- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $138,707.52
- Government Page
- Feb/6/24 3:04:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if the Liberals do not measure the results of the carbon tax, there are no results. The Liberals have no shame in punishing Canadians without anything to show for it.
Here is something we can measure, though. After eight years of the Liberal government, gas is up, groceries are up, home heating is up because of its failed carbon tax.
Now that the environment minister has exposed his own carbon tax scam, will he finally axe the tax?
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- Feb/6/24 3:02:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, shame on the Liberals for telling Canadians that their costly carbon tax is reducing emissions. It is a complete scam.
The minister pretends that his carbon tax reduces emissions, but now we know that the Liberals do not measure the results of their carbon tax. With no measurement, there are no results. No wonder emissions went up after eight years of the NDP-Liberal government.
Why did the environment minister mislead Canadians about his carbon tax scam?
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- Feb/6/24 3:00:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, last week, the environment minister revealed the truth about the carbon tax. I asked how many emissions were directly reduced from the carbon tax in an Order Paper question. The minister's response was “the government does not measure the annual amount of emissions that are directly reduced by federal carbon pricing.” Those are his words, not mine.
Why is the minister forcing Canadians to pay his carbon tax if he does not measure the emissions he pretends to reduce?
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- Nov/9/23 2:17:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years it has never been more clear that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. He told Canadians that, if they just paid their costly carbon tax, the NDP-Liberal government would meet their environmental target.
However, in a bombshell report, Canada's environment commissioner revealed that, despite a punishing carbon tax, the Liberals will fail to achieve their own emission targets. In fact, the only time emissions went down under the current government was when the entire economy was shut down. It is all pain and no gain under the NDP-Liberal government.
The truth is finally exposed. The carbon tax was never an environmental plan. It was always just a tax plan. After eight years of environmental failure, the Prime Minister is definitely not worth the cost.
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- May/10/23 6:15:30 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the government again did not answer my question. I find it interesting that the Liberal platform was to tax hospitals in the form of a carbon tax to heat themselves. That is an outstanding type of platform. Maybe the member should run on it again and call this the actual carbon tax that it is, but I digress.
I guess Canadian hospitals, municipalities and universities will never know where the money went. Here is an idea. Instead of forcing hospitals and municipalities to pay a carbon tax, and instead of designing a complicated government program that makes it look like the money will be returned, let us just scrap the carbon tax altogether.
I will give the government one more chance: Why did the Liberal government mislead Canadians and not return any carbon tax revenue to hospitals, municipalities or universities through its own MUSH retrofit program?
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- May/10/23 6:08:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my question to the Liberals is regarding their failed, ineffective and ever-increasing carbon tax. The Liberals have misled Canadians on their carbon tax, not once, not twice, but many times. Government members must be held accountable for their misleading carbon tax claims, and they must answer to the Canadians they are supposed to represent.
Let us take a walk down memory lane. First, the Liberals promised not to raise the carbon tax, and then they tripled it. Then the Liberals promised Canadians they would get more money back than they had paid, but the government’s own Parliamentary Budget Officer proved the government wrong. In fact, we now know the average family in 2023 will pay between $402 and $847 even after the rebates. Then the Liberals claimed the carbon tax would reduce emissions, but guess what, emissions went up.
Now we know the government misled Canadians once again on its failed carbon tax. Let me explain. In 2019, the Liberals announced a program called the MUSH retrofit stream. MUSH stood for municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals. It was a bureaucratic government program designed to return the carbon tax back to the public institutions it was charged to so they could afford energy-efficient retrofit upgrades.
One may be wondering why on earth the government is forcing a carbon tax on our hospitals and schools in the first place, or how this reduces emissions, and trust me, I wonder the same.
Despite this, and despite promising to return the money the Liberals took from our hospitals and public institutions, no money was returned to hospitals, no money was returned to municipalities and no money was returned to universities. Not one dime.
The Liberals took millions of dollars to Ottawa, created their own bureaucratic program, promised to return it and never did. Even the commissioner of the environment pointed this failure out in a recent report, and local governments across Canada were wondering where the millions of dollars they were promised went. We would never have known this if it were not for an Order Paper question I submitted because the Liberals took the money and secretly shut down the program without telling Canadians. I guess we will never know where the money went.
My question to the Liberal government is very simple. Why did the Liberal government mislead Canadians and not return any carbon tax revenue to hospitals, municipalities or universities through its own MUSH retrofit program?
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- Feb/14/23 2:10:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the cost of food production in Canada is soaring because of the government's failed carbon tax. A family farm is now expected to pay $150,000 in carbon tax every single year. Families will pay over $16,000 a year in groceries. It is no surprise that Canadians are visiting food banks at record rates: The Prime Minister has failed the producers who put food on the table.
It does not need to be like this. Conservatives will stand up for farmers, ranchers and consumers, and we will axe the failed carbon tax.
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- Nov/29/22 3:01:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, first the Liberals promised not to raise the carbon tax, and then they tripled the tax. Then they said Canadians would get more money back when they paid the carbon tax. That was proven false. Then the Liberals promised the carbon tax would lower emissions, but emissions went up.
When will the Liberal government stop misleading Canadians and cancel the failed carbon tax?
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- Jun/16/22 9:11:41 p.m.
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Madam Chair, ironically, no. On the fuel source, what are they going to reduce? It is the only option they really have at this point. There is no other choice. We have no choice to make.
We need energy to grow food. It does not matter where it comes from. We need diesel fuel and it comes from natural gas and it comes from fossil fuels. There is no other choice right now. Manitoba tried to eliminate the use of coal for heating homes and stuff like that, and it did not work. It just came back that we needed to heat our homes at the end of the day.
