- 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/8/24 2:49:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, this Prime Minister is not worth the cost of housing, which has doubled across Canada.
The crisis is now more urgent than ever in Quebec. Non-profit organizations report meeting people who are contemplating and planning suicide because they have no idea how they will pay their rent next month.
Will the Prime Minister finally stop his radical plan to fund more bureaucracy instead of more homes?
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- Mar/18/24 4:34:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we all know that after eight years the Prime Minister is not worth the cost of food, gas, heat and groceries. We also all know that common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, but today is different. The cost of living crisis has turned into a cost of living emergency with stories now, in Montreal, for example, of police being called to food banks because they have run out of food and disorder is breaking out among the people who are desperate to eat.
With 8,000 people now joining a Facebook group called the “Dumpster Diving Network”, where they share tips on how to eat out of garbage cans, and with tent cities in all of our major towns and centres, 35 of which are in Halifax, basically our economy is falling apart and our people are desperate, hungry, cold and, in many cases, in the streets. Some of these scenes are reminiscent of the Great Depression, if they were merely put in black and white. This is an emergency.
The Prime Minister, though, wants to go ahead with a 23% carbon tax hike on gas, heat and groceries on April 1. This will be the tipping point for many families who are literally hanging on by their fingernails. This policy has already driven many into hunger and despair. We cannot allow for that breaking point to occur.
That is why I wrote to you, Mr. Speaker, on March 17, 2024. I have a dated letter asking for you to accept an emergency debate on this forthcoming Liberal-NDP tax increase and the resulting desperation and emergency that it is causing around kitchen tables, at food banks and in tent cities across this country. I ask you to find the compassion, the urgency and the common sense to grant our request for an emergency debate on the April 1 Liberal-NDP carbon tax hike.
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- Feb/28/24 2:58:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister brags that there is a housing crisis after he has been in power for eight long years. He quotes the same failed Liberal academics who gave him the advice that helped him double the price in the first place.
The Conservatives' common-sense plan will incentivize cities to speed up and to lower the cost of building by requiring that they permit 15% more homes as a condition of getting the money. The more they build, they more they get; the less they build, the less they get. We pay builders based on the number of homes they build and realtors for the number that they sell. We should pay municipalities based on the number they permit.
Is that not common sense?
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- Feb/6/24 3:58:05 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, he knows it is not relevant and he does not care, because he does not care about Ukraine. He cares about using Ukrainians to distract from the car-theft crisis that his boss, the Prime Minister, has caused. The Prime Minister could not care less about Ukraine or any of the other distractions he brings up. He does it because he knows he cannot run on his miserable track record of doubling the cost of housing, sending a record-smashing two million people to food banks, quadrupling the carbon tax, leading to a 300% car-theft increase in just eight years in Toronto, and giving Halifax 30 homeless encampments. This kind of chaos and misery is a record no one wants.
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- Jan/31/24 2:22:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will say it again: His policies are more costly. Yes, he is a lot more costly.
The Conservatives spent less and had less auto theft. In fact, there were half as many car thefts in Montreal and two-thirds fewer in Toronto in 2015, the year that he took office. That is because he is releasing car thieves and mismanaging federal ports, which are plagued by incompetence.
Will he reverse the policies that caused the crisis?
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- Jun/7/23 8:53:59 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I regret to inform the House that, while history shows that countries where the debt is more than three times the size of the economy have a strong propensity toward debt crises, according to S&P, Canada's total public and private debt is now 474% of GDP. That includes government debt, household debt, business debt and financial sector debt combined. This makes us the second most indebted country, relative to GDP, of any country in the G7, with only Japan being worse.
I spent a lot of time when I was the shadow minister of finance studying debt crises, and there is a phenomenal book called Big Debt Crises, written by Ray Dalio, the single most successful hedge fund manager in the history of the world. In it, he quantifies the precursors to debt crises. He put together the 48 biggest debt crises that have happened in modern world history, and he put together a chart of the debt-to-GDP ratios of all of those countries. I will list off some of the crises that might come to mind.
There was the Greek debt crisis that happened roughly just over a decade ago in Europe. That crisis then spread to Spain, Portugal and other European countries. There was the U.S. financial crisis, which was ultimately a mortgage debt crisis. There are the examples of the Argentinian debt crises of 1998 and 2001. I could go on.
