- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Abbotsford
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 66%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $146,571.88
- Government Page
- Jun/3/24 5:17:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Regina—Lewvan.
I would like to get back to the basics on the bill before us, which is on a national pharmacare program. Before we can even consider a program like this, I believe Canadians need to place all of this into context within the fiscal mess that has been created by the Liberal government going forward.
As members know, we are facing a fiscal wall. We are leaving behind, for future generations to pay back, a massive national debt. In fact, over the last nine years, this Prime Minister and his Liberal government have amassed more indebtedness than all previous Canadian governments combined since Confederation. That is one piece of the context.
What about the ongoing deficits being run by this Liberal government? There is no end to them. In fact, time and time again, the finance minister has been asked to at least give us a timeline when we will return to balance, when Canada will begin again to live within its means and not spend more money than is being brought in by taxes. Each time, the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister has said nothing. She will not respond to that question, because the answer is that there is no plan. How can we, as a nation, justify billion-dollar program after billion-dollar program without having a plan to bring our fiscal mess back into order? The only way to do that is to come back into balanced budgets, which has not happened.
There is also the challenge of increasing taxes on Canadians. Carbon taxes, which have been the subject of much debate in the House, keep going up and up. Fuel taxes are going up and up. In fact, it was not long ago when my colleague for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon was at committee, and they were grilling the Minister of Small Business. The minister had asserted that she had reduced taxes on small businesses. The simple question that my colleague asked was which tax the minister had reduced on small business. And the answer was, well, humming and hawing. Finally the minister turned to her officials and said that perhaps her officials could answer that question. The officials looked dumbfounded, because they did not have an answer either. The truth is, taxes have not been reduced on small businesses. Across the board, taxes have been raised on Canadians.
Now, within that context, this Liberal government wants to introduce another billion-dollar spending program. The Liberals could have come to us and said, “Listen, the recent budget shows that we will be returning to balance within the next, say, five years, and within that context we'd like to bring forward a program that is going to help those who have no pharmacare coverage.” However, that is not what they did. This government came forward and said that it was going to spend another $40 billion, $50 billion additional, that it would go into deficit by another $40 billion, and that it would throw in this program that would put Canada in the hole for years to come. However, who has to pay all of that back? I heard some heckling over here in the corner because they do not like to hear the truth, but it will be future generations of Canadians, with interest thereon. So that is the context in which this whole pharmacare discussion needs to take place.
This is not a pharmacare plan. Like so many others, this is an empty promise that will leave Canadians deeply disappointed and angry.
Let us remember it was the current Prime Minister who promised affordable housing back when he was first elected in 2015. Instead, what we have is a doubling of housing prices, rents, down payments, interest rates and mortgage payments, and another broken promise. Oh yes, the carbon tax would not cost Canadians anything and we now know from the PBO that in fact that is not true. The Prime Minister promised taxes would go down. He promised safe streets and instead we have chaos, crime and drugs on our streets and social disorder. With so many broken promises, we could go on and on. We could spend hours talking about broken promises, but the pharmacare plan is destined to be just another one of those broken promises.
Now, there is another problem. By its own definition, the pharmacare plan is intended to be a single-payer plan. That means the Government of Canada pays and it is universal, so, of course, the fear is for the 97% of Canadians who already have some kind of coverage, typically through their union plan or company plan, or they may have bought coverage. They would now lose that coverage because the pharmacare plan that is being proposed by the current Liberal government is a very narrow one. It would cover a very small number of medicines when, in fact, most plans across Canada are expansive. Now, it looks like the government wants to insert itself and introduce a plan that would actually cannibalize many of the other plans across Canada. There has been no consultation with the insurance industry and there has been no consultation with the provinces.