This is a made-in-Canada problem. The government can fix it, if it really decides to and starts working with farmers. I think that is the most important thing it could start doing right now.
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Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-19, the budget implementation act. I will be honest. I found the title of this year's budget quite misleading. The NDP-Liberal government titled this year's budget, “A Plan to Grow Our Economy and Make Life More Affordable”. If the government really wanted to grow our economy and make life more affordable, it would have looked at Canadian agriculture. Unfortunately, when I looked for Canadian agriculture in the budget, I noticed that not one page was fully dedicated to agri-food or agriculture. The blatant lack of priority for Canadian agriculture would be concerning in any budget, but even more concerning in budget 2022.
We are in a food crisis. There is a global food shortage, and the Canadian government is nowhere to be found. I am going to quote Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, a professor and researcher of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University, who has been sounding the alarm on this crisis. He stated, “We need to be clear on the fact that by fall more than 100 million people will experience either famine or severe hunger.” Let us let that statistic sink in: By fall, more than 100 million people will experience either famine or extreme hunger.
Corn and wheat make up 30% of the calories consumed on earth, yet the region responsible for 25% of these exports is at war. That means that the poorer countries will lose access to their food supply and developed countries will pay higher prices to secure their food. Where in the budget was there anything to ramp up the production of export capacity of these commodities? I sure did not find it.
When I read the budget implementation act, I saw things like new taxes on luxury goods and vaping products. These are the types of things that the government has prioritized over Canadian agriculture. This reminds me of Maslow's hierarchy of needs: one of the best-known theories in human motivation. This hierarchy is modelled in the shape of a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is the need for self-actualization. Beneath that are the need for esteem, the need for love and belonging and the need for safety. At the bottom of the pyramid are the foundational psychological needs, including food, for example. Society does not care about the higher levels of needs if the foundational needs are not met. At a time when the world is in a food crisis, the NDP-Liberal government is more focused on some higher ideological need than on the foundational need of food security.
I am shocked that the government is not focused on replacing the global reduction in food from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Not only could Canada feed the world, but we could also create wealth and jobs for our rural communities. We are one of the few remaining agriculture-exporting nations on earth. I believe we have a role to play in feeding the world. However, when I read the budget, I do not see any priority given to this by the current government.
The government has the mentality that western Canada should be limited to simply producing, harvesting and exporting raw commodities. This means that even if Canadians produced a record crop, we would still have to rely on other countries to process our commodities. This is the wrong mentality. We can do so much more. The government should create the right business environment so industry can create more value in Canadian agriculture products. When we turn our raw commodities into high-quality products such as canola oil, flour and starch products, we not only grow our economy but we also meet the demands of the world.
It was the current government that commissioned the Barton Report. In that report, agriculture was identified as a sector where Canada has the potential for substantial growth and export improvement. The report mentioned global population growth, a rising protein demand in Asia and the need for trusted markets. Canada could and should meet these new global demands, if only the government would let it.
Production and processing capacity is not the only bottleneck in the agriculture value food chain. We must also improve the resilience and reliability of our transportation system. There is no mention of investing in transportation to export our agri-food products faster and more efficiently. I think all members of the House would agree with the notion that our country is too reliant on a few transportation systems.
We saw this last year when the flooding in B.C. completely landlocked our ability to export product. Imagine the drastic consequences of not being able to feed the world because we could not get our agri-food products to tidewater.
I am noticing a consistent theme with this Liberal government. It is more focused on the farming of the past than on the farming of the future. The Liberals try to be visionaries in many areas, but never in agriculture. The lack of thinking is limiting our nation's potential and starving the world. If the Liberals want to grow our economy, I can tell members how: It is through agriculture.
Not only does the budget fail to prioritize increased food production, but it also fails to address the restrictions and regulations that are preventing Canada from becoming an agriculture superpower. We know that this government's carbon tax is restricting our ag industry's competitiveness and driving up the cost of food from the day it is planted until the day it is consumed.
APAS reported that the government's carbon tax would add an additional $12.50 of input costs per acre on wheat by 2030. At the same time, when the world is desperate for wheat, it is absurd that this government is actually making it more expensive to produce such an essential commodity.
The government also appears to be drafting regulations that would restrict fertilizer usage for Canadian farmers in the name of the climate agenda. Any plan to meet fertilizer emissions reductions should not be at the cost of production. Is the government aware that there is a global fertilizer shortage? The less fertilizer that is available, the less food we can grow.
MNP reported that reducing Canadian fertilizer use to achieve 30% emissions reduction would result in yield losses. Corn, for example, would see losses of over 67 bushels per acre per year, which is about 40%.
Where is the investment in creating a more competitive fertilizer industry? Where is the focus on exporting Canadian fertilizer? I did not see that in the budget.
I also learned last week that Health Canada has yet to release its regulations on gene editing. This innovative plant science technology is an important tool in helping Canadian farmers be more productive and efficient. Plant science innovations have been responsible for a 50% increase in crop productivity over the past century. Without these innovations, prices would be 45% higher, on average, for many food staples.
The government should create an investment environment that fuels plant science research and development. There is no reason why Canada cannot have the fastest and most responsible regulatory process in the world. Where was this investment in the budget? I did not see it.
The world is facing a food crisis. Food is becoming unaffordable for millions of people and, for some, food is becoming unavailable. Millions will starve if Canada does not step up to the plate. Instead of focusing on fulfilling the basic needs of society, this government continues to focus on a political agenda. This government's disregard for the food crisis before us is deeply disturbing.
Not one page in the budget is focused on agriculture and agri-food. That should concern every single member of the House. It is time to focus on the future of farming. It is time to make Canada an agricultural superpower, and it is time for Canada to feed the world when the world needs us most.
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