20/22 10:50:17 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I cannot explain it. I am as befuddled as he is. The Prime Minister says that he needed the Emergencies Act legislation because he did not have the tools, and yet with regard to the simple tools that are providing resources to the Ottawa police, those resources were never delivered by the Prime Minister, as the member has suggested. There was a better way of resolving—

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Feb/20/22 10:48:54 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for not painting everybody with the same brush, as some of his Liberal colleagues and the NDP do. That is to his credit. I live within the protest zone and every single day I walk to and from work through the protesters, I can tell him from experience that I never felt intimidated. I was never accosted. Yes, there were some people speaking loudly and some with strong views. However, did it take the Emergencies Act, the sledgehammer of War Measures Act-type legislation to resolve this? No, the Prime Minister had all those tools available to him to resolve this crisis. He chose not to. That is to his discredit. That is his failure and his alone.

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Feb/20/22 10:37:54 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the motion before us is a story of a profound failure of leadership. When I was elected to this chamber some 16 years ago and became the member of Parliament for Abbotsford, I would not have believed it if I had been told that I would be asked to approve giving the Prime Minister the extraordinary powers of the Emergencies Act. I remember, when growing up as a teenager in 1970, Pierre Elliott Trudeau triggered the War Measures Act to quell the FLQ terrorist threat in Quebec. That crisis had gripped the nation for many months and involved kidnappings, extortion, over 200 bombings, gun violence, robbery and the eventual murder of a Quebec cabinet minister. The circumstances were clear and compelling, implicating the security and sovereignty of our country and justifying the use of this extreme measure. Fast-forward to today and the circumstances are very different. For two years, truck drivers had been the heroes of the COVID pandemic, risking their health to transport goods and groceries as the virus raged across our nation. For a while, the truckers were the good guys. Then the Prime Minister decided to deprive these heroes of their livelihoods because they chose not to get vaccinated, despite the Prime Minister failing to show any evidence that unvaccinated truckers were significant spreaders of the virus. He made no effort to accommodate these Canadians through the use of other tools like PCR or rapid tests. The reaction of the truckers was swift. A convoy was organized with the goal of delivering to the Prime Minister one simple message: Do not force us truckers to get vaccinated in order to keep our jobs. We all know the rest of the story. The protests grew and ended up right here in Ottawa, camped out in front of the Parliament Buildings. They were expecting at the very least that the Prime Minister would be open to listening to their concerns, but they were wrong. He was not. It became clear that the Prime Minister was not interested in hearing out his own citizens. What he did do was resort to name-calling. The protesters were the fringes of Canadian society. They were misogynists, racist, science-deniers, un-Canadian. “Do we even tolerate these people?” he screamed. In fact, he questioned whether those people should have any place in his Canada. In the meantime, residents of downtown Ottawa were rightly becoming agitated. With the incessant honking of horns, shops and malls that had to close their doors and send employees home, major traffic disruptions and misbehaviour by a small number of protesters, life in the protest zone was becoming unbearable. I know. My apartment is within that protest zone. We Conservatives called upon the protesters to dismantle the barricades and for the Prime Minister to reach out to the truckers. He again refused, not even an olive branch. Instead, during the first week of the protests, the Prime Minister simply disappeared into his cottage, missing in action as a crisis developed. When he finally reappeared, we Conservatives began asking him what steps he was taking to resolve the impasse. After all, he had said that invoking the Emergencies Act should not be the first, second or even the third response. We asked him what was his first, second or third response. Had he met with the protesters? Would he sit down with the other party leaders to discuss a resolution to the dispute? Had he deployed a negotiating team to resolve the impasse? Had he delivered the additional policing resources so desperately needed by the city of Ottawa? We were met with stony silence. The answer was obviously, no, the Prime Minister had not taken any steps to address this evolving situation. He even rejected our request to create a plan to roll back mandates, which could have lowered the temperature. For three long weeks, the Prime Minister refused to act and then he did what only autocrats and authoritarian regimes do when faced with peaceful, civil disobedience. He did what his father had done in 1970. He triggered Canada’s war measures regime, except that this time the circumstances do not, in any way, rise to the level of those present during the FLQ crisis. There have been no bombings in the streets of Ottawa, no kidnappings, no robberies, no extortion or gun violence, no murders of politicians; only peaceful civil disobedience by frustrated Canadians who have concluded that the Prime Minister does not care for them. The Prime Minister had at his disposal all of the tools he needed to bring an end to this protest without invoking Canada’s war measures legislation. Indeed, blockades at the Ambassador Bridge, the Coutts border crossing and in Emerson, Manitoba have all been resolved without resorting to the Emergencies Act. What about the violent rail blockades in 2020, the Oka standoff or the Wet’suwet’en dispute in B.C.? What about the riots in Toronto at the G7 in 2010? The Emergencies Act was not required. Not even the circumstances around 9/11 called for war measures legislation. The Prime Minister already has the tools to respond to the Ottawa protest. It is just that he chose not to use them. There was no need to freeze the bank accounts of Canadians for exercising their right to peaceful protest or for donating to the cause. There was no need for the Liberal government to suspend the licenses and livelihoods of truckers without due process, simply because they disagreed with his vaccine mandates. It was completely unnecessary and a reckless overreach by the power-hungry prime minister. By triggering extraordinary, sweeping powers under the Emergencies Act, the prime minister has set an incredibly low bar for abrogating the rights and freedoms of Canadians. How do we know that? The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is challenging the Prime Minister’s power grab in court. Here is what it had to say: The federal government has not met the threshold necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act. This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: the Act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes. This standard has not been met. Further, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association states: The Emergencies Act is there to address these kinds of extreme threats to Canada, not to protect the economy [as the Prime Minister had suggested]. Emergency legislation should not be normalized. It threatens our democracy and our civil liberties. Never before in the history of our country has the threshold for triggering martial law been so low and the overreach been so high as with the motion before us. When the story of this monumental overreach and abuse of power is finally written, when historians analyze and dissect why the Prime Minister would invoke martial law powers to quell peaceful civil disobedience, when historians try to explain why Canada’s Prime Minister chose to use a constitutional sledgehammer to “crack a peanut”, as the NDP’s Tommy Douglas once put it, I want to be on the right side of that history. I want my children, my 12 grand-children and their descendants to know that I stood on the side of freedom and that I stood up to a power-grabbing prime minister. Yes, the streets of downtown Ottawa are now clear, protesters are in jail, truckers are on their way home; bank accounts have been frozen and the lives of many Canadians have been irrevocably damaged by the Prime Minister’s failure to listen and his abuse of the Emergencies Act, but for what? I would ask the Prime Minister how it came to this. This was a mess of his own making. The Prime Minister could have listened and de-escalated. He had the tools to resolve the situation but he refused. That is a profound failure of leadership on his part. Invoking the Emergencies Act is and was completely unnecessary and sets an extremely dangerous and ugly precedent for the future. For all of those reasons, I will be voting against this motion.