Let us remember that health care is the purview of the provinces and yet we have the government starting to step into dental care and pharmacare. That is on top of all the billions and billions of dollars in health care transfers every single year. Somehow, the provinces have not been consulted adequately. We know that some provinces are already providing additional pharmacare support and some provincial leaders are saying, “Listen, instead, give us the cash because we are already providing these services.” Others are saying, “Listen, we have a long list of priorities for our health care system and that is not the top priority. We have a number of other priorities.” For example, how about that mental health funding that was supposed to come to the provinces? It has never happened. Oh, what about that palliative care funding that the Prime Minister promised to the provinces years ago? What happened to that? It is gone. Therefore, the lack of consultation with the provinces and repeated stepping into areas that are the exclusive jurisdiction of the provinces is, I believe, leading us down this road where, without a fiscal plan that will lead us back to budget balance, we continue to heap more spending onto the taxpayer and that is unsustainable.
This pharmacare program is a big program, like so many other programs that the current government tries to introduce and implement. In fact, it was the member for Kingston and the Islands who said that this program is big and complex. Well, if it is big and complex, there is one guarantee: The current Liberal government will not be able to manage it effectively. We think of all the scandals, the spending scandals, GC Strategies, the ArriveCAN scandal and the TMX pipeline that went seven times over budget after the Liberal government purchased that pipeline.
This is the question that Canadians have to ask themselves: Do we trust the current Liberal government and the Prime Minister to manage a pharmacare program that is billions of dollars in the coming years? Do we trust them to manage this program efficiently and effectively? I believe the answer from Canadians would be a resounding no.
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- May/21/24 6:39:57 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, every time our Liberal friends across the way get up, they tell us how good Canadians have it. In fact, just a moment ago the member from Kingston and the Islands got up, telling us Canadians have never had it so good, and to look at inflation, it is only 2.7%.
Perhaps my colleague from Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon could explain how harmful the reckless spending of the Liberal government has been, and how that spending has stoked the inflationary fires in Canada.
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- May/2/23 11:12:05 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I was very disappointed to hear the hon. member spend most of her time attacking the previous Conservative government. She did not mention that her government, her Liberal government, has been in power for eight years and has spent and spent and spent. In fact, it has spent somewhere in the order of half a trillion dollars. She talked about how much money her government has spent on housing, affordable housing. The problem is that it is not about how much one spends. In fact, spending has driven much of the inflation in the housing market that we see today.
I would like to ask her to explain how it is that her government has been in place for eight years and has spent a historic amount, not only on affordable housing but on many other things, yet housing in Canada has not become more affordable. It has become more and more expensive. It has doubled in price. Rents have gone up. Down payments have gone up—
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Madam Speaker, my colleague across the way just had an opportunity to ask the defence critic that question.
I would suggest to the member that it was her finance minister who, last year, said that she could balance the budget in four years. How would she have done that? It would have required controlling spending and being responsible with taxpayer dollars, which is something the finance minister has been unable to do. That is why we will not support an irresponsible budget.
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- Feb/14/23 11:08:39 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, in her speech, the member mostly talked about low unemployment and 3% GDP growth, basically suggesting Canadians have never had it so good. However, when the Canadians who are watching these proceedings today go to the grocery store, they know that those prices are not going down. If anything, they are still going up, and the problem with inflation is that once those inflationary prices are baked in, they are there to stay. Canadians know that this is going to be a serious, ongoing problem.
The member did mention spending, very briefly, at the end. Given the fact that former Liberal colleagues, finance ministers and governors of the Bank of Canada have said that Liberal government spending is a major contributor to inflation in Canada, how is her government going to actually control spending going forward so we do not have those inflationary pressures anymore?
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- Feb/7/23 4:16:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am glad the member quoted Milton Friedman. Of course, that member, being a member of the Liberal Party, is a great disciple of John Maynard Keynes, who used to promote spending as a way out of governments' problems and spending as a way of getting an economy back on track. Unfortunately, it is spending that has gotten our economy off track and into an inflationary spiral.
Will that member not admit that the spending his government undertook in Canada has driven inflation to 40-year highs and has caused the current unaffordability crisis in Canada? Will he now, at least, admit that?
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- Dec/5/22 3:04:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians face the worst affordability crisis in a generation, yet the government is only making things worse by spending $54 million on the ArriveCAN fiasco, $6,000 a night for the Prime Minister's luxury suite in London and $1 billion in wage subsidies to wealthy corporations. Liberal waste has become a national embarrassment, and every time the government borrows and spends on waste, life becomes more unaffordable for Canadians.
