- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Abbotsford
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,571.88
- Government Page
- May/31/22 2:38:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, has the minister seen the price of gasoline lately? Of course she has not; she has a chauffeur. However, in Vancouver it is as high as $2.35 per litre. A huge chunk of that cost is GST and the carbon tax. That is a tax on a tax.
The Conservatives have asked the Prime Minister to suspend GST on gasoline purchases. He refused. The only winner is the Liberal government, which is raking in billions in extra taxes but is refusing to share that windfall with Canadian families.
Why have the Prime Minister and the government so badly failed Canadians in their time of need?
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Madam Speaker, I think what my hon. colleague from the finance committee is signalling is a concern over the financialization of housing in Canada, where people see housing as simply being an investment to be profited from rather than a roof over a person's head. I do share his concern that, if we are not sensible about this, it is going to cost Canadians significantly.
However, I do take issue with his assertion that, under the Harper government, somehow housing prices also spiked. No, that is not true. Housing prices were very stable during the Harper years. We a had a slight appreciation in value over time, which is what Canadians expect. They want to see a return to stable house prices in Canada. We, as Conservatives, are capable of delivering that.
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- Apr/25/22 2:45:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the governor also announced that, because of inflation, every single Canadian pays $2,000 more a year. He said Canadians should expect more interest rate increases, leaving millions of Canadians paying more on their mortgages and on their loans. When the governor was asked what this government should do to preserve Canada's fiscal position, he said not to spend too much. Is the minister listening?
Will she finally control her spending, and why has she failed to address Canada's affordability crisis?
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- Apr/25/22 2:44:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this morning, the governor of the Bank of Canada was very clear that inflation is no longer transitory. In fact, Mr. Macklem said, “Team Transitory has disbanded.” For months, the government has claimed that inflation was a passing global phenomenon, nothing to see. It continued to borrow and spend all the way to a skyrocketing inflation of 6.7%.
Why has the minister allowed her spending to fuel an affordability crisis, which has left millions of Canadians behind?
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- Apr/8/22 10:01:57 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to continue debate.
Yesterday when I started my debate, I quoted the words of King Solomon out of the Proverbs: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That admonition is actually etched on Canada's Peace Tower, and there is a reason it is etched there. It is a reminder to governments and a reminder to leaders, including the Prime Minister, that those of us in this august chamber are called upon not only to lead by example, but to lead with vision and have a long-term view of the best interests of our country.
I mentioned yesterday that I believe this budget reflected an unserious Prime Minister, an an unserious Minister of Finance and, quite frankly, an unserious government. I know that a few of my Liberal colleagues did not like my reference to “unserious”, but the reality is that it is a fair characterization of what has happened in this budget. Quite frankly, a serious Prime Minister would not say that budgets balance themselves. A serious Prime Minister would not say that he does not think about monetary policy, which is so critical today as we discuss inflation. A serious Prime Minister would not take a budget, cut the number of pages down by half, from 700 last year down to 300 this year, and then not cut anything else.
Why is it that the government somehow has made the assumption that bigger and bigger government is better? It is not. We as Conservatives believe that as much as possible, government should remain small. It should be as least intrusive in the lives of Canadians as possible. By the way, so should the tax burden, and I will get to that in a second.
I want to touch on four main things. I want to first talk about whether this is a growth budget. I want to talk about inflation and the cost of living, which of course is the biggest thing facing Canadians right now. I want to talk about spending, and this is a big-spending budget. It has not only big spending, but big permanent spending, which is going to saddle future generations of Canadians with a massive debt challenge. Then I want to talk about taxes and tax increases. The Liberal government always talks about having Canadians' backs and having taxpayers' backs. The problem is that it is all rhetoric. It is actually empty, vacuous rhetoric, because with every budget that it tables, the tax burden on Canadians increases and increases. I will get to that in a moment.
Let me start by talking about growth. One of the biggest challenges facing Canada today is that we have an economy that is not positioned for long-term success. Economist after economist and thought leader after thought leader has said that Canada's competitiveness is leaving us way behind in the global marketplace, and I will talk in a moment about what that means. The problem is that the government loves to put out documents like this budget, and smack dab in the title of that budget is the word “growth”. The Liberals want Canadians to believe that they have now heavily invested in driving growth in Canada, but the reality is that they have not.
