- Member of Parliament
- Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada
Leader of the Opposition
- Conservative
- Carleton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $61,288.13
- Government Page
- May/29/24 2:25:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has had a revelation. In an interview with Halifax's The Chronicle Herald, he told how he responded to people asking for him to spend even more government money. He said, “As soon as you do that, inflation goes up by exactly [the same] amount. Right.” Right. Why did I not think of that? My goodness, spending money we do not have actually causes inflation.
In the middle of having epiphanies, has the Prime Minister also realized that budgets do not balance themselves?
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- May/29/24 2:23:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has had an epiphany. In an interview with The Chronicle Herald, a Halifax newspaper, he said that when people ask him for even more government money, he tells them that as soon as the government spends money, inflation rises by exactly the same amount.
Why did I not think of that? Spending more money than we have causes inflation.
Can these revelations coax him to admit that budgets do not balance themselves?
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- Apr/18/24 10:20:49 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, after nine years and nine deficit budgets, the Prime Minister has doubled the national debt. He has added more to our debt than all the other prime ministers combined.
He has doubled the cost of housing and forced two million people to rely on food banks. Now, he is presenting a budget with $50 billion in additional inflationary spending, while repeating the same election promises he has failed to keep for a decade. That is why this budget and this Prime Minister are not worth the cost. We will be voting against this budget to show the government that we have lost confidence in it.
The Conservative Party has a common-sense plan: axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. Before I get into my common-sense plan, I would like to pay the Minister of Finance a compliment for asking Canada’s wealthiest some very good questions. She said, “I would like to ask Canada's 1%, Canada's 0.1%, to consider this: What kind of country do they want to live in?”
First, it bears mentioning that the minister and her leader do recognize that Canada's 0.1% are doing very well indeed after nine years of this Liberal government. They have benefited from enormous corporate handouts and grants—the biggest in the history of our country, in fact. They have received massive loan guarantees that protect them against losses from poor investments, which means that working class Canadians are left holding the bag. Millionaire businessmen like the GC Strategies contractors are surely part of the wealthiest 0.1% thanks to the gifts given them by this Prime Minister, such as the 100% increase in the number of outside contracts. In addition, by printing $600 billion of new money, this government made billionaires even richer. Lastly, the Prime Minister is a member of the 0.1%, since he inherited millions of dollars from his grandfather and placed the money in a trust that shelters it from taxes and protects it, just like those billionaires who invite him to their private island in the Caribbean. It was therefore a very good idea to put this question to the wealthiest 0.1% who are doing better than ever after nine years under this prime minister.
I am going to quote other questions that the minister asked them, including the following: “Do they want to live in a country where we can tell the size of one's paycheque by their smile?” After nine years of rising taxes, inflation and interest rates, Canadians are no longer smiling when they look at their paycheque, because it is disappearing. After nine years, Canada has the lowest personal income growth of any G7 country. Our GDP per capita is down from what it was five years ago. People have no reason to smile. Their paycheque does not buy them as much food or cover as much of their housing as it did nine years ago.
The minister also asked, “Do they want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry?” Obviously, the answer is no. However, that is the reality after nine years of this Prime Minister. According to the documents published by his own government, the Prime Minister admits that nearly one in four children go to school without food every day. After nine years of this Prime Minister, who taxes the farmers who produce our food and the truckers who deliver our food, a quarter of all children do not have enough to eat. We see today in the budget a promise to feed them. That promise was made in 2021, three years ago. How many meals have been provided since? Not a single one has been provided. After nine years of this Prime Minister, our children are going hungry.
The minister also asked, “Do they want to live in a country where the only young Canadians who can buy their own homes are those with parents who can help with the down payment?” That is the country we live in now, after nine years of this Prime Minister.
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- Apr/16/24 4:40:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this is the ninth deficit budget since the Prime Minister said that budgets balance themselves. Everything he spends money on only gets worse.
He promised that these deficits would make housing affordable. Then rent, mortgage payments and down payments for buying a home doubled.
He said that food would become more affordable. Now it costs 30% more, and one in four children do not have access to a nutritious meal.
After nine deficits, the government is rich and the people are poor.
Today, he is doing much the same with a $40-billion inflationary deficit in new spending, which is the equivalent of $2,400 in inflation for every family. We are spending more on interest on the national debt than we are on health.
That is why common-sense Conservatives will be voting against this pyromaniac firefighter who is pouring fuel instead of water on the inflationary fire he has set.