Will the government finally put an end to this inflationary spending, yes or no?
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Mr. Speaker, what our leader, the Leader of the Opposition, has been speaking about is inflation. He has been speaking about taxes. He has been speaking about the cost of living and affordability of housing, all of the things that matter to Canadians. That is what he has been speaking to in the House, and I have been here for every single meeting.
The biggest challenge facing Canada today is the affordability crisis, where Canadians are having to make the choice between groceries and putting fuel in their cars or between sending their kids to ballet lessons and paying for rent. Those are decisions we should never have to foist on Canadians, yet it is the Liberal government's irresponsible approach to borrowing and spending that has brought us to this point. As I mentioned earlier, we can do better.
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Madam Speaker, I would be glad to answer the member's question. I do not know if he was in this House for the full speech I gave, because I acknowledged that supply chains do have an impact on inflation and that rising commodity prices around the world, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine of course, do have an impact, but I also mentioned that housing affordability and the housing inflation we are experiencing today in Canada are largely a made-in-Canada phenomenon. That is backed up by many economists, and I think he knows that.
Let us be fair here. I acknowledge that some of the inflation that we experience in Canada is a global phenomenon, but a lot of it is driven by the actions of the current government in borrowing and spending in a way that is irresponsible.
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Madam Speaker, that was quite an introduction to my speech. It basically took all the oxygen out of the House.
Let me start by saying that this bill is effectively the budget implementation act, which would implement a portion of the last federal budget, budget 2022, which was tabled just over a month ago. Not surprisingly, after having given this much thought, considered it and looked at all the different elements of this particular bill, as well as the budget itself, we as the Conservative opposition have no choice but to oppose it. I will tell the reasons why.
When I spoke earlier to the budget itself, I highlighted the fact that there were a number of issues we took very seriously. One was that, contrary to expectations, it was not a growth budget. In fact, it was very much like the previous budget in 2021, which was panned by the Liberals' own former advisers, who said that the claims that that budget was a growth budget were actually profoundly wrong. In fact, it was a spending budget. It turns out this budget, budget 2022, is also a spending budget.
Why can I say that it is a spending budget? We know the figures, and the officials have confirmed them. There is somewhere in the order of $57 billion or $58 billion of new spending in this bill. That is not just carrying over from the previous year or established programs simply carrying those forward. This is, on top of that, $57 billion more that the government would spend.
I believe we need to place this all in context because the government took over some six and a half years ago in 2015, and over those six and a half years, and members will not believe this, spending has grown 53%. To put this into further perspective, just between 2019, so just before the COVID pandemic, and today, spending has increased by 25%, so by all measures this is a tax-and-spend Liberal government. Canadians should not be surprised. That is the reputation they have earned over many decades.
Is this a growth budget, which is what it was supposed to be? It was intended to be about fundamental changes that were going to improve the prospects for long-term growth for our country. About the growth we are seeing in the economy today, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said that growth is actually “GDP inflation.” In other words, it is not organic or substantive growth that is generated by improving productivity within the economy that would improve our competitiveness on the world stage and the global marketplace.
For example, there was nothing in this budget about comprehensive tax reform, which would clearly position our tax system as being fairer, making sure the wealthy pay their share, and also position Canada to be competitive within the global marketplace. Such a tax system would attract investment from all around the world, because today Canada has a reputation of being a place people do not invest in. They shy away. It has too much regulation. Taxes are too high. There is no certainty that the investment will ever be approved, and it has a federal government that is not supportive of this investment, certainly not investment in our resource sector and certainly not investment in our oil and gas sector.
This is also not a growth budget because there is nothing in it about regulatory change or about regulatory reforms that would speed up the approval process for worthy projects. That just is not here.
There is nothing in this budget about interprovincial trade barriers, which have bedevilled governments for many, many decades. It is tougher to do trade among the provinces and territories than it is to do trade with some of our free trade partners around the world. What a sad comment on the performance of the government, which had nothing in the budget or in this bill that addresses that serious problem.