Why is fundamental growth so important? Why are the structural deficiencies in our economy so pernicious when it comes to our long-term prosperity as a country? It is because we are undermining our ability to compete on the global stage. That is the problem.
If we can learn to produce more per person and more units per person, we drive prosperity. What we do is mitigate the inflationary pressures we face today in our economy. A lot of my Liberal friends do not understand that, but if we become more productive as an economy, as a nation, we reduce the likelihood of runaway inflation. We reduce the likelihood that the Bank of Canada, our central bank, has to step in and start increasing interest rates the way it is doing now.
This is a budget that will only fuel inflation because it is all about spend, spend, spend. There is virtually nothing about growth. When we talk about the few elements in this budget that touch on growth, they are actually about giving subsidies to the private sector. I do not know why the NDP is not screaming bloody murder. They hate subsidies to the private sector, yet there is a $15-billion fund in this budget that effectively amounts to using taxpayers' dollars to incent private companies to invest in themselves and invest in clean technology.
There is nothing in this budget that addresses the issue of interprovincial trade barriers, which is one of the most significant underminers of economic performance in our country. In many ways, we have freer trade with our free trade partners around the world than we have with our 10 provinces and three territories. It is really a sad comment on our country that our federal relationship cannot overcome barriers that prevent us from freely trading among ourselves.
There is nothing in this budget to address comprehensive tax reform. We as Conservatives have been calling for comprehensive tax reform. Even the finance committee, in one of its earlier reports and studies, called specifically for comprehensive tax reform. Why? We want to make sure that our tax system is fair, that those who really cannot afford to pay taxes do not, that those who should not be paying a high tax rate do not and that those who should be paying their fair share of taxes do.
There are four areas of tax performance, which I will get to in a moment, but if we can get tax reform right, we can be assured that Canada will again become a place where the world wants to invest. Members will not believe this, but right now Canada's investment performance as a country is the very worst out of the 30 OECD countries. Many of them are in the EU. They of course include Japan, the United States and Canada. We are at the bottom of the list of those 30 countries when it comes to being able to attract investment from around the world, foreign direct investment, as it is called, or FDI. That is a terrible performance. The government has had seven years to fix that problem and it has done nothing about it other than throw a bit of money at it.
There is also nothing in this budget about rural broadband. One of the best things we can do as a country is invest in the infrastructure that will bring rural broadband to every single Canadian, especially rural Canadians, many of whom still do not have broadband. When we give Canadians access to broadband, we link them to the rest of the world. We link them to the rest of their country. We link them to the rest of their community. When we do that, we improve productivity and our ability to compete and produce in this country. Whether it is products or services, we can do things more efficiently if we have comprehensive broadband infrastructure across our country. There is virtually nothing in this budget on that, except to signal that the Liberals did a bit in the last couple of years, so that should be good enough. When we are talking about competitiveness within the global stage, that is not enough.
There is nothing in this budget about trade-related or climate-related resiliency. In fact, I noted yesterday that there is one glaring hole in this budget. There are a number of us on this side of the House, some of whom are in the House right now listening to me speak, whose communities were devastated by the atmospheric river event that took place in B.C. last year in November, with the massive amount of rain that fell and the flooding that ensued.
In my community of Abbotsford, the whole Sumas Prairie was flooded, a prairie that is full of chicken farmers, egg farmers, dairy farmers, blueberry growers, vegetable growers and greenhouses. It goes on and on. In fact, Abbotsford is the agriculture capital of British Columbia. It is the breadbasket of the province, and for much of the country, by the way. It is the number one farm gate producer in the country per hectare, so everyone can understand, when one of our big prairies is under water by four, five or six feet, the devastation that was wreaked.
We sent a letter to the minister, co-signed by a number of my MP colleagues on the Conservative side, and begged her to please take this seriously. This was a once-in-100-year event that is probably going to become a much more regular event because of climate change-related weather patterns. This is going to happen again. It could happen this coming year or it could happen three years from now, but it is going to happen again.
Did the minister listen to us? Did she reach out to us and ask what it was all about, what specifically we would like her to do and what projects we think she should fund? She did not even reach out. Surely, we as a country can do better when one of the most significant climate-related events does not even get a mention in this budget, is not worthy of a mention, to protect human life, to protect livestock and to protect livelihoods. Clearly the minister does not care.
