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Context: House Hansard - 227 - Sep/29/23

Oct/18/23 3:10:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the Liberal government, the deficit continues to rise. In March, the finance minister said that this year the deficit was going to be $40 billion. The Parliamentary Budget Officer just told us that she was off by at least $6 billion. Earlier this month, in a Senate committee, finance officials could not even say what the Liberal-NDP government is spending on debt interest charges. The Prime Minister is simply not worth the cost, so when will the Prime Minister come up with a plan to balance the budget so Canadians can keep their homes?

101 words

Context: House Hansard - 203 - May/31/23

Sep/29/23 10:21:47 a.m.
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Re: Bill C-50 Bill C-48

Madam Speaker, my apologies, but I have a very difficult time believing the sincerity of the government with this bill, and that is a result of its constant retaliation against the natural resources sector. We saw this with Bill C-48. We also saw this with Bill C-69. We have seen this with the endless carbon tax after carbon tax, as well as with emissions standards, which the government forced industry to meet. This results in a larger mental health crisis among industry workers and higher suicide rates. Perhaps it is even fuelling the opioid crisis. With a $41-billion deficit and $2.1 trillion of debt across Canada, and with oil and gas making up 7.5% of the GDP, how are the Liberals going to replace the funds in the coffers from a dying industry that they have killed at a time when they are also overspending?

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Context: House Hansard - 203 - May/31/23

May/31/23 8:39:14 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-35

Mr. Speaker, that is the whole point. We should be debating ways to find efficiencies within the government to lower taxes and to lower spending. Instead, we are wasting our time here in this House, creating programs to make the government look good and to pretend to Canadians that it is doing something. I absolutely agree with the member that we should be doing things that actually benefit Canadians, like decreasing inflationary spending and decreasing taxation so that Canadians can buy whatever they want in the grocery store, so that Canadians can actually purchase a home, and so that Canadians can make the choice for a parent to stay at home if they want. The Liberals are perpetuating their lie. That is what they are doing, and Canadians are catching on to it.

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Context: House Hansard - 190 - May/3/23