This is the ninth deficit after the Prime Minister promised the budget would balance itself, and what did he do with the money? Everything he has spent on has become more expensive. He has doubled the rent, doubled mortgage payments, doubled the needed down payment for a home and forced 3,500 homeless encampments. In Halifax alone, one in four kids cannot afford food, and now he is adding $40 billion of new debt and new spending, which is $2,400 of new inflation.
That is why Conservatives will vote against this wasteful inflationary budget, which is like a pyromaniac spraying gas on the inflationary fire that he lit. It is getting too hot and too expensive for Canadians, and that is why we need a carbon tax election to replace him with a common-sense Conservative government.
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- Feb/14/24 3:00:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, our common-sense plan axes the tax, builds the homes, fixes the budgets and stops the crime.
The Prime Minister cannot defend his policy, so he is changing the name. People hate the carbon tax because 60% pay more into it than they get back in his phony rebates. Today, he announced a costly rebranding of the hated carbon tax.
My questions for him are these: How much did he spend on consultants in order to come up with the new name, and was it GC Strategies that he hired?
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- Oct/25/23 2:59:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, again we hear all of the Prime Minister's expensive promises that have not completed a single home. He mentions that I spent only $300 million on housing, but he had the number of houses built wrong. It was actually 200,000 homes that were built in the year I was housing minister, but we know that numbers are not his strength. This is the guy who thinks budgets balance themselves, who does not think about monetary policy and who doubled the debt, doubled housing costs and doubled rent.
What else is going to double before the Prime Minister realizes that he is just not worth the cost?
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- Oct/4/23 2:49:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister should be taking economics lessons from everyone.
This is a guy who said that budgets balance themselves, right before he doubled the debt. This is a guy who said he does not think about monetary policy, right before he led interest rates to rise faster than at any time in Canadian history. This is a guy who, until I told him, did not even know how much he was borrowing out of the Canadian economy. This is a guy who has doubled the rent, doubled mortgage payments and doubled the needed down payment.
It is about time he took some lessons. Why does he not go to the library and do a little bit of studying?
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- Jun/21/23 5:36:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am glad to hear that the hon. member wants balanced budgets. I agree with that. I have put forward several ideas for saving money.
For example, $35 billion of taxpayers' money was allocated to the infrastructure bank. However, it has not completed a single project in five years. This is an enormous waste of money. What is more, the amounts awarded to consultants keep increasing, even though we have a larger public service that can do exactly the same work. Buying back hunting rifles is another example of waste.
There is a lot of waste in this government. We will eliminate waste and balance the budget to bring down inflation and interest rates.
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Madam Speaker, unfortunately, I must rise today to talk about a crisis we are going to have to face in the medium term.
I am not talking about the fact that, right now, after eight years of this Prime Minister, nine out of 10 young people believe that they will never be able to buy a house. I am not talking about the fact that one out of every five Canadians are skipping meals because of the cost of food after eight years of this Prime Minister. I am also not talking about the fact that 1.5 million Canadians need to use food banks to be able to eat. I am not even talking about the fact that, after eight years of this Prime Minister, Canadians have to allocate 63% of their pre-tax income to pay their monthly housing costs. In Vancouver, they are using 98% of their pre-tax income.
That is not the crisis I am referring to. The crisis I am referring to is something no one is talking about, but that could explode if we do not change direction. The crisis is the following. When the government decided, in 2021 and 2022, to print $400 billion to finance excessive spending, one of the effects was to create inflation, which always happens when you print money. This also caused a huge bubble in our financial system, caused by the mortgage situation.
Huge numbers of Canadians took out mortgages because they were easily available and because of their artificially low cost. In fact, 38% of all current mortgages were taken out between January 2021 and June 2022. Almost 40% of all mortgage debt today dates from that 18-month period, because interest rates were extremely low. People decided to go to the bank, make changes to their mortgage and borrow huge amounts of money, because it cost almost nothing to borrow money from the bank.
The problem is that these mortgages have a five-year term. These high mortgages will all be renewed in 2026 and 2027, at a significantly higher interest rate. We are not talking about billions or tens of billions of dollars. We are talking about mortgages totalling hundreds of billions of dollars that will be renewed at a higher rate. Even the Bank of Canada acknowledged that it was a systemic risk, not only for people who took out mortgages, but also for the banks, which will probably have trouble getting their money back.
If families cannot pay the increased interest rates, what will they do? They will have to sell their homes. However, if everyone is selling their house at the same time and there are no families that can afford the increased interest rates, there will be sellers but no buyers. That could cause house prices to fall. We already have the largest housing bubble in the G7 and almost the largest in the world. What are we going to do about it?
