- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- South Shore—St. Margarets
- Nova Scotia
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $136,927.65
- Government Page
- Apr/21/23 11:52:07 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, perhaps the member should listen to his Minister of Finance who, on Wednesday, said that competing with the subsidies of the Biden inflation act is a “race to the bottom”. Liberals surely would not give away $14 billion in taxpayer money without a contract on the exact commitments of jobs in the plant.
I will ask again: How many jobs in the plant will this $14-billion subsidy buy?
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- Apr/21/23 11:50:52 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, last year, Volkswagen had the same revenue as the Government of Canada, at $413 billion. Now the Liberals are providing a $14-billion subsidy from taxpayers.
My question is simple. How many jobs in the plant does $14 billion buy for this auto company, which was convicted of environmental law crimes in Canada?
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Mr. Speaker, I look forward to hearing the intervention of the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent.
My comments today lead off the comments of His Majesty's loyal opposition on Bill C-47. That is the Liberals' budget implementation bill. The question before us is whether anything in this budget bill will actually be true when we look at the promises of the Liberals compared with the results.
I want to put the record spending in this budget plan into some historical context. I know the Liberals are a little challenged on math sometimes, so please bear with me. I hope they can follow it.
In the federal election of 1968, Pierre Trudeau reassured Canadians that a Liberal government would not raise taxes or increase spending. During the election, he said that the government was not Santa Claus. How did that work out? When Pierre Trudeau became prime minister, real government spending increased from 17% of the GDP to 24.3%. In other words, the federal government's share of the economy rose 42% under Pierre Trudeau. Every single area of federal government spending increased, except defence spending, where Pierre Trudeau cut spending in half as a percentage of the budget. When Pierre Trudeau took office, we spent more on national defence than we did on servicing the country's debt. When he left office in 1984, for every dollar the government spent on defence, we spent $3 on paying the interest on his national debt.
Let us look at this another way. The deficit Pierre Trudeau ran in his last year of office was 8.3% of the GDP. Based on Canada's GDP in 2022, Pierre Trudeau's 8.3% of GDP deficit would be like an annual deficit of $157 billion today. His record was to drive Canada's debt from $262 billion when he became prime minister to $700 billion when he left office. Pierre Trudeau added $438 billion to Canada's debt, almost tripling it. This was from a Liberal leader who said he would not run deficits when he was first elected in 1968 and that the government was no Santa Claus.
I raise this because, as the adage goes, like father like son. By the time Pierre Trudeau left office in 1984, 38¢ of every dollar that the federal government spent was to pay interest on the debt that he had built up. His policies of massive spending led to a rapid rise in interest rates to try to reduce inflation. All that government spending simply made it worse. Interest rates rose to 21%.
Like his father, the current Liberal leader promised Canadians in his first election in 2015 that, even though Canada was running a robust growing economy and had a balanced budget left by the Harper government, he would run modest stimulus deficits. However, in 2019, it would be balanced. The platform that the Liberals all stood on in 2015 said: “We will run modest deficits for three years so that we can invest in growth for the middle class and credibly offer a plan to balance the budget in 2019” and “we will...reduce the federal debt-to-GDP ratio to 27 percent”.
Did he have a balanced budget in 2019, as he promised and as his father also promised in his first term? No, he did not: like father like son. The Liberals produced a $20-billion deficit in 2019. Promises were made, and promises were broken.
Did the Liberals reduce their first fiscal anchor of 27% of the GDP? No, they did not. It was 31% in 2019, so another promise was made and broken.
In the new Liberal budget after 2019, there was no longer talk of a balanced budget. The debt-to-GDP ratio was the new fiscal anchor. It would remain the same during the four years of that fiscal plan, even though that meant they would be spending more. We know that at least the promise to spend more and not to balance the budget was true.
We then had an early and unnecessary election in 2021. What did the Liberal platform say then about promises for the country's finances? There was no talk of balanced budgets until perhaps 2050, but the Liberals did promise to drop the debt-to-GDP ratio from 48.5% in 2021-22. We should remember that in 2019, their campaign promise said that, in 2022, the debt-to-GDP ratio would be 31%, not 48%.
What does the bill project for this year? The budget set the cumulative spending for the next five years at a record $3.1 trillion. We should remember that, in the fall, they promised that the budget would be balanced. However, if these numbers are to be believed, and if they did not add more spending in the rest of their term, they would add another $130 billion to the national debt. The national debt would rise to a record $1.3 trillion. The Liberals project that interest on the national debt would rise from $44 billion a year to $50 billion a year in five years. This is if we can believe the interest rate projections in this budget. That $50 billion in interest is $10 billion more than we spend on national defence.