May/31/23 8:26:22 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-35

Mr. Speaker, I always appreciate the opportunity to come here to this House of Commons and speak on behalf of the people of Calgary Midnapore. Of course, I am very proud to say that I am a proud hockey mom in the riding of Calgary Midnapore, and I certainly like to have conversations with the other mothers at the hockey rink. We do that. We wait for our kids to get on the ice or wait for the practice to end, and we have conversations, and certainly we have conversations about child care. There is no doubt about it. A lot of families require child care. A lot of families are not so fortunate as to have a parent stay at home, as two incomes are required, but we also have conversations about why that is so, and we have conversations about the cost of living. My truth, and the truth of the hockey moms I talk to, is that the words from the government about making life affordable for Canadian families are a lie, and day care is just a part of that lie. It is a cycle that the government has created. First of all, there is inflationary spending. We have seen that excessively. We have seen excessive taxation, so there is inflationary spending and excessive taxation. This drives up the cost of living for Canadian families as well as costs for Canadian businesses. I have mentioned often in this House that I come from a small business family, so taxes on small business are very important to me and to my family. As a result of the cost of living being driven up, Canadian families are driven into poverty. Businesses have to close and lay off workers, and Canadian families cannot afford to eat, cannot afford rent and certainly cannot afford child care. What the government does after it has created this nation of poverty is throw little scraps out to the Canadian public, and this day care program is just a marketing plan. It is just one of those scraps. The government threw out the rent subsidy. They said, “Here is $500 this month; I don't know what you're going to do next month, but here is $500.” The grocery rebate was $234, even though groceries are going to cost an additional $1,000 for a family of four. The government makes life unaffordable for Canadians, and day care is just another example of what it is doing. It is creating a cycle of continuous poverty for Canadians, whereby Canadians are reliant upon the government instead of on themselves and the common sense of the common people, as we talk about. This day care scheme is just another example. I talked about inflationary spending. We saw in budget 2023 an additional $69.7 billion that is going to be spent. This will cost each Canadian household an additional $4,200. I just came from the operations committee, where we had the president of the Treasury Board, who just added another $1.3 billion to the tab of Canadians for the recently negotiated agreements, which the Treasury Board failed to do two years previously. In a hurry to get things done, it has now finally completed these agreements. I thank goodness, because services were suffering for Canadians, but it is for the price tag of $1.3 billion. The government has to bring down inflationary spending and excessive taxation so Canadians can have a chance. We see an escalator tax on beer, wine and spirits of 2%. Let me say that the hockey moms and I sometimes could use a nice glass of wine at the end of the day, but it is 2% more now, as a result of the government and its creation of a life that is not affordable for Canadians. We see an increase of 40% in the cost of food with high inflationary spending, with 1.5 million Canadians visiting food banks in a single month. We have talked about these numbers a lot in this House. One in five Canadians are skipping meals, and as I mentioned, the grocery rebate is just $234, but groceries are going to cost an additional $1,065. Day care is a part of this lie of affordability that the Liberals say they are creating for Canadians, when really they are just making everything more expensive. The cost of shelter has doubled. Mortgages have doubled from $1,400 in 2015 to $3,100 in 2023. Rents have doubled from $973 to $1,760, and that is for a single bedroom. Life is not affordable. Again, it is a result of what the Liberal government is doing. It is taking all this money and handing out little bits, little scraps, like this fake day care plan. The housing minister could not say what rent was in Kelowna when the member for Kelowna—Lake Country asked last week. That is an example of how out of touch the government is. The government is raising payroll taxes on workers in small businesses. A worker who is making above $66,000 will now need to pay an extra $255 to CPP and an extra $50 to EI, and of course we have the carbon tax. The carbon tax went up 14¢ a litre on April 1. We know that the carbon tax is driving up the cost of gas and groceries, as I indicated. Those groceries have to get to the supermarket somehow. They go through vehicles, which use gas, so there is a double taxation there. Then there is home heating, something that all Canadians need, yet the government has called Canadians “polluters” in the past. It called grannies in the Maritimes “polluters” when really Liberals are creating the cycle of poverty to make people dependent on them. An average family will spend between $402 and $847 a year more on the carbon tax. I have talked about all of these other things. I have talked about how the government needs to reduce inflationary spending because the cycle that it is creating drives up the cost of living for Canadians and drives them down into poverty, and then Canadians are forced to accept these scraps, like this $10-a-day child care. This $10 day care is an illusion, because if it cannot be accessed, it does not exist. It does not help thousands of families and children on the wait-lists or the operators who do not have the staff or the infrastructure. It has been said that in the future there will only be one space for every three children who need it and that a shortage of 8,500 child care workers will exist in this country by 2026. Perhaps the government could use a pink seal program, something very similar to the blue seal program that our leader has put forward for the trades. In B.C., 27% of child care centres turn away children due to a lack of staff. In Ontario, by 2026, 38% of kids will not have a space. The thing about this is that the Liberal government has the audacity to think that it can do things better than the common people, better than Canadians. Where have we seen the failure of this? We have seen it with passports, from the very minister who is responsible for this program, and with the immigration backlog, and with the inability to negotiate a public service deal over two years. Also, what does this say about mothers? So many moms would rather just stay home with their children, but they cannot. They cannot because the Liberal government has made us into a country of two-paycheque families. Two paycheques are needed to keep a family functioning, to keep a roof over their heads and to keep them fed. As well, what does it say about the women who operate these day cares? They are closing them down, taking away income from families, and often it is new Canadian families. In conclusion, the Liberal government's talk about making life affordable for Canadians is a lie. Inflationary spending and taxation drive up the cost of living for Canadians and for businesses. It drives Canadians into poverty. They cannot eat, they cannot afford rent, and businesses close. I will not even get into the natural resources sector. The government throws scraps at Canadians. This day care program is one of the scraps. “Making life affordable for Canadians” is a lie. This day care program is one of them.