We are stressing the importance of balancing the budget today precisely because that is a key element in avoiding this serious looming crisis. Even all the Liberal experts are saying it: deficits cause inflation. Inflation causes interest rates to rise. If we do not lower inflation rates over the next year, we will be unable to reduce interest rates in time to avoid a housing bubble in 2026 and 2027.
What we want is a government plan aimed at balancing the budget in order to reduce inflation and interest rates. I know that it is the Bank of Canada that sets interest rates, but the economic environment in which it makes these decisions is a determining factor.
If the government drives up inflation with inflationary deficits, the Bank of Canada will be forced to raise interest rates. Former minister of finance John Manley said that, when the Bank of Canada puts its foot on the brake, the government puts its foot on the inflation accelerator. We need to take our foot off the accelerator to reduce inflation and allow the Bank of Canada to reduce interest rates before the crisis hits. That is plain common sense. It is nothing new.
Deficits drive up inflation and interest rates. Balanced budgets reduce both. That is what we are going to do. We will put a ceiling on spending to eliminate deficits and waste in order to balance the budget, reduce inflation and allow all Canadians to continue paying their mortgage and keep their home.
We recommend that the government proceed with the utmost caution, and we are asking that it keep the promise it made six months ago to balance the budget in the medium term. As soon as the government does that, we will allow a vote and perhaps let this budget pass if the votes in the House permit it. It is just common sense. We will bring back common sense.
There is a crisis in this country, and the crisis is not just that 1.5 million people are eating at food banks or one in five are skipping meals because of the price of food. The crisis not just that a majority of Canadians now tell pollsters they are struggling to make ends meet or that even nine in 10 young people believe they will never afford a home. The crisis is not even that it takes 63% of average monthly income to make monthly payments on the average home, a record-smashing height. The crisis is not even that it now takes 98% of pre-tax income in Vancouver for the average family to pay a mortgage on the average house. Those things are all insane and unprecedented, but they are the reality after eight years.
The real crisis is that there is massive mortgage bubble that is ready to detonate in the years 2026 and 2027. Here is how this bubble occurred. Today, 38% of all mortgage debt was originated between January of 2021 and June of 2022, all when rates were at rock bottom because the government printed $400 billion of cash and pumped it into the financial system, causing it to be artificially abundant and artificially cheap. People took on mortgages they would otherwise not be able to afford. This inflated housing prices and mortgages together, but those mortgages come up for renewal five years later. That will be between January 1, 2026, and June of 2027. If interest rates are as high then as they are now, these people will run into a brick wall.
The Bank of Canada says that they will face a 40% increase in mortgage payments, so if their payment right now is $3,000, they will be paying an extra $1,300 a month, which equals almost $15,000 a year. If the average Canadian does not have more than $200 left at the end of each month, they will not be able to pay it. That will lead to mass selling and there will be no buyers because the buyers will not be able to pay the higher rates on those prices. That is a real crisis that we face if we do not change course immediately, so what must be done?
We need to reduce inflation so that the Bank of Canada can reduce interest rates. How do we do that? We do it by doing the opposite of what we are doing now. Even top Liberals, like former finance minister John Manley, have said that deficits are like putting the foot on the gas of inflation. What we need to do is take the foot off the gas to balance the budget, to reverse the $60 billion of inflationary spending that the government has put forward and to honour the promise the government made just six months ago to have a medium-term plan to balance the budget within a half decade.
If the government will do the common-sense thing, rise to its feet and present a plan to balance the budget, then Conservatives will allow a vote to occur. We know that the only way to rescue people from this crisis is through common sense: by balancing the budget to lower inflation and interest rates, bringing down the tax burden so that there are more powerful paycheques and allowing people to pay less and bring home more. This is just common sense. It is the common sense of the common people, united for our common home: their home, my home, our home. Let us bring it home.
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- May/8/23 2:24:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the question was for the Prime Minister, but he does not have the courage to stand up to answer it.
His finance minister said, just a few months ago, that deficits add oil to the inflationary fire. A few weeks later, she announced she would continue running deficits forever. There were a few courageous Liberals who showed up, in a minority to their congress, to push forward a motion, which would have required the government eliminate these deficits, but it was voted down, sadly.
Will the Prime Minister have the courage to stand up to answer? Will he get rid of his inflationary deficits, or does he believe that budgets will balance themselves?
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