- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Calgary Forest Lawn
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 65%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $131,041.76
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, the costly coalition strikes again. The fall economic statement gave us a window into the government's ongoing spending problem and the uncertain economic future that Canadians are bracing for. Liberal-made inflation continues to be a reality for Canadians and their families, while Liberal spending continues at a record pace.
After this Prime Minister spent more than all prime ministers before him combined, the finance minister had an opportunity to get her government's spending under control, listen to Canadians, stop new taxes and cancel the tripling of the carbon tax. There was hope that the finance minister would hear the plea to follow the wisdom of the Conservative leader that a dollar of savings would be found for every new dollar spent.
This update shows that the Prime Minister's addiction to spending shut her down. What is unfortunate is that it means Canadians will continue to pay record prices for groceries, gas and home heating. It means mortgages, loans and rent will all cost more, and it means Canadians continue to fall further and further behind.
It is like our country is being pulled back into the days of Pierre Trudeau, a prime minister who also inherited an excellent fiscal position and stable economy but then spent everything in the treasury and more, adding billions to the national debt. One deficit after another increased Canada's debt by 1,000%, and the deficit in his last year in office was over $37 billion, which is roughly $90 billion in today's money and eerily like last year's deficit. Canadians were also hit with high Liberal-made inflation and high interest rates caused by that spending. As a result, it took 13 years for the federal government to be pulled out of the deficit tailspin left by that government.
We are seeing the same pattern re-emerge as this Prime Minister adds hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt. Liberal-made inflation continues, and interest rates caused by his out-of-control spending are rising. The Liberal government took over from the Conservatives, who balanced the budget and left the finances in good shape. Conservatives shepherded Canada through the 2008 recession without record-high spending or inflation. The inflation rate under the previous government never reached 4%, despite the recession and wars in the Middle East.
In contrast, before even one COVID case was detected in Canada, the Prime Minister had already added $110 billion to the debt. He then proceeded to spend and spend and spend, to the tune of half a trillion dollars in just the last two years. Liberals told Canadians that their enormous spending spree was to protect people from COVID. We learned that almost half of the $500 billion was actually not even related to pandemic measures and supports. Even the part of those hundreds of billions of dollars that was COVID related is also very questionable.
In budget 2022, the government continued to add to the debt with a $90-billion deficit as it announced $30 billion in new spending. This was at a time when inflation was at 6.7% and climbing, and stakeholders such as the Conference Board of Canada warned that new spending on this scale would add further fuel to this inflationary fire.
Since fiscal year 2014-15 and all the way to 2020-21, the government's program expenses have increased by 113%. The bureaucracy has also grown to almost 400,000 employees, costing taxpayers $60.7 billion. The government loves to claim it was creating jobs, but it turns out it did it for its bureaucracy, using money it got from Canadians struggling with Liberal inflation. What the government's economic update does not show Canadians is how the Liberals plan to return to fiscal stability or how they will rein in their spending. It instead reannounces several billion dollars from the 2022 budget and adds over $6 billion in new spending.
The PBO, economists and the Conservative leader have all warned the government that its out-of-control spending is driving up inflation. Now Canadians are getting hit from the left with inflation, as well as being squeezed by higher interest rates hiked by the same Bank of Canada that has kept printing money for the Liberals to spend.
Hard-working Canadians and their families are not even getting by, and any support the government proposes is evaporated by inflation, taxes, and higher mortgages and rents. Grocery inflation is at a 40-year record high as prices increased 11.4% in September. That has led to one in five Canadians skipping meals and forced 1.5 million people to visit a food bank in just one month. One-third of those food bank users are children.
It is not only grocery inflation that is eating up Canadians' paycheques. Home heating bills are also soaring. Natural gas prices were hit with 37% inflation, and other fuels increased by 48.7%.
The solution proposed by the finance minister is for families to cancel their Disney+ subscription. How out of touch does one have to be to tell Canadians that billions and billions of inflationary spending is a good thing and they should not worry if they cannot afford to eat, heat their home, or go to work, because cancelling their $14-a-month subscription will fix everything.
This is from a minister who makes way more than the average Canadian, kept her job during the lockdowns, voted to keep COVID measures in place long after the rest of the world opened up, and fed the Prime Minister’s spending addiction with taxpayers’ money. People in my riding and many parts of Canada cannot even afford Internet, let alone Disney+. They choose between heating their homes, feeding their kids, and paying for rent or their mortgage.