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Context: House Hansard - 157 - Feb/9/23

May/3/23 7:08:05 p.m.
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Re: Bill S-6

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleagues for ensuring that the debate stays relevant. Certainly the amount of money the Liberal government is spending is critical to every bill, so thank you, Madam Speaker, for overseeing the discussion as I continue my interaction here today. As I was saying, the finance minister indicated that she would use fiscal restraint. I do not believe she did so. If I could go even further back to when Bill S-6 was first being discussed, which was last spring before we broke for the summer recess, it was at that time and even into the fall that the finance minister indicated she was going to implement an idea that our leader has committed to: the “pay as you go” system. She said she would have fiscal restraint, but I do not believe she has that. Last year, at the end of the spring session, Bill S-6 was being discussed, as well as the “pay as you go” system, but both of these things did not happen. In relation to our economy, I talked about Canadians being frustrated, defeated and exhausted. I am sure members saw the article in The Globe and Mail today indicating that this point in Canadian history is the worst time for new small business start-ups. This touches my heart very much. I know members have heard me speak before about how I come from a small business family in Calgary Midnapore. For me, growing up, small business was always front of mind. This included regulations, and I believe small businesses will struggle with the changing regulations indicated in Bill S-6. Again, if we look across the different departments, we can see how this can happen. Those are a couple of points in relation to Bill S-6. I will also point out that in Bill S-6, with the way the government legislates and operates in general, the language is consistently filled with jargon, with words and phrases that are difficult for Canadians to interpret. I started out this speech by talking about how legislation should be for Canadians. It is the common Canadian we should be legislating for. When we have phrases that are too complex for Canadians to understand, it does not help them. It does not empower them. We need to do that. With that, I would like to take a moment to talk about the plain language law that we would implement once we are in government, again in an effort to get government working for Canadians instead of having Canadians work for the government, as we are seeing in this case. I thought that was a very important point to mention. As shadow minister for the Treasury Board, another place where I see this take place is with the public accounts. There needs to be much revision to the public accounts and how they are presented. I do not believe Canadians understand them in the format they are in presently. I always share the story that in my home growing up, like the concept we have in our home, a budget was like this: We bring in this much money as a household, we spend this much money as a household and we save this much money as a household. I do not believe the public accounts reflect a simple concept such as this, a concept that many Canadian households and many Canadians sitting around the dinner table have to follow. Again, this is in relation to the jargon, the lack of plain language and the complexity we see in regulations and legislation from the government, which is relevant to Bill S-6. We also talk about Bill S-6 being indicative of another concept, which is very dear to the official opposition and the heart of our leader: getting rid of the gatekeepers. That essentially means making it easier for Canadians to live, to conduct business and to have the quality of life they deserve, which the government is not delivering to them, as evidenced by some of the earlier indicators I gave. We as the official opposition have provided some constructive ideas for getting rid of the gatekeepers. For example, our opposition day motion that was presented yesterday talked about getting rid of the municipal gatekeepers, which, coming from Calgary, I have had an opportunity to see first-hand at Calgary City Council. Having done some advocacy work at the civic level, I can say that all governments must be working together, pulling in the same direction in an effort to provide Canadians with the best standard of living, and that includes housing. Especially when we consider the ambitious immigration targets of the current government, we need to seriously and sincerely consider how we are going to accommodate all of these newcomers. Again, I say this as an Albertan. Alberta is a place of incredible growth and we are so happy that so many new Canadians and so many Canadians who have abided in other places are making the choice to come to Alberta, but we need to seriously consider how we are going to support our citizens. In his opposition day motion speech yesterday, my leader talked about how we will incentivize those municipalities that make the decision to build more homes for Canadians, and we will not reward those that do not. This is an excellent example of where we have to think about the gatekeepers. Bill S-6 is just an indicator that there are so many gatekeepers across government, when we have to make these minute changes to legislation which seems applicable to ages ago, including things as simple as removing stickers from liquid vending machines. It is astounding to me that these types of things are coming to light now. Another example I will give of the official opposition's desire to get rid of the gatekeepers is our unique idea to bring home doctors and nurses and to allow for a Blue Seal in the same way that we have the Red Seal in the trade professions. That is wonderful. It is just fantastic how we have more young people joining the trades. I am especially excited about more young women joining the trades. I am certainly glad to see some of the legislation, even if it is at a provincial level, allowing young women to feel comfortable in joining the trades. Whether it is providing safe and clean restrooms for them or whether it is providing equipment that is suitable for their size and stature, whatever that may be, that is just excellent. Our leader and the official opposition have found that the licensing bodies create endless barriers and red tape, which again is a topic that is talked about much in Bill S-6, resulting in an unnecessary, even greater shortage of doctors and nurses. I would like to quote this sentence from my leader. He said, “The Blue Seal will mean that it won’t matter where someone comes from, it matters what they can do.” That is just fantastic. If these doctors and nurses meet our Blue Seal standards, they will be able to work in our health care system. Again, this is just another example of the Conservative Party, the official opposition, looking for true efficiencies. Bill S-6 addresses these tiny things. Really our energies could be spent on addressing much larger problems and finding efficiencies in larger problems rather than, in many cases of Bill S-6, providing opportunities for even more legislation through regulation. I will add that legislation by regulation has not always resulted in the best outcomes for Canadians. I know that as we discuss Bill C-290 in the government operations committee right now, we are discussing, for example, the role of the public service integrity commissioner. A big discussion around these debates on Bill C-290 is really to decide how much leeway we will give the public service integrity commissioner in terms of regulation. These are significant things that touch upon workers and will gravely determine whether a public servant decides to file a grievance and if they feel comfortable in doing so. This is something that is very important. Another situation where we saw regulation was not sufficiently applied, for this official opposition, was the order in council regarding firearms. My goodness, that was before the pandemic, so three or four years ago now. That is a time when it most probably should have been legislation. Of course, we are going through the Bill C-21 process right now, which the Conservatives oppose. No matter what the wolf in sheep's clothing looks like, we will oppose Bill C-21. That is an example where regulation was used and perhaps should not have been. Perhaps it should have been left to legislation. This is most definitely another example. I look through these different examples. There are other examples that my colleagues will talk about this evening, things they are very concerned about, interpretations of endangered species, for example. Again, there are more topics filled with jargon, but members will give their comments as well as to what interpretation of this legislation will mean through regulation. It is something important to keep in mind, because, as I indicated, legislation should be made by the people for the people. This is something the official opposition, the Conservatives, are committed to. I think about how we are going to deal with the complex issues ahead of us, such as artificial intelligence, if we are talking about liquids coming out of vending machines. Bill S-6 brings back the complexity, the jargon and the gatekeepers of this legislation. We on this side of the House want to have legislation that works for every Canadian in every single home, my home, all our homes, so let us bring it home and let us re-evaluate Bill S-6.