The budget includes $84 billion in new tax credits for businesses over the next five years. The Liberals project that inflation will be 3.5% in 2023 and roughly 2.1% thereafter. For this to happen, inflation would need to drop from 5.5% now to 2% in July and stay there for the next five years. This is not likely. The $3.1 trillion in spending, with massive deficits, would pour gasoline on the inflation fire. Therefore, these projected inflation rates are ridiculous.
In the last year of the Conservative government, federal government spending was $280 billion, with a $1.9-billion surplus. This year, the budget projects $456 billion in spending. That is up $176 billion, or 63%, since the Liberals took office. The fiscal framework projects the government spending to be $543 billion. This is if there is no further spending in the rest of their term. That is $263 billion more than in 2015, representing a 94% increase in spending. The increase alone is almost as much as the entire 2015 budget. Taxes have risen by $282 billion since 2015. We know it is not a revenue problem, because revenue has gone up by 92%.
At the end of the bill's plan, Pierre Trudeau and the son, the current Liberal leader, will have contributed $1.1 trillion to Canada's national debt. Pierre Trudeau always spent more than he promised. After eight years of the Liberals, the son has done the same. Promises were made, and promises were broken. Canadians simply cannot afford any more Trudeaus.
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- Dec/8/22 1:30:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the NDP member from the costly coalition is obviously very sensitive to any accusation that his friends and fellow caucus members are putting up the cost of everything.
I will go back to what my constituents have written to me. The member for Kingston and the Islands, I am sure, is getting emails like this. Nancy wrote to me to raise the issues facing those on a federal disability pension. The member for Kingston and the Islands is obviously not aware that people live on disability pensions.
She continued with asking us to please raise their pension. She wrote that her oil bill was over $700, and she gets $895 a month. She cannot afford prescriptions, power, cable, phone or Internet, to say nothing of food. She lives in rural Nova Scotia, so everything she needs, she has to drive to, but she cannot afford gas. She says she is usually home anyway, but this is ridiculous. She goes on to talk about her medical needs, and she says she is living a life like the early days of the pandemic because she cannot get out and misses appointments.
She then says that the government is giving away millions of dollars, and she understands why it has to do it, and she does sympathize, but she asks about Canadian citizens. She questions if the government cares about them. She then says that she finds it hard to see her mom, as she is 35 kilometres away, and Nancy cannot afford the gas to visit her. Her mother is on an old age pension too and cannot afford food.
I would think that the Liberals would care about these issues and vote for the motion.
We are seeing, for example, that food inflation is up 10.8% because of the policies of the government. Fish, which is very important in my riding, is up 10.4%. Butter is up 16%. Eggs are up 11%. Margarine is up 37%. I am not buttering members up on this. The reality is it has gone up by 37%. Bread and rolls, which is something we butter up, have gone up 17%. I can go on. The food costs have grown enormously.
Fishing is an important part of my riding. It is lobster season and the winter has just started. It is a dangerous job, fishing in the north Atlantic for lobster in the winter during storms, with waves and snow. There are dangers when people are out to sea, 40 to 50 miles off shore.
I know I am going to get scoffs from the other side, but the cost of diesel for a fishing boat is $2.70 per gallon, which is triple what it was at the start of the season last year. It is tripling. It is because of the policies of the government that we no longer have access to the necessary bait. We are not allowed to fish mackerel because of the decisions of the government. The reality is they have to buy bait from Europe and Norway, and the bait has now doubled to $1.40 per fish.
There are people who have a loan from the provincial loan board. They are young entrepreneurs who have gotten into the fishing business and have upwards of a million dollars of loans, so they could buy their boat, their licence and their gear. Their loans have just rolled over this fall. Do members know what they are now? They were paying 2%. What do members think they have gone up to? They have more than tripled to 7% on a million-dollar loan.
This is an incredible burden on and cost increase to the food that we eat. That is why we are putting forward this motion. We are saying we have to give people relief. The government has to give relief to Canadians to stop the cycle of inflation it is causing, which is driving up food prices and making our constituents have to choose between heating and eating.
How did we get here? Those tiny deficits were promised in 2015 and balanced by 2019. Before COVID, we had $110 billion of deficits spent by the government, which was supposed to have balanced budgets. Then during COVID, over $200 million was spent on issues that were not related to COVID, which added more debt to the country than all other prime ministers combined in the history of this country.