I have mentioned all of the different areas of this budget that could have addressed growth but did not. We want a deeply rooted economic recovery, not the shallow recovery we are experiencing right now, nor an inflation-driven recovery where Canadians actually get further and further behind. If we are going to have a true, thoroughly rooted recovery within an economically competitive economy, that needs to be driven by the private sector, by small and medium-sized businesses and, yes, by the many large businesses across Canada. This should not be bigger and bigger government trying to steer the economy in the right direction and always getting it wrong.
Next I would like to talk about inflation and the cost of living. Members may recall that in the last budget, from one year ago, the minister stood up in the House and said that in addition to all of the other massive spending she was undertaking in the budget, which, by the way, was the biggest spending budget in Canadian history, much of which has gone to waste, she was also setting aside over 100 billion dollars' worth of investment that she was going to call stimulus. She wanted to plug that stimulus into the economy, inject it into the economy, because the economy was not doing that well. She was priming the pump, so to speak, and we could see where this was going.
Then the Minister of Finance cautioned us. She said she was going to take care not to pump too much stimulus into the economy. We all know, in the House, that if we pump too much stimulus, too much cash, into the economy, it is more cash chasing the same number of goods and services. That creates inflation. She said that she was going to take care of that and make sure that consumers and Canadians were protected. She said she was going to put in place labour-based guardrails, and a number of other guardrails, that would give her an idea of whether this stimulus was actually required so she would not make the mistake of pumping too much in and driving inflation. At that time, a year ago, inflation was not at the level it is today.
Now, we fast-forward to today. Yesterday, I was in the budget lock-up, where we got to ask questions of the government officials. We wanted to know what happened to the stimulus. We wanted to know how much of the stimulus was actually spent, whether the guardrails were applied and how much of that stimulus was left unspent.
There was no answer. Officials stumbled, fumbled and said they could not really identify how much of that stimulus was spent, because it had been allocated to different departments and they were responsible for reporting on their own spending. They said they could not really tell us that.
What did they say about the guardrails? What did they say about these protective measures that would ensure not too much cash was pumped into our economy to stimulate inflation? They said they did not know. There was no answer.
Today, I think we know what the answer is. Every single penny of that hundred-plus billion dollars was pumped straight into the economy, and guess what we have today? We have the worst inflation in over 30 years, which was driven by the actions of the Liberal government.
I will be the first to acknowledge that not all inflation is driven just by what we do in Canada. Yes, there are supply chain constraints around the world. Yes, there are spikes in commodity prices around the world that drive up the cost of living. That is consumer price inflation. However, there is something else called “asset price inflation” that covers things like houses, and that is a Canada-made inflation problem.
That inflation, of course, has left millions of Canadians behind. It has left behind Canadians who want to get into the housing market and Canadians who can no longer afford to buy groceries for their kids. They are cutting back. It has left behind Canadians who cannot buy household goods.
We are now in an affordability crisis in this country, and the government has to bear some of that blame. This budget simply makes it worse. It exacerbates the inflationary pressures we have in our country. This is a big-spending budget. What it does is spend, spend, spend. There is more cash being pumped into the economy, which is driving inflation.
Canadians should not, in any way, expect inflation to go down in the medium term, or even in the short term. In fact, the Bank of Canada governor was before the Standing Committee on Finance not too long ago. He said we should expect that things are going to get worse before they get better. Is that on the Liberal government? Of course it is. The Liberals are the ones responsible for government spending, and this budget represents a massive government expenditure.
I got into the spending part of it. There is $56 billion in new spending in this budget. That is massive. What is worse is that most of this $56 billion of new spending is new, permanent spending.
I want to remind members of something. Back in January 2021, just over a year ago, the finance minister received a mandate letter from the Prime Minister. For those who do not know what a mandate letter is, it is simply a long set of instructions the Prime Minister gives either to new ministers or other ministers whose directions he wants to refresh.
He gave her this mandate letter and right there, in the middle of that letter, it said, “Minister, you will not embark on any new permanent spending.”
Period, full stop: There would be “no new permanent spending.”
That was her instruction just over a year ago, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, when the Liberals were spending wildly, and perhaps there were some justifiable reasons for spending a little bit more than we normally would in the budget.