In putting together all 48 of these biggest debt crises, he recreated the debt-to-GDP ratios that all of these countries had, public and private debt as a share of GDP, and I took the liberty of taking Canada's current debt-to-GDP ratio and putting it in that list. What did I find? Our current debt-to-GDP ratio is bigger than all of those other crisis countries except for two. In other words, there were 46 countries on this earth that had massive financial meltdowns with significantly smaller debt levels relative to the size of their economy than we have here today.
The question is why we have, up until now, not had a full-scale meltdown. The answer is obvious. It is because we have had such inordinately and artificially low interest rates. Even today, as rates rise, much of the debt that is in the current stock of the country is still locked in at lower rates, but that is not a permanent phenomenon. In other words, every passing day, somebody's mortgage comes up for renewal, and the artificially low rate they had up until then renews at a much higher rate. This is the fundamental risk we have. The same goes for government debt. Some of it is locked in at lower earlier rates, but governments have mortgages.
Bonds are just mortgages. They are just varied terms. Some of these mortgages are 90 days. Some of them are 30 years. Most of them are somewhere in between, but all of them at some point come up to renewal, and when they renew they do so at the rates that are present when the renewal occurs. Slowly but surely, that is happening already.
Where do we manifest the higher rates? Ironically, it is in the Bank of Canada itself, because the bank purchased government debts and government bonds when rates were low, and is therefore collecting a small yield on those debts. The bank purchased those debts by depositing money in the central bank's accounts of financial institutions, which sold the bonds back to the bank.
Those deposits are receiving the policy rate of interest that the central bank pays out, which is now 4.75%. In other words, the Bank of Canada has bought government bonds that pay out 0.6% and paid for them with deposits that it now has to pay out 4.75% on, so our central bank is losing money every single day. In fact, the central bank, were it not backed up by the government, would be bankrupt today, because its liabilities are worth so much more than its assets. This is a very unusual situation, but it is a precursor for what everyone else is facing.
I ask this: What happens in the year 2026 when all of the mega mortgages that people took out five years before at artificially low rates with artificially high home prices all come up for renewal, and the rates are three or four times higher than the families had been paying up until that time? All of a sudden, we are going to have hundreds of thousands of people renewing their mortgages at the same time at an increase of interest rates of 3% or 4%. That is not a three or four percentage point increase. That is a 300% increase, because four is actually 300% higher than one. The artificially low rates then create a multiplying effect when they collide with new and real higher rates.
Imagine then that there are hundreds of thousands of people who can no longer afford their monthly payments because they have gone up by $1,600 a month, and the average family only has $200 extra in their bank accounts. They are now paying $15,000 or $16,000 more per year in interest on their mortgages, all at the same time. What will they all think to do? They will sell. What else are they going to do? They cannot afford their homes anymore, and they cannot pay for them, so what will they do? They will sell when everyone else is selling and then, all of a sudden, there is a fire sale.
Furthermore, who is going to be around to buy? Are other people going to be able to pay 5% or 6% mortgages on million-dollar homes? Of course not. Therefore, there will be a preponderance of sellers without buyers to match then. Then what happens? House prices—
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- Jun/7/23 8:18:50 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it was good to hear from the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay. He does make a lot of noise, but that is because an empty wagon rattles the loudest. The people of Timmins keep telling me, as I have been there four times in a year, that they have seen more of me in the last year than they have seen of him in the last decade, and they are happy about that.
Over the last eight years, we have seen a massive, possibly unprecedented, mounting of both public and private debt. We have to understand where we were and where we are in order to understand where we are going. In the last four years, the government has doubled our national debt. That is more than half a trillion dollars of new debt. The Prime Minister has added more debt than all previous prime ministers combined.
He will be quick to point to many different excuses that have caused this run-up in our national debt. I will point out that while there was a COVID pandemic, this is not the first crisis we have ever seen in the history of the world. While there has been a war between Russia and Ukraine, this is not the first war ever fought in the history of the world.
We had the great global recession under the previous Conservative government. We had two wars: one in Afghanistan, and another in Iraq and Syria. We managed to do so while keeping the debt the lowest in the G7 and balancing the budget. Other countries faced similar challenges without adding as much debt.