There is nothing in the budget that addresses Canada's lagging investment performance. In fact, Canada is at the bottom of the list of the 38 OECD countries when it comes to investment performance. Investors from around the world just do not see Canada as an attractive place to invest.
I want to hearken back to a comment that the finance minister just made. She made it seem like Canada's growth rate is the best in the world. There is nothing to see here. It is all great. “Don't worry, be happy.” In fact, she quoted the IMF, which said that Canada is going to have a good growth rate for a couple of years.
Do members know what the OECD has said? Canada ranks 38th of 38 countries when it comes to expected future growth of our economy over the next 30 to 35 years, between 2030 and 2060. Canada will be at the bottom of the list of the developed countries of this world. That is a failure on the part of the Liberal government. This is not a growth budget. The prospects under the government are bleak when it comes to future growth.
Second, let me address the issue of inflation. Inflation is the biggest challenge to Canadian families today. The affordability crisis stretches from coast to coast to coast. Yes, there are external influences that have driven inflation from around the world, supply chain challenges and spiking commodity prices, but the government has to take responsibility as well. Economist after economist notes that governments cannot keep spending and spending and pumping more money into our economy without paying a price, and that price is the inflation we see today, especially in our housing market. The housing affordability crisis is as severe as I have seen in my lifetime. It has never been so bad in this country. Right now, the government cannot give Canadians any hope that things are going to get better in the near to mid-term.
The problem is this. The Liberals had something in their budget called a housing plan. They said they were going to pump $10 billion into Canada to help ease the housing crisis, but $4 billion of that is simply a transfer from the federal government to municipalities across the country. It will not create one extra house in Canada. It will not build one extra house over the next few years. It is going to be used, purportedly, to help the municipalities improve their application processes, to make sure they are more efficient, more timely and speedier, so they can get more permit approvals out the door, but that is going to take years to manifest itself. I think we all in the House know that this is not a quick fix.
The other $6 billion from this $10-billion fund is going into a program that will allow first-time homebuyers to set up a savings plan where, over a period of five years, they can invest $8,000 per year for a total of $40,000 in an account that has tax-deductible investments into the fund and one can take money out tax-free. It sounds great, but it is only $40,000 and it is over five years.
Over five years, these families are going to be left far behind by a housing market that is raging out of control. To boot, that program is going to increase demand for housing in Canada even more as more Canadians take advantage of this. We are going to have a problem on the demand side and a problem on the supply side of housing in Canada.
The real challenge here in Canada is the housing crisis itself, and the inflationary aspect of it is a made-in-Canada crisis. Some of the elements that go into our home construction would be impacted by global forces, but for the most part, housing inflation in this country is a made-in-Canada crisis. We had the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklem, at our committee not long ago and we specifically asked him if it was possible that some of the inflationary spending that the federal Liberals had done, the borrowing and spending, with record deficits and record debt, could be contributing to housing inflation. He admitted that yes, that was true. Housing inflation can be driven by excess liquidity in the marketplace.
It is not available to the Liberal government to simply wash its hands of the inflation crisis besetting our country and afflicting homes across this country. It has to take some ownership and responsibility for a crisis of its own making. It is not solely of its own making, I will be the first to admit, but it is significantly of its own making.
That was the cost of living, and of course it is going to get worse because on one side we have inflation. How do the Bank of Canada and Mr. Macklem fight inflation? He now has to increase interest rates. At committee last week, he admitted he was going to have to do that quickly and that the increases in interest rates would be significant.
Now we are between scourges afflicting families across this country: on one side, we have skyrocketing inflation, and on the other side, we have rising interest rates. Canadians who have mortgages that are due for renewal are going to be paying higher mortgage rates. That means higher payments, which in turn mean less disposable income for those families. That is the story and the legacy of the Liberal government.
I will go to the third problem that we see with this budget and this bill. The finance minister was expressly directed by the Prime Minister, just over a year ago, not to engage in any more new permanent spending. That was in the middle of the COVID pandemic, and the government I thought had realized that we could not keep spending. We need to discipline spending because, at the end of the day, we also have a duty to future generations of Canadians who have to pay back this massive debt that has been incurred because of the COVID pandemic and because of the government's reckless spending.