Here we are, in March. Just four months ago, at the end of 2021, for some reason the Prime Minister decided to give the finance minister a new mandate letter. This was some 11 months after the first. We looked at it. We looked at it carefully. I am looking for it, and there is no reference to new permanent spending. The Liberals had purged the document of that directive.
Anyone who thinks that the Liberal government is committed to living within its means can forget it, as my colleague just said. This is not a serious government, as I said earlier, and we cannot take seriously any of the commitments that it makes, because tomorrow the Liberals will change their minds and say, “Too bad. Tough luck. Be happy.”
There is a ton of spending in this budget. Of course, there is the NPD spending on dental care. We see that there is more spending on the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank. In fact, the Liberals have expanded the mandate of the failed Canada Infrastructure Bank, which is finding itself incapable of getting money out of the door and actually making the investments in infrastructure that are required in our country. There is more spending and more wasteful spending, and who pays for it? Taxpayers and consumers do, because the spending drives inflation, which leaves Canadians behind. The taxpayers also have to pay the bill for this spending.
Of course, I have not even mentioned the fact that this is actually an NDP-Liberal government. This is an unholy alliance, and guess who the tail is that is wagging the dog? It is the NDP. The NDP is telling the Liberal government how many taxpayers' dollars it should be spending, and it goes on and on. Many of the asks that the NDP had, when it shacked up with the Liberals in their common-law relationship, have not been reflected in the budget. They are coming in the next and the following budget. They are coming. I can tell members that.
There are also promises that this government made in the last election that did not show up in the budget.
There is more spending to come. With regard to the suggestion from the finance minister that, somehow, she was going to rein in spending and discipline spending, and this was all in safe hands, the Liberals' record says otherwise.
In fact, did we know that, since the Liberals came into power, they have increased government spending by 53% in just over six years? Much of that is permanent spending, so future generations of Canadians are stuck with this, and this is spending that is generating inflation in our economy.
Did members know that, even since the pandemic crisis in 2019, government spending has gone up 25%? The minister stands in the House and claims that she is disciplining government spending and that she is reining it in. “Trust me,” is what she said.
I also talked about taxes. This budget is full of tax increases, and the Liberals have made them very discreetly. We have to explore the different corners of this budget to find these tax increases.
Of course, there are increases on alcohol taxes because there is an escalator built into the excise taxes on alcohol. What this government did, back in 2017, was something really clever. The Liberals said they did not want to keep going back to the representatives of the people to ask them for permission to spend taxpayers' money. What they were going to do was build into their structure an escalator that automatically kicked in and increased taxes on Canadians every single year. They did that with the excise tax.
Let me talk about GST. We have inflation in Canada, so the GST revenues to the government have skyrocketed because of the oil and gas revenues that have come in. The price of gasoline at the pump has gone way up, which has left Canadians behind. They are unable to fill up their gas tanks, unable to get their kids to school, unable to get to work and unable to drive their kids to hockey practice or music lessons.
On top of the high price of gasoline, the government layers the GST. The more that inflation sets in, the more GST revenue the government collects, which is why it had these windfall revenues this past year. The windfall revenues were not from good management on its part. It was not an underlying, strong economic performance.
This was about the government benefiting from inflation, and the Prime Minister benefiting from inflation through higher GST revenues and through higher excise tax revenues, but leaving Canadians behind because they have to pay the price for that. That is completely unacceptable. We, as Canadians, are better than that.
There is something in this budget about housing. The minister made a big thing about housing. I asked her a question yesterday after she gave her budget speech. I mentioned that housing was the number one concern facing Canadian families, especially those who are not in homes. They cannot get into homes anymore because inflation and housing affordability have left them behind.
In fact, in Canada, the price of housing has more than doubled since the Liberal government came into power. We did not see that kind of housing inflation under Stephen Harper, did we? There were steady increases, but they were controlled. Prices were stable. Today, prices are no longer stable and families have been left behind.
When I asked the finance minister a question yesterday, she could not respond. All she said was that I was right, and that housing was the number one problem in this country right now, especially for Canadian families. She made a statement and made the suggestion that she was going to double the number of houses she was going to build in Canada over the next 10 years. Do members remember that? She stood up and said, “I promise the House, and I promise Canadians, that over the next 10 years, I am going to double the number of homes”. She used the word “we”. I am assuming it was the royal “we”, and she was referring to the government.
