- 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 2:28:28 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister finally, for once, thought about monetary policy. He said, “As soon as you [spend more], inflation goes up by exactly the same amount. Right.” He is right for once. However, repeating the same costly promises that he has already broken does not change that fundamental monetary rule.
Will the Prime Minister acknowledge that, yes, the economy is about numbers; that people pay their rent in numbers, their gas in numbers and their groceries in numbers; and that the numbers are too high?
89 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/8/24 2:45:24 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, with his comedy routine, I was going to say that he should not quit his day job, but actually, he should quit his day job. He should not go into number crunching whatever his next job is, because he does not believe the economy is about numbers. I do not blame him, because if I had his economic record, I would not want to talk about numbers either.
It might help him to go to the library and quietly study just a little. Will he commit to reading page 3 of the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report, which demonstrates Canadians pay more than they get back in the tax?
111 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Apr/18/24 11:37:33 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I will end corporate handouts to all industries. I do not believe in corporate handouts. We are the only party that stands against corporate welfare. We believe businesses should make money, not take money. We believe in the free market, not state capitalism.
It is the NDP and the Liberals who continually stroke these monster cheques to businesses that have not earned the money. Ironically, they are always angry at businesses that make money by selling things that consumers choose to buy, but they are never upset to take money by force from working taxpayers and hand the money to large corporations who have very skilful lobbyists.
I want an economy where businesses make money, not take money, where they make profit based on the quality of their products, not the quality of their lobbyists, where they please customers rather than pleasing politicians. It is called the free market.
151 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Mar/20/24 2:56:57 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost to our economy. Real per person GDP has grown more slowly in Canada than in all the rest of the G7. It is dead last. In fact, our per capita GDP is smaller than it was five years ago, which is the worst record since the Great Depression. The Parliamentary Budget Officer calculates that the carbon tax will blow an $18-billion hole in the size of our GDP, $1,000 in economic costs per family.
If he really thinks that is worth the cost, why will we not have a carbon election to—
108 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Mar/18/24 4:34:15 p.m.
- Watch
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.
329 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Dec/14/23 2:21:47 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, the economy has been shrinking per capita for five quarters now. Our economy is smaller per capita than it was five years ago. What is more, after eight years, this Prime Minister is not worth the cost of housing. According to the Bank of Canada, housing costs are now the highest they have been in 41 years, and rents are rising faster than ever. It is an all-time record.
When will the Prime Minister stop driving up inflation and creating bloated bureaucracy to allow affordable housing to be built?
93 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Dec/12/23 5:26:53 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, there is no limit to my speaking time, just like there is no limit to Canada's potential, if only we had some common sense.
The reality is that when we create $600 billion of cash and we flood it into the financial system, that money is then lent out to those who have connections to that system, and those people bid up the cost for everybody else. That is why, in the early months of the pandemic when everything was crashing, the billionaires were suddenly getting richer.
Why were they getting richer? The economy was crashing. Well, of course, all of their asset values were being inflated by insane money printing supported by every party in the House except for ours. Ours was the only one that worried that this crazy money printing would do exactly what it has done every single time it has been tried.
When I produced the evidence of this in the documentary, all of the “bought and paid for” media said, “Oh, this is an outrageous explanation”, but they have not once provided a shred of evidence that it is not true. Look at the graphs the Bank of Canada itself produced. It demonstrates there was a massive flooding of cash into the real estate market through the vector of the same financial institutions that had profited off of quantitative easing.
I find it interesting that the NDP, which claims to be so concerned about the gap between rich and poor, saw absolutely no problem with the government creating all of this cash and pumping it into a select group of financial institutions, which happen to have the privilege of being members of Payments Canada. They had been eligible to receive the cash before anyone else and before it lost its value, and saw all of their net worth explode all of the stock values artificially pumped up. Then the resulting consumer price inflation chewed up the paycheques of the working poor. It was a direct transfer of wealth from the have-nots to the have-yachts, and the NDP supported it 100%.
NDP members talk about these little, itty-bitty wealth taxes that they claim to want to bring in that amount to $100 million here and $1 billion there when we are talking about $600 billion that was flooded into the financial system to the benefit of the wealthiest—
404 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Dec/12/23 5:23:39 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I love how when the first nations people do extraordinary things, Liberals show up to take all the credit. The member reminds me of the rooster who thought that just because he crowed when the sun came up, he made the sun come up. He did not make the sun come up; he just crowed about it. It is actually the first nations people who are building this project, and it is a shame that Liberals try to take credit for it.
If we could just get the Liberals and the government out of the way, we could do many more great things because we know that, prior to the current government, housing was affordable in this country, taking a fraction out of a family paycheque to afford a home. The good thing is that housing was not like this before this Prime Minister and it will not be like this after he is gone.
The second cause of the housing hell, which I pointed out in my documentary, was the rampant money printing that the government unleashed. While it was technically done by the Bank of Canada, it was clearly in total collaboration with the elected government and with the total support and the lack of discipline from the government to print $600 billion. The government has created 32% more cash in a period of time when the economy has grown by 4%. In other words, the cash is growing eight times faster than the stuff the cash buys.
The Liberals did this through a program called quantitative easing, where the government sells bonds to the private sector and the Bank of Canada buys them right back at a higher price, profiting the financial institutions, freeing up easy money for government to spend, but also flooding the financial markets with easy cash that is lent out to wealthy investors.