I grew up in an immigrant family that had very little. We knew, though, that if we worked hard and kept dreaming of a better future, we could one day achieve the Canadian dream. I know that through hard work and the grace of God, I am lucky to be standing here in this place, representing the community I grew up in and knowing my family is going to be okay.
That is not a luxury that many other Canadians and newcomers have. In a developed country like Canada, it should be possible for anyone, no matter where they come from or what their last name is, to work hard and get back what they are willing to put in. Unfortunately, the reality today is that dream is gone.
Conservatives have stood in the House week after week, demanding on behalf of Canadians that the government stop new taxes and cancel its plans to triple the carbon tax. Even after the Bank of Canada's governor said the carbon tax added to inflation, and even after the inflation numbers showed home heating costs increasing by ridiculous amounts, the costly coalition voted against our motions and responded to questions with condescending statements that ignored Canadians’ pain.
Liberals insist that spending more money and raising taxes is the solution to the fire they started. The left also loves to talk about so-called greedflation, but the real greed here is the profits the government is making off the empty stomachs of Canadians. The government is now making more revenue as inflation drives up the tax dollars the government brings in.
Canadians are hurtling towards a long, cold and hungry winter, and the other side does not look encouraging, yet the minister wants everyone to believe that Canada will be fine while all the spending, inflation and high interest rates wreak havoc on our economy. The government and the Liberal insiders might be fine, sitting on all the taxpayer money, but the people who paid those taxes are already paying the price.
Even more frustrating for Canadians is that this update had the opportunity to do what is right and stop the out-of-control spending, the taxing and the virtue signalling, yet none of that was done. Savings were not found to pay for new spending. The tripling carbon tax, payroll tax, second carbon tax and inflation tax continue targeting Canadians while loading up government coffers.
It is time to stop flooding the economy with government money and create more of what Canadians’ money buys: more homes, more energy and more food here at home. With the Conservative leader as prime minister, a Conservative government will remove gatekeepers. We will build more homes and affordable energy projects and let Canada’s world-class agriculture sector grow the food the world needs. Canadians are out of money, and the costly coalition is out of touch. While the Liberals continue to fail Canadians, Conservatives will fight to restore the Canadian promise and make hard work mean something again in this country.
For these reasons and more, 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-32, an act to implement certain provisions of the fall economic statement tabled in Parliament on November 3, 2022, and certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on April 7, 2022, because the bill brings in new inflationary spending that is not matched by an equivalent saving, and does not cancel planned tax hikes.
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- Mar/23/23 10:21:20 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today with another opportunity to warn the government about the course it is on.
Winston Churchill is famous for saying, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, and he was right. We can just look at the Liberal government. High taxes, high inflation and corporate socialism are not an innovation of today's Liberals. It has been going on for years. This is a lefty obsession: raising the taxes of everyday Canadians, and then turning around and spending so much money that the government runs massive inflationary deficits and runs up the debt. The only people who benefit are the wealthy Liberal insiders and their corporations. In the 1970s, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau did this exact same thing. At the time, he spent more than all his predecessors combined, driving up Canada's debt and leaving in his wake nearly two decades of high inflation and high interest rates.
Canadians are turning in their house keys, taking on more household debt just to survive and worrying about whether they can afford to heat their homes, buy groceries or gas up their cars. It sounds very familiar. It is another example of history repeating itself.
We know that, just as in the days of Pierre Trudeau, the current Prime Minister created the inflation and cost of living crisis we see today with his out-of-control spending. While he got Tiff Macklem and the Bank of Canada to cover his massive deficits with money printing, he did nothing to address the inflation concerns or ease the inflationary pressures of higher taxes. Instead, the Prime Minister passes on the taxes. He takes from everyday Canadians and spends their money on high-priced consultants and Liberal insiders who get cushy government contracts.
The concept of money printing and inflation is not even the invention of the Liberals of the 1970s. In the 1700s, French banker and economist Richard Cantillon observed that the rich and the insiders get all the benefits when the government increases the money supply. In those days, the rich and the insiders were the aristocracy closest to the French king. When a gold mine was discovered and the supply of gold increased, Cantillon saw that the value of gold did not increase, and neither did the wealth of the everyday people. Instead, the value of gold diminished. Instead of one gold coin purchasing a loaf of bread, it now took two, yet the wealthy gold mine owner and the landowner growing grain for bread were better off. They could keep spending money on luxuries, while everyday people fell further behind.
