- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Abbotsford
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,571.88
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to speak to this implementation bill for the modernization of the Ukraine free trade agreement.
I always welcome opportunities to talk about trade. It is one of my passions, which is why I was somewhat disappointed by the disparaging remarks made by my colleague from Winnipeg North regarding the previous Conservative government's record on trade, especially Stephen Harper's focus on trade as the linchpin of Canada's economic strategy.
During the Harper years, the government set an unprecedented pace for negotiating trade agreements. When the Conservative government was first elected back in 2006, Canada had trade agreements with five countries: the United States, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica and Israel. By the time we were finished some nine years later, we had free trade agreements with 47 additional countries, an astounding number. That included the Canada-Europe free trade agreement. It included the TPP, which morphed, of course, into the CPTPP. It also included South Korea, which was a very difficult negotiation but was successfully concluded.
One of the agreements that former prime minister Stephen Harper really wanted to get done was between Canada and Ukraine. Even back in 2010, Ukraine was facing difficult challenges. It had a very weak economy and was struggling in trying to deal with Russia. The Prime Minister at the time, Stephen Harper, said the government was going to negotiate a trade agreement with Ukraine that would be unique in that the outcome would be asymmetrical. What that meant is that the benefits flowing each way were not necessarily going to be equal or balanced, at least at the beginning. The phasing in of market access and the elimination of tariff barriers would be done on a differentiated basis so that the outcome was not a quid pro quo in the perfect sense of the term. The Conservatives did that because we wanted to give Ukraine a leg up and help Ukraine re-establish itself as economically viable and strong.
I should indicate that I will be splitting my time with the member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan.
When the former Conservative government negotiated the trade agreement, the negotiations started in 2010 and were concluded in 2015. We left office in 2015. These agreements sometimes take a number of years to come into force, so the agreement came into force in 2017 and has served Ukraine well. Our trade with that country has increased. It was not completely unexpected that when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, trade flows declined. In fact, the current government and Ukraine stopped negotiating for a while because of the invasion by Russia into Ukraine.
Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and made sense out of the fact that Ukraine still needed to move forward economically and put in place the economic structures that would allow it to be successful. Negotiations were then recommenced in 2022, and here we are, a year later, in a position to pass the implementing legislation.
The purpose of modernizing this free trade agreement is that the free trade environment around the world, the playing field, is evolving rapidly. Some things are happening that are not necessarily good. For example, the world is becoming more protectionist. We are putting up more and more tariff and non-tariff barriers.
The United States, under Donald Trump, turned inward. In fact, members may recall that it was former president Donald Trump who pulled the U.S. out of the TPP negotiations. Why? I do not know. He was running for office. I suppose he saw it as politically beneficial.
The whole premise for the TPP was to take advantage of what is called comparative advantage. Every country has its own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to manufacturing goods and delivering services. If we can take the strengths of each country and cobble them together into a coherent trade strategy, we can ensure that the outcome for partner countries is optimal.
Unfortunately, the United States has pulled out, and since that time, it has really turned inward. It is not negotiating free trade agreements. When we go to the World Trade Organization, we notice that large countries, such as Brazil, China, South Africa and India, often block consensus on trade liberalization.
This causes us to reconsider how we engage with the world and open up new opportunities for Canadian companies to do business abroad and expand exports. That is why this agreement with Ukraine, which was negotiated under the former Conservative government led by Stephen Harper, is now being modernized. Many of these factors that were not in play back when we first negotiated this agreement now call for us to update the agreement and modernize it.
For example, there are 11 new chapters included in this agreement. There is a chapter on cross-border trade in services. There is a chapter on investment, which is very important. There is a chapter on temporary entry for business purposes, to facilitate the travel of business people back and forth between our countries. Financial services are covered, as is telecommunications. There is a chapter on small and medium-sized enterprises.
There is also a chapter on digital trade, because digital trade has evolved so quickly that it has left a lot of our trade agreements behind. One of the reasons that our free trade agreement with the United States was updated is that we had no chapter on digital services. People are doing business online now. Amazon has become an obscenely profitable company. Why? It is because of online purchasing, which is digital trade. There is a separate chapter on that.
There is a new chapter on how labour and workers will be treated, and the high standards that both countries want to set. There is also a chapter on the environment.