I said to the minister, if she was going to double the number of houses, she must know how many houses she and her government had built over the past seven years since the Liberals were elected. She must know that figure because without knowing that figure, it would irresponsible to make the statement that the Liberals were going to double the number of homes they would build. I said I just needed a number on how many homes they had built in the seven years they had been in government.
The minister hummed and hawed, and spent about two and a half minutes pontificating and arguing around the question. She never answered the question, even though some of my colleagues were calling out, “What is the number? How many homes did you build in the last seven years?” She could not give an answer, yet she made the statement that she was going to double the number of houses over the next 10 years. It is a number that she does not even know. That is the kind of economic, financial and fiscal leadership we have with the NDP-Liberal government.
There is one way we can address the skyrocketing cost of housing in this country. In fact, there is a way we can address the issue of skyrocketing inflation, broadly speaking, whether it is on gas, household goods or anything else we buy, and on the services we buy in our communities. They have all gone up because of inflation. There is a way of controlling inflation, especially in the housing market. Do members know what that is? It is to control government spending. Thanks for asking. We need to control government spending.
Instead, the current government has done the very opposite. It is fanning the flames of inflation. In fact, it has poured gasoline on the flames of inflation and things are only going to get worse in the Canadian short term.
Before I finish, and I do have a motion to bring, I want to mention that, like any budget that is full of bad policies and massive Liberal spending, there are always a few things that we can support. For example, the announcement of enhanced defence spending is something we would support, but the reality is that the current government has allowed defence spending to lag behind. Now it is catching up, but we see this as simply a $6-billion down payment to strengthen our ability to defend ourselves as a country and to engage in the global community of nations when it is required.
We can support a $3.8-billion critical minerals strategy as well, because critical minerals are critically important to the electric vehicle industry, which we are trying to get a foothold in. I would love to see Canada become a leader in that.
There is a ban on foreign homebuyers for two years. I think we can support that.
Of course, for small businesses there is a small improvement when it comes to the small business tax rate. Small businesses across the country will be pleased that at least the government has finally, after years of pleading, agreed to adjust the phase-out schedule for the small business tax rate.
This is a budget that is profoundly lacking in vision. I mentioned that at the beginning of my speech. Canadians can do better. We have so much wealth in our country with the natural resources, the human capital and the education we have. We can do so much better than having to always borrow tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars every time a government tables a budget. We should not have to be doing this. As we do this, in the process we kick more money into the economy and drive up inflation, leaving millions of Canadians behind. We can do better.
I move, seconded by the member for Simcoe North:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:
“the House not approve the budgetary policy of the government since it fails to:
a. rein in spending in order to control inflation;
b. provide Canadians with tax relief; and
c. take immediate action to increase housing supply.”
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- Mar/22/22 10:07:53 a.m.
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moved:
That, given that,
(i) Canadians are facing severe hardship due to the dramatic escalation in gas prices,
(ii) the 5% collected under the Goods and Services Tax (GST), the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), and the Quebec Sales Tax (QST) creates increased revenue for the federal government as fuel prices rise which compounds the pain on Canadian consumers and the economy,
the House call on the government to immediately provide relief at the pumps to all Canadians by introducing a temporary 5% reduction on gasoline and diesel whether collected under the GST, HST, or QST which would reduce the average price by approximately eight cents per litre.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to speak to something that concerns virtually every single Canadian: the skyrocketing cost of living in our country. Fifty-three per cent of Canadians today say that they cannot keep up with rising prices, and I suspect that percentage is going to keep going up. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
Yesterday, at the finance committee, we had a number of Canadian economists speak to us, and they very clearly said that the cause of the inflationary spiral we are in today, which is leaving so many Canadians behind, is our federal government. Our federal government has claimed that this is a global phenomenon and there is nothing to see here, and it has washed its hands of that problem. However, these economists noted that there are two types of inflation. One is CPI, consumer price index inflation, or the cost of everyday goods and services. The second is asset price inflation, which is for some of the big assets we purchase, like housing, that are not subject to the whims of the world markets.