That excessive spending puts more cash into the market, and it is chasing fewer goods, which means our paycheques cannot buy what they used to. It is basic economics. However, if we had a government that understood or paid attention to monetary policy, it would have understood that and saw it coming, as we did two years. We warned the government that this was going to happen. The Minister of Finance said she was worried about deflation. Do members believe that? She did nothing about understanding the basic economics of our economy.
I have a lot more to talk about on the wasted government spending that has led us to this point where we are calling on the government to give some compassion and relief, so people can afford to buy food and do not have to choose between food, heating and prescriptions in my province, and in some cases selling their houses.
I have asked questions here, and I had Debbie on the phone. Her mother has to sell her family house. She has to sell the family house because the price of home heating has gone up from $200 to $400 a month. We get calls every week from people having to sell their houses because they cannot afford to heat them anymore, and they have to make the choice between maintaining that home or eating, so they have to sell the home.
We are calling on the government to show a little compassion and reduce or eliminate its failed carbon tax, which has not met a single carbon target it has set out. The Liberals have not reduced carbon outputs in this country since they have been in government. It is an inflationary tax intended to drive up inflation, and it is not working, so we would urge all members in the House to please support this motion today. It is a brilliantly crafted motion, which would really help Canadians suffer through this terrible economic time we are in.
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Mr. Speaker, let me begin by taking this opportunity to share my concern for my constituents and all Atlantic Canadians who are preparing for Hurricane Fiona’s landfall this weekend. Reports are suggesting that Hurricane Fiona could be Canada’s strongest storm ever, and the peak winds and rain may arrive early Saturday morning at high tide.
The arrival of this generational storm at high tide poses a strong risk for coastal communities throughout my riding and the province. I encourage everyone to take the advice of public safety officials, stay indoors and wait out the storm. Please monitor emergency service websites and social media pages, along with traditional media, for the latest updates on the storm.
This historic storm has the potential to cause massive destruction, and I am in constant contact with local municipal, provincial and federal government officials to ensure that all the support that my constituents may need is in place.
Today, I rise to speak to Bill C-30 on behalf of my community. This bill provides a doubling of the GST rebate in the next payment cycle, and then the rebate will go back to its current levels. The one-time payment will vaporize with Liberal inflation, which will cost more than the benefit.
This bill is one that we should not even have to have a discussion on, and it should not even be before the House. The government is finally coming to grips with the fact that Canadians are struggling right now, but it is its endless spending and money printing that got us here. The half-trillion dollars of Liberal spending means all the money chasing limited goods pushes prices up.
This 40-year record inflation, not seen since Pierre Trudeau days, and for the same reasons, means life has become more expensive for Canadians trying to pay rent and buy food. Wages are not going up to match inflation, causing even more hardship, at least for now. We should not be in a place where one-time relief is needed.
The Liberals should never have caused this record-breaking inflation. While Liberal MPs enjoy their benefits and jet around the world having $3,000 meals on private jets, inflation is having real-world impacts on everyday Canadians. Surveys show that 24% of Canadians have reduced the groceries they buy, and food banks are reporting a 170% rise in customers.
Let us take Nancy, from the South Shore in my riding. She lives on disability and receives $895 a month. Due to the skyrocketing cost of home heating, her oil bill in the winter is $700 a month. If we add on the bare necessities, like food, Internet, phone, and gas for her car, it does not really leave anything at the end of the month, if she can even pay for those.
Nancy has to drive to Halifax from her home in rural Nova Scotia every three months for treatment because of her disability. However, ever since the price of gas shot up, it has become more difficult to afford to go into the city for her treatments.
Thanks to Liberal inflation, people like Nancy need to decide if they should be using the fuel in their car to pick up groceries or receive medical treatment. Nancy worked hard and faced an unfortunate setback. Like so many, she simply cannot keep up with inflation.
We can also talk about Cameron from my riding. His mother lives a mere 35 kilometres away, in rural Nova Scotia. Cameron needs to get to work, feed his family and put clothes on his kids’ backs. However, because of the high cost of fuel, Cameron cannot afford to visit his own mother, who is only 35 kilometres away.
It is stories like this that I and many of us in this place have heard over the past year. Regular, hard-working Canadians are facing impossible financial decisions simply due to government spending that has caused the price of everything to skyrocket.
The government’s proposals do little to solve the problem. The GST rebate will provide welcome relief that Conservatives support, but it will not address the real problem, which is that inflationary deficits and taxes are driving up costs at the fastest rate in 40 years.