The bottom line is this: We as Canadians need to step up and stand in the gap for Ukraine. Canada has a large Ukrainian diaspora that expects us to partner with Ukraine in its time of need. That is what this agreement does. That is what the original trade agreement did.
In my home city of Abbotsford, many Ukrainians have fled their home country and made their home, or at least their temporary home, in Abbotsford. We now have something called the Ukrainian village, which is reinforcing why it is so important for all of us to work together with our Ukrainian diaspora and with the people of Ukraine to put in place a trade agreement and structure under which the Ukrainian economy can be lifted back up. Both of our countries can benefit from that.
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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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- May/2/22 10:25:15 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, I will start by saying that I am seeking unanimous consent to share my time with the hon. member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola.
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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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- 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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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this bill, which is another case of the Liberal government trying to clean up after itself.
I will be splitting my time with the member for Elgin—Middlesex—London.
I come from the beautiful city of Abbotsford, which is nestled between majestic Mount Baker and the mighty Fraser River. We are very grateful to live in that community, but it is a community that has many seniors. In fact, my own office is in a tower that houses seniors.
Another element of Abbotsford that I am very proud of is the fact that Abbotsford is the most generous census metropolitan area in the country. Of all the 27 census metropolitan areas in this country, we are the most generous by a country mile. That is a good thing. It is a great model for other communities to emulate.
The reason I share this is that much of the generosity actually comes from the seniors in Abbotsford. These are seniors who contributed to building our country. These are seniors who today still contribute to the fabric of our nation, yet here we are. Some of these very seniors are well-to-do and live comfortable lives, but many are living on the edge of poverty. I know my Liberal colleagues are mocking us today. It is a shame that something as serious as this would be treated with such contempt by our Liberal friends across the way.
I will say this. The seniors in my community, many of whom are on the edge of poverty, took an incredible hit from the incompetence of the current government. This is actually a story of what was intended to be something good, which was a response to the COVID pandemic. The government, stepping up and hoping to invest in the lives of Canadians and make sure that Canadians did not slip through the cracks during the pandemic, invested heavily in support programs.
When the government invested in these support programs to help Canadians through the COVID pandemic, they forgot a few things. First, they forgot that these support programs that helped Canadians had to be properly designed to make sure that Canadians who truly needed the support received the support, that fraudsters who may have wanted to apply for these benefits did not get away with it, and that people who lived outside of our country and who did not need these benefits did not qualify for them. Unfortunately, many of the programs that our Liberal friends across the way implemented had none of those safeguards. They did not have the oversight, and they did not have the scrutiny. The Liberals rammed the stuff through the House of Commons.
Again, my Liberal colleagues across the aisle are laughing. They are laughing at seniors across our country for the pain that these Liberals have caused them.
In delivering these support programs, there were design flaws. There were oversight and scrutiny problems along the way, so that people received benefits who should not have received those benefits. There were hundreds of millions of dollars going outside of our country to people who did not even have a connection to Canada, but applied and somehow qualified for these programs.
There was a second problem. The Liberals forgot that some of the most critical programs that seniors rely on in this country, such as old age security and the guaranteed income supplement, are means-tested and depend on taxable income from the previous year. Some of these seniors applied for the government support programs. They qualified for them and they received the support. After the fact, they were told that the amounts that the government had just sent them were fully taxable, and they were going to have to include them in their taxable income.
Of course, what happened was that vulnerable seniors who trusted the Liberal government realized they would no longer qualify for the GIS. They realized that the funds they received from the government so generously were now going to be clawed back by that very same Liberal government. Therein lies the rub. The Liberals made a mistake. In the vernacular, they screwed up.
It gets worse. The Liberal government has known for almost a year that this was a problem, and that seniors were distressed in the knowledge that this money was going to be clawed back and their ability to qualify for seniors' benefits, such as the GIS, was going to be compromised. Can colleagues imagine the distress of someone living on the poverty line who is then told they have to repay thousands of dollars to the government? These were thousands of dollars that seniors did not actually have. For a year, the government has known this and failed to act.
The Liberals failed to act for a number of reasons. First, there was the situation where Parliament could have been recalled in the fall of 2021 to deal with legislation that would fix this problem. Instead, what did they do? They called an unnecessary and expensive election that changed absolutely nothing. They still are in a minority government. Over half a billion dollars was spent on an unnecessary election, and they delayed their response to a problem they had created for seniors. The election was held. Nothing has changed. The Prime Minister could not recall Parliament right away. He took many months before he recalled Parliament.