Instead, after receiving that clear directive, a year later what did the Prime Minister do? He gave the finance minister another mandate letter in which he purged any reference to eliminating new permanent spending. I do not know. Maybe the Prime Minister already knew that he was cooking up a coalition between the NDP and the Liberals, that it would cost taxpayers a lot of money, and then the government would have to borrow a lot of money to satisfy the NDP. I do not know that, but I do know this.
Shortly after the finance minister received that mandate letter, she started crafting her 2022 budget, which introduced a massive amount of new permanent spending, including a dental care program. In the last budget, it was a child care program. In the next one, we expect there will be a pharmacare program.
What was shocking to me, as a member of the finance committee, was the process when all of these requests were pouring in as we did our pre-budget consultations. There were stakeholders from across Canada. Five hundred written submissions came in, and many more witnesses were basically asking the government to fund this program or that program or to give them this subsidy or that subsidy. We asked the other members of the committee if we could at least go through a process of prioritization and triage all the requests flooding in, so that we could bring a critical eye to them to determine which ones were actually affordable for Canadian taxpayers and future generations, who would have to pay the bill.
The Liberals, NDP and Bloc said that they were not interested in prioritization. They wanted to take all the recommendations and send them up to the minister to see what she would do with them. What a reckless way of doing business. That is not the kind of country I want to live in. I want to live in a country that is fiscally responsible. I want to have a Prime Minister who actually thinks about monetary policy, not who shuns it and says it is something that does not concern him.
It is the monetary policy of this country that is requiring interest rates to go up because of the reckless borrowing and spending of the Liberal government. That is the permanent spending part of it. There is $57 billion of new spending just in this budget alone, and that will saddle future generations with an albatross. It is a huge indebtedness that they are going to have to pay back with rising interest rates.
The last point is taxation. The Liberal government often talks about having Canadians' backs and being there for the middle class. “Hear, hear,” they say, yet the budget is tax after tax. It is unbelievable. Look at the escalator on wine excise taxes, for example. It is unbelievable. The escalators automatically drive up the taxes on goods that Canadians purchase every single day. It is tax after tax. What is worse is the fact that with the dramatic escalation in the price of gas at the pumps, Canadians who already had a tough time filling up their tanks are now realizing, because we Conservatives are telling them, that on top of that gas price, they are paying GST, which means more revenues for the federal government but less disposable income for them.
We, as Conservatives, brought forward a proposal, because we are solution-oriented. We are problem-solvers on this side. We came forward to the Prime Minister and said that we could at least temporarily suspend carbon taxes and temporarily suspend the GST on gas so we could give Canadians a break. The Liberals said no.
Let me close by saying that there is no way the Conservatives, the official opposition and the loyal opposition, can support a budget bill that is irresponsible. I have a motion that I would like to table in this House.
I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “that” and substituting the following: “the House decline to give second reading to Bill C-19, an Act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 7, 2022 and other measures, since the bill fails, among other things, to address inflation, provide tax relief for Canadians and take immediate action to increase housing supply.
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- May/3/22 3:23:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I hope I will be able to finish my motion before we get all these “no”s from across the way.
There have been discussions among the parties, and I believe you will find unanimous consent for the following motion, that, given that the government tabled the largest spending budget in Canadian history—
Some hon. members: No.
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- May/2/22 10:26:00 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to chime in on this debate again. Bill C-8 is actually a piece of implementing legislation that arises out of the biggest spending budget in Canadian history, namely budget 2021, which was tabled well over a year ago. That budget set a record because the Liberal government had not tabled a budget for well over two years, which is something that has almost never happened in Canadian history. Budgets are intended to be tabled every single year to give Canadians a picture of what their finances look like and a picture of what the government wants to spend their hard earned tax dollars on and how much the government is going to borrow to try to deliver the services Canadians receive.
Bill C-8 is coming out of the biggest budget ever seen in Canada. It has over half a trillion dollars' worth of spending in one year, and members can think about that. It ended up doubling Canada's national debt. That is how big this budget was, so members can understand why it was critical that the official opposition, which is the Conservative Party, and other opposition parties in this House had an opportunity to exercise oversight over this huge budget.