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Context: House Hansard - 153 - Feb/3/23

Feb/9/23 3:01:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the government's inflationary spending, things are worse than ever for Canadians and they are struggling just to get by. The government has given over $100 million to McKinsey & Company. Why does the Prime Minister not just take responsibility that McKinsey is influencing the government and stop giving money to well-connected insiders?

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Context: House Hansard - 139 - Dec/1/22

Feb/3/23 11:12:11 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, after eight years of the government's inflationary spending, Canadians are barely getting by, while Liberal insiders and high-priced consultants have never had it so good. After eight years, Canadians have been struggling to cope with 40-year high inflation. After eight years, 1.5 million Canadians are visiting food banks in a single month, but after eight years, the government does not care. Instead of helping Canadians, the government decided to hand out over $100 million in contracts to its friends at McKinsey & Company, and that number keeps climbing. In fact, we still do not know the full amount awarded to McKinsey over eight years because the Liberal government refuses to say. However, we do know that, of the 23 contracts awarded, 20 of them were granted in a non-competitive environment and hand-picked by the government. We need to know how much has been handed out to McKinsey and the influence it has on our government. Canadians deserve answers, and we will not back down.

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Context: House Hansard - 134 - Nov/24/22

Dec/1/22 2:17:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, everything in our country seems to be broken since the Liberal government took office in 2015. The government's reckless spending has led to a 40-year-high inflation rate, 6.9% just this month, and Canadian families simply cannot absorb those rising costs. Instead, 1.5 million Canadians a month are having to use a food bank and one in five Canadians are skipping meals; nine in 10 Canadians are now tightening household budgets; and the average credit card balance held by Canadians was at a record high of $2,121 by the end of September. The RBC estimates that households will soon have to allocate 15% of their income to debt servicing alone. The government needs to take this inflation crisis seriously. It needs to cap government spending and inflationary deficits, and bring inflation down now.

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Context: House Hansard - 129 - Nov/17/22

Nov/24/22 3:08:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, everyone agrees that the government is failing. Even the Governor of the Bank of Canada said yesterday that the government has been spending too much for too long. Even the Parliamentary Budget Officer said that Albertans will spend $2,000 more on the carbon tax than they will get back in rebates. When will the government do the right thing and cancel its plan to triple, triple, triple the tax on gas, groceries and home heating?