In the meantime, seniors have been calling my office saying, “Ed, what am I going to do? How am I going to get through this? I don't have the money to repay these benefits that they are now clawing back from me. How am I going to survive? How am I going to put food on the table? How am I going to pay rent?”
This is a problem of the Liberal government's making. Here we are now, almost a year later, and what we see are government MPs giving speeches in the House, talking about how great they are and how they love seniors, and saying that this legislation is going to provide certainty for seniors across our country. The minister herself, in her responses in question period, was pretending that this was not a problem. In fact, the Liberals are doing seniors a favour with this legislation. The minister's responses have been nothing short of a word salad. I think she was hoping to create some kind of a fog that seniors in this country would not see through.
The fact is that this is a problem of the Liberal government's making. Now it is asking us, as Parliament, to fix and clean up its mess. This is symptomatic of the Liberal government: It is constantly asking Parliament to clean up after it. They ask us to get out the shovels and clean up the mess.
Canadians are getting very tired of this. I hope that Canadians who are watching today understand that the problem in the House is the Liberal government and its leader. It is the most divisive, incompetent and unethical government this country has ever seen. It is incompetent even when it comes to our seniors, of all people.
I will leave those thoughts with members and the Canadian people. I hope the Liberals learn a lesson from this. They are constantly doing this: screwing up time and again. This has to stop.
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- Dec/1/21 7:39:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to start off by saying that I will be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Nose Hill.
I would like to provide the counterpoint to what we have just heard from the Liberal side, because we have to distinguish fiction from fact. The truth is, there is a long history to this dispute, going way back to at least 1982. It was a Liberal government under Paul Martin that finally tried to bring peace to the woods. This was called the war of the woods because we had ongoing battles between the United States and Canada on the softwood lumber issue. Unfortunately, Paul Martin failed to get a deal done, to get peace in the woods. His trade minister, Jim Peterson, failed to get an agreement for Canadians.
Then we had an election in 2006. Stephen Harper was elected prime minister of our country and he did something remarkable. He reached across the aisle and asked David Emerson to cross the floor and join his cabinet. He had one main task, and that was to resolve the lumber dispute. David Emerson had deep roots in the softwood lumber industry. He knew it well. Stephen Harper knew that David Emerson could get the deal done, and guess what? He did it successfully.
In fact, he was remarkably successful. He negotiated a seven-year softwood lumber agreement and bought peace for seven years. He also negotiated a potential two-year extension. On top of that, he negotiated a $4.5-billion U.S. repayment to Canada that went back to the softwood lumber producers in Canada. It was a big win for Canada. It was a big win for the Conservative government under Stephen Harper because it brought us that peace we needed in the woods.
That softwood lumber agreement needed to be ratified in the House through a ways and means motion, and guess what? The Liberals voted against it in 2006. Only one Liberal voted in favour of it: Joe Comuzzi. He boldly stood up against the duplicity of the Liberals at the time. We later ended up renewing that agreement, so we had a total of nine years of peace between Canada and the United States.
Today we find ourselves in a situation. For the last six years, the Liberal government, the finance minister and the Prime Minister have been continually promising to resolve this dispute.
In fact, I have here a CBC article going back to March 12, 2016. The headline is “[Canada's trade minister] heralds ‘real breakthrough’ on softwood lumber negotiations”. That was six years ago. That trade minister was quoted as saying, “We have now managed to get the Americans to the table, we have managed to raise attention to this issue at the very highest levels.” She went on to say, “I don't want to downplay to anyone the complexity—the fiendish complexity—of the softwood lumber issue [but] this was a real breakthrough.” That was six years ago. What happened to that breakthrough?
Time after time, when we ask questions in the House about how those negotiations are going, we are told we are going to get a deal, yet it has been six years. That, by any definition, is failure, especially when we compare it to the standard the Harper government set in negotiating nine years of peace in the woods. For six years we have had a war in the woods and that war continues. In fact, today we are in a situation where the U.S. has doubled tariffs on softwood lumber exports from Canada.
Shame on the government. Shame on the Prime Minister. Shame on the finance minister, who was trade minister when she made those bold statements. I know we can do better and Canadians deserve better.
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