Here is what Robert Kavcic, senior economist at the Bank of Montreal, had to say on this. He said:
We’re not going to deny that there are households seriously in need of help right now in this inflationary environment. But, from a policy perspective, we all know that sending out money as an inflation-support measure is inherently inflationary.
There we have it. As the Liberals continue to spend, Canadians will continue to suffer.
While Conservatives welcome this much-needed support, the one-time cheque of $467, for a family of four that is eligible for this benefit, covers less than 40% of the Liberal inflation at the grocery store and does not begin to cover the rising costs of heat, gasoline or rent. The average family of four is now spending over $1,200 more each year to put food on the table. Grocery prices are up almost 11%. More than 70% of families with children will not receive support. Liberal inflation is hitting these families hard while the Liberals ignore the issues.
The Conservatives have called for the Liberals to scour government spending to find savings to pay for these proposals to avoid adding to the costs. Let us start with axing the $25-million ArriveCAN app altogether, scrapping the $35-billion Infrastructure Bank and reducing the bloated bureaucracy. Departments like DFO have doubled their HR department in the last three years. There are more than 800 HR people in DFO alone now. I guess it needs this because the department has grown by 4,300 employees in only three years. While Canadians lost their jobs, DFO went on a job-hiring binge. That is why the new Conservative leader promises to introduce a pay-as-you-go law for the federal government. The plan will make sure that, if it wants to spend a dollar more, it has to find a dollar in savings.
If the Liberals were serious about making life more affordable for workers, families and seniors, another thing they would do is cancel the tripling of the carbon tax immediately. It is not just groceries, gas and home heating the government has raised taxes on. In fact, it is difficult to find anything that the current government has not raised taxes on.
During the pandemic, the Liberal government raised payroll taxes and alcohol taxes three times. On top of that, it removed key tax credits that families depended on, like the fitness and arts credits, along with public transit credits. Now it is raising the payroll taxes of EI and CPP. This means every Canadian will be taking home less money at the end of each month. These taxes are coming at the worst possible time for Canadian families who are struggling with rising costs.
Instead of freezing taxes, or better yet reducing them, the Liberal government is raising taxes on people who are struggling to make ends meet. This is causing structural inflation. High spending and increased taxes can only be fixed with structural changes to government spending, not with one-off measures.
The bill will provide a one-time temporary relief, but it does not have to be this way. It does not have to be this type of relief. The best solution is a permanent one, not a temporary one. It is to restrain government spending, which causes inflation, lower taxes and eliminate the tripling of the carbon tax.
The hurt inflicted on Canadians by the government must stop. Canadians cannot simply afford the current government anymore.
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- Apr/29/22 10:03:34 a.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Madam Speaker, it is always such an honour to rise in this place and speak on behalf of my community of South Shore—St. Margarets.
Today, we are debating the report stage of Bill C-8, an act to implement certain provisions of the economic and fiscal update tabled in Parliament on December 14, 2021 and other measures, in other words, more government spending on COVID‑19. Let us look at the NDP and Liberal COVID spending to date in this bill. The fall fiscal update added another $70 billion in new spending, and this spending is on top of that. The $70 billion I mentioned does not even include the Liberal campaign promises, which would be tens of billions more if, and that is a big if, the NDP-Liberal government lives up to their campaign promises and their coalition. The bill is going to add $70 billion on top of what we saw in the public accounts, the $1.4 trillion of debt that Canadian taxpayers are now on the hook for. Let us think about that: $70 billion more, on top of the $1.4 trillion that has already been added until now.
It is said that one should know history so one does not repeat it. I guess the current government does not know history, because if it did, it would see that the son is repeating the mistakes of the father. To understand the context of what this bill and this spending's impact on the economy will be, let us take a look at what the father did. It tells us what the country will face in the coming years because of the fiscal mismanagement of the son and the father.
In the federal election of 1968, Pierre Trudeau reassured Canadians that a Liberal government would not raise taxes or increase spending. The government, he said during the election of 1968, is not Santa Claus. How did that work out?
When Pierre Trudeau became prime minister, real government spending increased from 17% of GDP to 24.3%. In other words, the federal government's share of the economy rose 42% under Trudeau senior. Every single area of the federal government's spending increased under Trudeau senior, except defence spending, where he cut spending in half as a percentage of the budget. When Pierre Trudeau took office, we spent more on national defence than we did on servicing the country's debt. When he left office in 1984, for every dollar the government spent on defence, we spent three dollars on paying just the interest on his national debt.
How did he do it? He created 114 agencies and commissions. He created seven new government departments, for a total of 464 Crown corporations with 213 subsidiaries. The annual deficit rose to almost $40 billion. That does not seem so unreasonable, given what we have seen with the spending in this place lately. However, that $40 billion was on a base budget, an annual Government of Canada budget, of $100 billion.