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Context: House Hansard - 129 - Nov/17/22

Nov/17/22 2:36:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the government needs to rein in all of its reckless spending. The Prime Minister spent $420,000 on a weekend to London in 2021. Global Affairs Canada lost $7,000 in petty cash, if members can believe it. What does the government need to do? It needs to stop its inflationary spending and cancel its plan to triple the tax on gas, groceries and home heating.

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Nov/17/22 2:35:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the cost of living continues to increase for Canadians under the Liberal government. Food was up 10% in October; shelter is up close to 7% and gas almost 18%, and that is because the government has a problem with inflationary spending: $36.4 billion in this fiscal year alone. When will the government stop its inflationary spending and cancel its plan to triple the tax on gas, groceries and home heating?

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Nov/1/22 2:43:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are opposed to all wasteful spending, which includes $6,000 for a hotel room, $12,000 for groceries in a single month and $54 million for a single application. However, 53% of Canadians are worried we are going to enter a recession next year. Why is that? It is inflationary spending. Will this Liberal-NDP coalition commit to stopping inflationary spending?

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Nov/1/22 2:42:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the numbers are in: $2,400 per Canadian was spent last year. That is $171,000 a minute, yet 47% of Canadians feel they are in a worse economic position this year than last year, and 30% of Canadians feel we are already in a recession. Canadians cannot afford this costly coalition, so will this Liberal-NDP coalition commit to no inflationary spending?

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Nov/1/22 1:19:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, well, it is true. Numbers have come back, and there has been a significant increase in the number of full-time equivalents, without a doubt, and in fact even more than planned originally. The unfortunate thing is that this has been done without an improvement to services for Canadians. Canadians are still waiting for their passports, and there is still an incredible backlog in our immigration system. The Liberal-NDP government is clearly not up to the task of not only reducing spending but spending and getting results for Canadians.

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Context: House Hansard - 102 - Sep/26/22