Today, Canada sees the same thing happening. We are not just witnessing the 1970s repeat themselves. We are seeing fundamental economics return with a vengeance. Leave it to the Liberal government to ignore an at least 300-year-old lesson in inflation.
Today's aristocracy is the ones benefiting from the $600 billion spent in the last eight years. These insiders enjoy privileged access to billions of tax dollars stashed away in Liberal programs like the Canada Infrastructure Bank or the Canada growth fund. These are the same insiders who will benefit from the so-called “just transition”, which will eliminate hundreds of thousands of good-paying, responsible Canadian energy jobs. They are the same insiders who will benefit from the $21.4 billion the Prime Minister is handing out to consultants like McKinsey, and from what his ministers are handing out to their besties in cushy contracts. These insiders are the same ones getting rich off the inflationary deficits and wasteful spending.
Do not get me wrong. As a proud Albertan and Conservative, I support the free market and individuals' ability to make and use their money the way they want to. What I have a problem with is when the Liberal government takes more out of the pockets of everyday Canadians and in some quasi-corporate socialist way redistributes these tax dollars to the rich and the Liberal insiders.
This is such a disregard for freedom, free enterprise and Canadians' money. The blatant payoffs to Liberal friends using taxpayers' money only make life more expensive for the rest of us. As the Leader of the Opposition has clearly explained to this House, just as Cantillon observed 300 years ago, it is this type of government waste that causes the people to suffer while the rich insiders have never had it so good.
What is most frustrating is how the Liberals cannot see that the increasing cost of government is tied to the increasing cost of living. That is what I take issue with. In the study the finance committee overtook, despite the warnings and voices of everyday Canadians pleading with us to address the real issue, the cost of living crisis, the Liberal-NDP costly coalition joined forces to make recommendations that will not restore affordability.
In our dissenting report, Conservatives were clear: The Liberal government must rein in its inflationary deficit spending and address its ballooning debt. We reiterated our calls for no new taxes and no new spending, including all planned tax hikes, such as the tripling of the carbon tax, the second carbon tax, the luxury tax, the escalator tax on alcohol, and the payroll tax increases. We called on the Liberal government to adopt the pay-as-you-go law the Conservative leader proposed, which was endorsed by the Minister of Finance in a letter to her own ministers last fall.
The reality is that, after eight years of the current Prime Minister, Canadians are out of money and the Liberals are out of touch. We cannot saddle future generations with borrowing for current spending and deficits. Interest rates are the highest they have been since the 2008 global recession. One in five Canadians is skipping meals, out of money or accessing charities for basic needs. Newcomers are being driven out of this country. One in five newcomers wants to pack up and leave. The number one cause of that is the high cost of living in this country.
Mortgages and rents have doubled since 2015. The average rent across Canada's 10 biggest cities is now over $2,200 a month, compared to almost $1,200 a month in 2015. Mortgages are now above $3,100 compared to $1,400 a month in 2015. All the while, Canada has the lowest homes per capita in the G7, and the lack of supply has home prices still inflated 30% above prepandemic levels. This is the result of eight years of out-of-control Liberal spending and increasing tax hikes.
That is why Conservatives are calling for budget 2023 to reverse the economic mismanagement brought on by the Prime Minister. Canada needs to stop printing money and, instead, make more of what money buys; axe the damaging and failed carbon tax, especially for farmers, so they can produce the food that Canada and the world need; remove gatekeepers to free up and speed up permits for homes, so that people can afford homes and so that job-creating energy projects can get built, which will create paycheques at home in Canada. By addressing inflationary deficit spending and high taxes, we can bring home lower prices and more powerful paycheques so that hard work pays off again.
This pre-budget consultation report fails to address the inflation and the cost of living crisis, and fails to provide real solutions. That is why, while I am on my feet, I move that the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:
the 10th Report of the Standing Committee on Finance, presented on Friday, March 10, 2023, be not now concurred in, but that it be recommitted to the Standing Committee on Finance with instruction that it amend the same so as to recommend that the government create a “Blue Seal” National Professional Testing Standard to quickly license professionals, like doctors and nurses, who prove they are qualified, and that anyone who has passed the common national test for their profession would get a “Blue Seal” certificate allowing them to work in any province or territory that chooses to join the Blue Seal Standard.
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