Of course, a budget in itself is not legislation. It is simply the government's statement of what it intends to do the following year. The government brought forward this budget document, then over the subsequent months of 2021, it began to roll out enabling legislation. First it was the budget implementation act, then different pieces of legislation after that. Along the way the government also tabled in the House something called a fall economic statement, which gives Canadians a six-month update on where the finances of the nation are and what the government still plans to do arising out of the budget.
Out of that process has come this bill, Bill C-8. Again, it is a bill that spends well over $50 billion of taxpayers' money, much of it borrowed, by the way. Members can understand why we are reluctant to force this through the House of Commons. Members will understand why we are reluctant to ram this thing through without proper oversight and accountability, yet it is the Liberal government that, every step along the way, has tried to do exactly that. It has tried to push this along faster that it should be. In fact, the Liberals have accused us of delaying this bill, when all we have done is exercise proper oversight, which is something the Liberal government really hates.
I look back at the mandate letter the finance minister received from the Prime Minister just over a year ago, and that mandate letter actually had a specific provision in it that said that the government was seeking to be transparent and accountable in everything it did, including when it came to budgetary matters. In fact, that was the direction to the finance minister. It was for her to be as transparent as possible with the finances of this nation, yet we see here the Liberal government doing everything it can to push through legislation that requires proper oversight.
Let me place this in a larger context. I have already mentioned the fact that the government has embarked upon the largest spending spree in Canadian history. In fact, over the last year or so it has doubled the national debt, if members can imagine that, and since it was elected in 2015, the government has increased spending by some 53%.
Since 2019, which was before COVID, the government has increased spending by 25%. For most household budgets in the country, if they tried to increase their spending like that, they would have to go to their local insolvency specialist and say, “Hey, listen. We cannot meet our payments anymore. Please help.”
However, with this government, it is spend, spend, spend. It is a Liberal tax and spend problem that this country has gained since our former Conservative Party lost the election in 2015.
Do members know what makes this worse? A year ago, when that 2021 budget was tabled, there were already warning signs. The economy was starting to recover and our Parliamentary Budget Officer had warned the government that inflationary pressures were building and that this extra 100 billion dollars' worth of stimulus that the finance minister had set aside to stimulate the economy might not be necessary. In fact, it might might be overkill.
We know now that the government has spent somewhere in the order of $176 billion of spending that is not COVID-related. In other words, it was in the nature of stimulus, which it pumped into the economy, and then Canadians are surprised, and the Liberals are surprised, that we suddenly have rampant inflation.
Today we know that the inflation rate is 6.7% and continues to go up. In fact, economists are incredibly worried right now about the rate of inflation in this country. They are concerned because now the Bank of Canada, our central bank, has had to step up. It is starting to increase interest rates, which, of course, impacts mortgage holders across Canada and loan holders across Canada. Typically, those are businesses and small businesses, and typically those are households that are highly indebted and are very vulnerable to high rate increases. That is what we are seeing happening around us right now.
We have the twin scourges of inflation on one side and increasing interest rates on the other, which are going to severely pinch Canadians and are going to make life even more difficult at a time when we have an affordability crisis in the country.
It is in that context that the government is still proposing to spend, spend, spend. How do I know that? Bill C-8 actually comes out of the previous year's budget. One would have assumed that the government would have learned from its mistakes, and that its next budget, budget 2022, would taper off spending, would control and discipline spending.
In fact, what happened in the 2022 budget? It is just as bad. There is $56 billion of new spending, much of it permanent spending that will bind future generations to these programs the government is creating.
The bottom line is this: These Liberals have been pounding their desks saying, “Hey, we have to get this passed, quickly, quickly, quickly”, and we have resisted. We said that we were going to take our time to review this legislation because there are things in this legislation that we support, such as tax credits for teachers and for farmers. We support those things. From time to time, we have asked the government to pull those things out of this legislation so that we can vote on them separately. Of course, the government says no. They want us to vote against the whole of Bill C-8, so they can blame us for voting against things that we actually support.