Nov/1/22 1:09:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this motion is about an application that was supposed to cost $80,000, but instead ended up costing $54 million. Furthermore, a group of experts said that they could have created this app for $200,000 in a weekend. What this app represents is so much more than the app itself. It represents the level of government bloat we have come to see under the costly coalition. It represents the lack of transparency that we have come to expect from this coalition. Most of all, it reflects the serious situation that Canada finds itself in now of inflation, and the cause is inflationary spending. As we know, the bank rate started this year at 0.25%. It recently jumped to 3.75%. It is true that some external factors have contributed to this rate hike. Of course, there is the oil price spike, which began with the recovery of demand after COVID and was made worse by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That was one of those external factors. Also, China's hyper-restrictive COVID lockdowns disrupted international supply chains. However, there has been a consensus that the main reason for this inflation is inflationary spending by this costly coalition. An article was recently published by one of my favourite economists, Jack Mintz. In it he points to a study of the U.S. Federal Reserve last July. It concluded that countries with the largest-spending binges tended to have much higher inflation rates. Therefore, this is not something that is unique to Canada; it is something that has been seen as a trend, but certainly something of which the costly coalition is guilty. We know that Canada's headline inflation rate has eased to 6.9% from a peak of 8.1%, but food costs are still accelerating and underlying price pressures remain sticky. At the same time, the Bank of Canada has hiked interest rates by 350 basis points in just seven months, one of its sharpest tightening campaigns ever, to try to force inflation back to what was supposed to be a 2% target. Unfortunately, the bank last week signalled its tightening campaign was nearing its peak, but made it clear that it was not done yet as it hiked rates by 50 basis point to a fresh 14-year high. The average family will spend $3,000 more next year as a result of these inflationary effects. Food inflation is at a 40-year high. Grocery prices have been raised by 11.4%, and interest rates are going up. Energy costs are up 100% to 150%, some even 300%, and winter is coming of course. Mortgage payments, groceries, fuel and consumer goods have all gone up. We talk about what other nations are doing. Other nations have managed to fair much better than Canada. Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan and Hong Kong have all managed to keep their rates below 3%. Other nations are providing tax relief to their citizens. Fifty-one other national governments have provided some form of tax relief. That includes more than half of G7 and G20 countries, and two-thirds of the countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It found that at least 25 countries were choosing to provide tax relief at the pumps. Australia cut its gas tax in half. The United Kingdom announced billions of dollars of fuel tax relief. The Netherlands cut gas tax by 17¢ per litre. South Korea cut its taxes at the pumps by 30%. India cut gas taxes to keep inflation low, thus helping the poor and middle classes. Instead, the Prime Minister is also choosing to take more money from the pay of Canadians. If people are making $65,000 this year, the federal government is taking nearly $4,500 directly from their pay through the Canada pension plan and employment insurance taxes. Their employers are also coughing up an extra $4,800. This year, the annual payroll tax bill, including employer and employee payments, increased by $818 for each middle-class worker. Over the past decade, seven of which the Liberal government has been in power, it increased by $2,435. Our peers are choosing to reduce income taxes. Former U.K. chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng said, “We believe that high taxes reduce incentives to work”, as he announced payroll tax relief. Down under, the Australian government said that by putting more in their pockets, families would keep more of what they earned, allowing them to spend more on what they needed, as is provided by permanent tax cuts of up to $2,500 for individuals in 2022-23. Eighteen countries, including Belgium, Germany and Norway, chose to save their citizens money by reducing consumption taxes. As we can see, many of the nations I have named have made the choice to provide tax relief to Canadians. The costly coalition, the Liberal-NDP coalition, has not chosen that. The numbers are in. Canada ran a $90.2 billion deficit last year. That deficit is equivalent to almost $2,400 per Canadian and at the rate of $172,000 of new debt for every single minute of the fiscal year. That is not a small amount. It also means that Canada's total debt now stands well north of a trillion dollars. As of March 31, the Government of Canada also had an accumulated deficit of $1.13 trillion. We wonder where this is coming from. The Auditor General says that there are $500 million in overpayments to civil servants that need to be collected. A new report from Canada's Auditor General said that 28% of civil servants in its sampling had errors in their pay. If a government cannot even handle the payroll, why should it handle our nation's finances or even our country? Another example of this wasteful spending is the $12 million to Loblaws for new fridges. Where are Canadians at with this? Forty-seven percent of respondents in a survey of Canadians felt that their finances had worsened over the last year. Fifty-three percent believe that we will be in a recession next year. Even worse, 30% believe that we are in a recession right now. Canadians have long forgotten the sunny ways of the NDP-Liberal coalition. The good news is that relief is on the way. Relief is on the way with a Conservative government. We pledge no new taxes. We pledge the “pay-as-you-go” system. For every new dollar of spending, we must find a new dollar of savings. The motion today is not just about a $54-million application that was supposed to cost $80,000, which experts say could have been made for $200,000; it is about much more than that. It is about how the NDP-Liberal coalition has lost its way and how it needs to stop the taxes and stop the inflationary spending, now.

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Context: House Hansard - 102 - Sep/26/22

Sep/26/22 3:41:02 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-30

Madam Speaker, the government had the opportunity on many occasions to not spend the amount of money it did to raise inflationary spending, but it did not choose that. It chose to spend, and it is Canadians who will pay for it.

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Context: House Hansard - 98 - Sep/20/22

Sep/26/22 3:37:54 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-30

Madam Speaker, the only thing the New Democratic Party has been doing, in conjunction with the Liberals, is pushing up inflationary spending as a result of agreeing to everything the Liberals put in front of them. I said this before and I will say it again. If the member wanted to see different changes, things that are not currently within these bills or other ideas she had, she should have done a better job in negotiating with the government when they came to their agreement. I find it very rich that she accuses us of inaction, when in fact it is her and her party that have done a fantastic job of raising inflationary spending and running this nation into the ground.

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Context: House Hansard - 98 - Sep/20/22

Sep/20/22 7:08:20 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I would point out that the affordability bill of 2022 has measures that are set to cost $4.5 billion. Of that $4.5 billion, $1.4 billion was previously announced in budget 2022. This bill actually adds another $3.5 billion on top of the $53-billion deficit projected in 2022. A rent subsidy of $40 would not pay for a tank of gas, let alone help Canadians afford a more secure place to live. Every province in Canada with the exception of Manitoba has existing dental support programs for children. Conservatives are concerned about the duplication of programs interfering with provincial jurisdiction. In summary, Conservatives are focused on fighting, not fuelling inflation, and are opposed to any new spending. I would encourage my colleague and his government that, for any new dollar in spending, it must be matched with a dollar in savings—

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