I raise this because, as the adage goes, “Like father, like son.” Pierre Trudeau once said, “We're going to build socialism here.” Well, he did, and his son just formalized it.
People who grew up in the 1930s, such as Pierre Trudeau, saw Roosevelt's New Deal of massive government infrastructure spending to pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression. They thought that this approach in the 1970s would stimulate us out of the “stagflation” of that time, which was, for those who do not remember, high inflation combined with high unemployment and a stagnant demand in the economy. It was disastrous.
It was so bad that at one point Pierre Trudeau brought in wage and price controls. He said, “Zap, you're frozen”, and froze all wages and prices. When those socialist wage and price controls came off, the floodgates of wage demands and price adjustments went up even faster. By the time Pierre Trudeau left office, 38¢ of every dollar collected in taxes by the Government of Canada was to pay interest, and only interest, on the debt. The biggest single government program was paying interest on Pierre Trudeau's debt. The government in 1984 spent more on debt interest payments than it spent on defence spending and health care combined. Trudeau's policies of massive spending led to a rapid rise in interest rates to try to reduce inflation. All that government spending simply made it worse.
In the early 1980s, banks were creating home mortgages at 21% annual interest rates. When Brian Mulroney took office in 1984, and I joined that government as a young staffer, we had to break the cycle of spending and deficits that were killing Canada's economy and jobs. By 1987, Mulroney was managing the government in an operating surplus position, reversing the structural deficits created by the Liberals. The deficits after 1987 were entirely as a result of paying interest on Pierre Trudeau's debt.
The government remained in an operating surplus through successive prime ministers until the current Liberal government came to office. The Mulroney government reined in spending and fundamentally restructured the economy with a new vision to deal with the economics of the day. There were fundamental changes, such as a complete restructuring of Canada's financial services industry; the first introduction anywhere in the world of free trade, which did not exist anywhere before then; the replacement of the 13.5% manufacturers' sales tax with the 7% goods and services tax; the elimination of the national energy program and the job-killing foreign investment review agency; and, yes, the privatization of 23 Crown corporations, which I was proud to be a part of, including Air Canada.
The Chrétien government continued this work with further cuts in government spending, although it took a different approach. It collapsed the separate unemployment insurance fund into the consolidated revenue fund, and then artificially kept payments high in order to build up a surplus that was not needed to pay unemployment insurance but was used to pay down the debt. It dropped the government spending on health care by 50%.
It took the governments that followed more than 25 years to break the back of Trudeau's disastrous spending, but he was a piker compared to his son, who has added more debt to Canada's national accounts in six years than all other governments since our founding in 1867. The son, in 2015, promised small stimulus deficits that would be balanced by 2019. Just like his father did in 1968, when he said he would not spend, the son promised the same thing in 2015. We know how that turned out.
The government spent $600 million on high school students living at home in its first round of COVID spending. The government also spent $11.8 billion on CERB for 15- to 24-year-olds who were living with their parents; $7 billion on spouses in households with more than $100,000 in earnings; $110 billion on the Canada wage subsidy. Some studies have found that the money did obviously go to struggling companies during COVID, but many were strong enough to withstand it on their own; 24% of that money went to companies whose revenue actually increased during COVID, and 49% to companies whose profits increased during COVID.
Spending more than $600 billion in two years, printing more than $3 billion a week in new money, has caused the structural inflation of almost 6% we now see. In the coming year or two, we will start to see wage inflation as a result of the way companies, both unionized and not, determine how their employees get pay raises, which is usually based on inflation. As publicly traded companies raise salaries at all levels, because consultants and their HR board committees will say they need to do so or risk losing their employees to other competitors, combined with the demands for CPI adjustments in union contracts, that is what is going to create wage inflation. We have not seen anything yet. Wage inflation will fuel further goods inflation as more dollars will flood the market chasing limited goods, which in turn leads to higher inflation.
The consequences of providing all these universal government COVID programs, pushing all this money into the economy at levels not needed, and now new social programs when the government is not even properly funding health care, will add to the structural deficit that the country has. The government has no plans to reduce the footprint of government in the economy, which means we are heading toward stagnation, a 1970s-type of situation.
I cannot support this bill, because Bill C-8 and the recently tabled budget will just make Canada's finances drastically worse. The NDP and the Liberals have not learned in their pact from what happened in the 1970s, and they had a pact in the 1970s, too. History is repeating. Like father, like son.
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