What is the reason this is happening in Canada? We have this inflationary spiral, where millions of families no longer have the dream of owning their own home, and the cause is profligate borrowing and spending on the part of the Liberal government, facilitated of course by the Bank of Canada through its quantitative easing, asset purchases and government bond purchases. At the end of the day, the problem is this: We have an inflationary crisis in Canada because the government has pumped excessive stimulus into our economy, effectively pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into our economy beyond what it can manage. What has happened is that we have more dollars chasing the same number of goods and services, and that drives inflation.
I know that my Liberal friends are laughing at me, saying that is not true. However, we had some of the highest ranking economists in the country at our committee, including an economist from the C.D. Howe Institute, who confirmed that the liquidity in our economy now is driving inflationary pressures. Even the Governor of the Bank of Canada admitted that things will get worse before they get better.
I will let members know that I will be splitting my time with the member for Brandon—Souris, who is also ready to speak to this very important issue.
Today, we are calling on the government to pause the GST on fuel. We are talking about gas and diesel at the pumps. We are asking the government to at least temporarily lift the GST.
Members may be asking why we are using the GST to perhaps diminish the impact of inflation on Canadians. Well, the reason is that GST is a tax on a tax. When Canadians go to the pumps and pay for their gas, there is already a fuel excise tax built into the cost. There is a carbon tax built into it too. On top of that is layered the GST. Of course, the problem with that, and the pernicious part of it, is that as the price of gas goes up and up, GST revenues go up. The government has actually reaped windfall revenues from the oil and gas sector in Canada and has this windfall because the GST is generating more and more revenue due to the escalating price of gas at the pumps, so we are suggesting that it would only be fair for the government to at least temporarily lift that GST and provide Canadians with a break.
We are calling for the government to finally, after months and months of calling for a plan, fight inflation. We as Conservatives are coming forward now to say that we have a plan. This is part of the plan. It is not the whole plan, but part of the plan is to lift the GST. There are millions of Canadians across Canada who would appreciate the 8 to 10 cents per litre at the pump they would pay less if the government heeded our call for this GST relief.
Giving Canadians a GST break is actually a simple, common-sense solution to help Canadians who are suffering because of inflation. I used the term “ common sense”. That is a rare thing in the House under this Liberal government, but we are asking colleagues to listen. We are coming forward not only with complaints, but also with solutions for the government. I am asking the government not to pour cold water on our motion. We are asking for the government to support our motion and to provide relief for Canadians, because we need real action to help Canadians make ends meet.
Colleagues know that we, as Conservatives, are always the defenders of the taxpayer. This, of course, would help taxpayers who go to the pumps to pay less GST. I would also note that this is all driven by the fact that we have an inflationary crisis in Canada. It is a significant cost-of-living crisis. Today, millions of Canadians have been priced out of the housing market. Why? The economists yesterday told us that it is because the government has pumped so much stimulus into the economy, with so much cash sloshing around, that it is driving the spiking prices for houses across Canada.
In my own community, since the Prime Minister was elected, housing prices have doubled. A house that used to sell for $500,000 in Abbotsford is a million plus today. In fact, recently some friends of ours sold their home and were expecting to get about a million dollars for it. Of course, there was a bidding war. They got $1.2 million for a house that, five or six years ago, was half a million dollars. I feel happy for this couple because this is a tax-free gain that they are experiencing, but what about all the millions of families that are lining up behind this couple and waiting to get into the housing market? Their dream of home ownership has been dashed. It has been shattered, probably forever.
Day after day in the House, we have been asking the Liberal government for a plan to fight inflation. I have been doing it and my colleagues have been doing it. Where is the plan to fight the cost-of-living affordability crisis that is facing most Canadians across the country? There has been no plan and no response from the government. In fact, the finance minister effectively has washed her hands of the whole problem by saying it is a global phenomenon and there is nothing we can do about it. Yes, there is something the government can do about it. We have brought forward a motion that would be a start. It would be a head start to addressing the inflationary crisis we have in Canada.
It is time for the government to step up for Canadians and temporarily remove the GST on gas and diesel. The least we elected parliamentarians can do is to heed the voices of Canadians who are being left behind. Inflation is at 5.7%. Wages are only increasing by somewhere in the order of 2.5%, so Canadians are being left way behind as inflation roars ahead. We need to address this problem. We have come up with a solution, or at least a partial solution. I hope my Liberal friends are listening.
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