For example, the Swiss, who are right in the centre of Europe, closer to the conflict in Ukraine, and more dependent on global supply chains than we are because they are a landlocked nation surrounded by the European Union, were able to balance their budget, pay down their deficit, pay down their debt and keep interest rates, inflation and unemployment lower than all of the other OECD countries. That proves that just because there is a pandemic or a war in one part of the world, it does not force a government to completely bankrupt itself.
Let us recall that the Prime Minister added $100 billion of debt before there was a single case of COVID. He has added roughly $100 billion since COVID came to an end. During the COVID pandemic, 40%, or $200 billion of the new debt that he added, had nothing to do with COVID whatsoever according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. The idea that we can blame all of this new debt on factors out of his control is provably false.
The Prime Minister had a choice and his decision was to spend without any thought for future generations or for the financial viability of the country. In order to enable his spending, he unleashed nearly unprecedented printing of cash. This was done through something called quantitative easing where the central bank purchased government debt at exceptionally high prices, driving down yields on that debt, and ultimately pumping $400 billion of new cash into the economy in less than two years.
Many will say the Liberals had no choice. There was a pandemic after all. Let us review that excuse. The pandemic did not bring a liquidity crunch. In fact, the economic phenomenon of the pandemic was that people had more cash than ever before, but they were banned from spending it. The problem was not the lack of cash, as had been the case in the previous great global recession.
The problem was that people and businesses had bank accounts that were overflowing with cash with nowhere they were allowed to spend it. In that kind of environment, the worst possible thing one could do is to print more cash and further overflow bank accounts with that money, which, in the end, we knew would ultimately have led to inflation.
During that run-up of the size of our monetary base that kept money printing, the Minister of Finance, always looking for the trendiest new slogan that would win her applause in Davos or Brussels or at some other international symposium, said that all this cash that was filling up bank accounts was like a “pre-loaded stimulus”, something that could be unleashed to revive a dead economy. Of course the economy was only dead because governments had shut it down, not because there was a lack of cash with which to facilitate commerce. When the economy opened, all of that excess cash was unleashed, and the goods we buy and the interest we pay were automatically and predictably bid up.
We do not fault the government for having created programs to pay people's bills while governments locked them down and prevented them from paying their own. Where we did object was with the government giving out $2,000-a-month payments to prisoners, to dead people, to teenagers who did not have that kind of money before the crisis occurred, and in many cases had no jobs at all.
We objected to the government continuing to pay out these benefits well after there were more than a million vacant jobs. In other words, we were paying people not to work while there were a million vacant jobs they could have been filling. Simultaneously driving up unemployment and job vacancies, an unusual coincidence of achievement or, in reality, negative achievement in the use of this policy.
The reality is that we warned the Liberals at the time that if they did not restrain themselves this would lead to a crisis. It would start with inflation and be followed up by an interest rate increase. This was not based on some invention—
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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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- Mar/31/23 11:25:30 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, on Tuesday, I said there was a crisis with stabbings across the country. People are being stabbed in broad daylight. The Prime Minister stood up and said not to worry; he is going to ban hunting rifles, even though it is knives that do stabbings, not hunting rifles. It is not the Inuit hunter in Nunavut who is causing stabbings in downtown Vancouver.
All of these facts angered and frustrated the Prime Minister. He became visibly upset and ran out the back door. He has not been back since. The Prime Minister was obviously frightened and concerned by that debate—
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- Nov/3/22 5:16:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do not have to google that, because Jim Flaherty was against quantitative easing. We specifically said we would not do it, and we did not do it, and we proved this nonsense today that the Liberal government had to do quantitative easing because the Americans did it. That is the excuse. The Americans did it in 2008, 2009 and 2010. They printed money like crazy and ballooned income and wealth inequality as a result.
Here in Canada we said no. We banned our Bank of Canada from doing that. As a result, we did not have an inflation crisis. We kept our debts low and we kept income inequality lower than it would have been.
We can have an independent monetary policy. Our mothers taught us that just because all of our friends are jumping off a bridge does not mean we have to.
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- Oct/26/22 2:50:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister caused this inflation crisis. Even Mark Carney, who will be the successor to the current Liberal leader, is saying that inflation is a homegrown problem. He is right. It is caused by the half trillion dollars of inflationary deficits that have bid up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay.
Today, rates went up another half point, meaning many families will be handing in their keys to the banks, because they will not be able to afford those bills. Has the Prime Minister been briefed by his officials on how many Canadians will lose their homes because of the higher interest rates that his inflationary policies have caused?
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