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Feb/15/22 1:41:32 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-12

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure what the member meant when she said “get with the program on that,” whatever “that” is. We have been consistent on this side of the House in supporting seniors and speaking up on behalf of seniors. Throughout this whole pandemic, it has been Conservatives that have been pushing the Liberal government to step into the breach and to support the seniors who are vulnerable across our country. We will continue to do that.

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Feb/15/22 1:39:46 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-12

Mr. Speaker, I am going to have to take issue with the suggestion by the member that somehow Conservatives do not support seniors. In fact, I would remind that member that it was a Conservative member of Parliament, the member for Sarnia—Lambton, who brought forward a bill to protect seniors' pensions against insolvency, against bankruptcy, against the big corporate raiders coming along, bankrupting a company and then leaving seniors out to dry. It is the Conservative opposition in this House that is stepping up and standing up for seniors to make sure that they have the pensions they deserve and have paid into.

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Feb/15/22 1:37:54 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-12

Mr. Speaker, I can assure the House, I would never mock that individual. I have great respect for him, but he is incorrect in suggesting that we did not support these benefits and then voted in favour of them. I never, in my speech, suggested that these benefits were not necessary for Canadians. In fact, I gave a speech in the House supporting these COVID benefits because they were necessary to keep Canadians afloat. Seniors never expected that they would be betrayed and told after the fact that these benefits would be taxable, especially when they were on the cusp of poverty.

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Feb/15/22 1:37:19 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-12

Mr. Speaker, it is very interesting. They are mocking again. After denying it, they are mocking seniors across our country. At no time has our Conservative—

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