We are not going to be bullied. We are not going to be pushed. We are going to take our time and do this job properly.
We have no choice but to vote no against Bill C-8 because it is perpetrating an incredible expense and massive debt on future generations of Canadians, and I just do not want to allow that to happen.
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- Apr/26/22 2:52:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Governor of the Bank of Canada admitted that inflation is much higher than expected. When asked to explain how to protect Canada's finances, he said, “don't spend too much”.
We know that the Prime Minister does not think about monetary policy, but Conservatives do and Canadians do, and Canadians are the ones paying the price for the Prime Minister's monetary illiteracy: higher grocery bills, gas bills and interest rates. Will the Prime Minister recognize that his reckless borrowing and spending is making things worse for Canadians?
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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 11:21:40 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the cost of home ownership has doubled. Food prices are through the roof. Fuel costs are at record highs, and yesterday’s budget only made things worse. There was no help for those being left behind by the NDP-Liberal government. There is no tax relief and no plan to fight inflation. It is only spend, spend, spend.
Does the minister not realize that her tax and spend policies are driving millions of Canadians out of the middle class? When will the government finally take steps to control the skyrocketing cost of living?
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- Apr/8/22 11:20:27 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, tax and spend policies have killed the Canadian dream. Every day we ask the government what it is doing to make life more affordable for Canadians, and every day it tells us how much money it is spending. It is not about how much money one spends; it is about the results one delivers. By that standard, the government has failed.
Yesterday’s budget was no different. It is tax, tax, tax and spend, spend, spend, as the Prime Minister stokes the fires of inflation. What happened to his promise to stand up for the middle class and those looking to join it?
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- Apr/8/22 10:45:38 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague refers to the government now as a spend-DP-Liberal government and he is correct. It is a spendthrift government, and he did mention inflation and the elements of inflation.
The one thing I did not mention in my speech, and this gives me a chance to do that, is the role that taxation plays in inflation. I talked a lot about the spending, spending, spending that is driving the vicious inflationary cycle we are in right now, but that is contributed to by the fact that the government continues to raise taxes. The more taxes Canadians pay, such as GST, carbon taxes and excise taxes, the more that drives inflation because it drives up the cost of everything that Canadians buy.
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- Apr/7/22 4:49:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That is a proverb one of my Liberal colleagues used earlier today, but it was in a different context. It was used in the context of Easter. However, the context in which I am going to use it is the budget, which is absolutely bereft of any vision.
The budget is bereft of any vision to meaningfully address what currently matters most to Canadians, which is the skyrocketing cost of living and the housing affordability crisis. There is no real plan to fight the inflation that has exacerbated this government's tax-and-spend profligacy. There is no overarching investment into economic growth, and no growth plan to improve our productivity and our ability to compete in the global marketplace. There is no grand plan to restore Canada's tarnished reputation as a good place to invest. Right now, we are dead last among the OECD countries when it comes to investment. Nor is there is a grand vision to manage the massive debt load that my children and grandchildren will be left to repay, with interest, of course.
Like last year's budget, this one fails to put forward a credible fiscal anchor that outlines a clear pathway and a firm target to return to balance. There is no grand vision for restoring Canada's reputation as a trusted middle power among the world's nations, neither is there a serious plan to harness the power and potential of our sustainably produced natural resources to address the environmental challenges facing our world. In short, this budget fails to deliver the visionary leadership that these times call for. Instead, this budget is emblematic of an unserious Prime Minister, an unserious Minister of Finance and unserious government.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That is from the Proverbs of Solomon, who is considered to be one of the wisest men ever to walk the earth. We need a vision, and I will have more to say in the days ahead.
Until then and until tomorrow, I move:
That the debate be now adjourned.
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- Apr/6/22 2:35:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, tomorrow we will witness the Liberal government's very first NDP budget. The picture will not be pretty. Canadians should expect a tax-and-spend budget that will make inflation even worse than it is today, with gobs and gobs of unfocused spending, deficits as far as the eye can see and of course higher taxes.
Can the Prime Minister tell us whether his budget will deliver a plan to fight the skyrocketing cost of living in Canada?
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