In my documentary, I use a Bank of Canada graph demonstrating the total liftoff in the number of homes bought by investors that happened exactly—
338 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/30/23 2:41:36 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, the economy is smaller today than it was five years ago on a per capita basis, and the IMF projects Canada will have the worst economic growth over the next six years and the next 40 years. This is the result of high tax hypocrisy.
It has come out that the environment minister, after punishing single moms, small business owners and farmers for heating their homes and driving their vehicles, has flown 60,000 kilometres. His climate change chair has flown the equivalent of going around the world four times, and now they are off with 70,000 other people at an air-conditioned dome in the desert in a petrostate. Why will they not park the jet, end the hypocrisy and axe the tax?
127 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/30/23 2:40:07 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, after eight years, we have entered the next phase of the Prime Minister's economic misery. We have seen “just inflation”, and today we have learned that Canada is in a state of stagflation as our economy has shrunk by 1.1% in the most recent quarter while the American economy boomed at 5%. This is the result of high taxes, big deficits and crippling red tape. At the same time as prices are rising for Canadians, their wages are falling. The economy is now smaller than it was on a per capita basis five years ago.
Why is the American economy roaring while the Prime Minister's economy is snoring?
115 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/22/23 3:11:48 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, it is not working. The Liberals have missed every emissions target but one in the year that the economy was entirely locked down. The Liberal government ranks 58th out of 63 in the world, and its own environment commissioner says it will not meet its emissions targets, yet the Liberals still go ahead with the carbon tax, which has proven not to work. They want to quadruple the tax, including on farmers, who have no other choice than to use traditional hydrocarbons to power their machinery, their barns and their drying.
Once again, how much will the carbon tax cost the average Canadian farmer when the Prime Minister quadruples it?
112 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/21/23 4:26:24 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, we can always count on the NDP to betray their constituents and come to the rescue of the tax-and-spend Liberals. Here they go again.
My question, not just on behalf of the common-sense Conservatives, but on behalf of the countless people who are losing their homes, who are lined up at food banks and who are living through the worst economy since the Great Depression, is this: Exactly how much will it cost the average family when the Liberal government goes ahead with its plan to quadruple the carbon tax? How much will it cost?
100 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Nov/2/23 2:21:00 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, he did not say whether his party supports him or not. That is interesting.
Senator Percy Downe said that this government is not serious about the economy, that it simply does not care, and that it would throw money at anything that crossed its mind. The resulting interest rate hikes, increasing cost of living and huge debt do not seem to concern it. Even the Liberals agree that this Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
Is Mark Carney the only one who can save the Liberal government?
90 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Oct/4/23 2:45:18 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, the question was “How much?” See, when the government borrows billions of dollars out of the economy, it bids up interest rates. Those interest rates have already ballooned faster under the Prime Minister than under any other in monetary history.
Once again, how much will the government borrow from the economy this year? I want just the number, please.
63 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/7/23 8:33:08 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, as I was pointing out, this practice of so-called quantitative easing was not invented in Canada. In fact, it started long ago in Japan, which caused a massive gap to appear between the rich and the poor, because the Japanese government printed cash, inflated asset values, left the working class behind and inflated the wealth of the super-rich. This led to a long-standing slump in Japanese economic growth, because investors no longer had to invest in productive assets that would generate wealth for the Japanese economy. Rather, they could just sit on their property, their stocks or their bonds and allow the Japanese central bank to inflate the values. The Americans then replicated this idea of quantitative easing in the U.S. financial crisis. The result was a disaster. It was a decade of very slow economic growth.
Furthermore, there was a major expansion in the gap between rich and poor. While the working class in America was losing its jobs to automation and outsourcing, it was not enjoying any of the lower prices that those competitive forces should have provided because the central bank was neutralizing cost savings by inflating the cost of living by printing cash. We saw a massive explosion in the wealth of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, while the working poor in industrial states, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and others, found themselves more and more disenfranchised. Their wages were going down, yet their prices were going up. They looked around and saw incompetent CEOs and other financial sector insiders, the same ones who had caused the U.S. financial crisis, not going to jail where they belonged. Rather, they were getting richer and richer. Therefore, the working poor came to believe that the system had ultimately been rigged against them.
Now I bring this to the present, because the government claims that because all central banks were engaging in quantitative easing, we had to do it as well. The American federal reserve is our big, friendly neighbour to the south. The argument goes that if it does something, we have to do it too. However, that is provably false. In the 2008-09 financial crisis, the American government printed cash to buy government debt. They did something called quantitative easing. In Canada, we did not do that. Our government signalled to the central bank that it would not be authorized to participate in fiscal policy by printing cash to buy government bonds. Yes, we ran small, temporary deficits to get through that financial crisis, but we did it by borrowing real money, not by printing cash. That is why we rebounded faster than the Americans did. We had lower unemployment. We were the last in and the first out of the recession, and we never had inflation above 4%. We were back to our inflation target in a year. This proves that we did not need to do what the Americans did, just as our mothers taught us. Just because our friends are jumping off a bridge, does not mean we should do the same.
We know that the Swiss did not print cash during the COVID crisis. Rather, they used real money; when they ran deficits, they borrowed real money. They quickly returned to a balanced budget, and the result was the lowest unemployment, the lowest interest rates and the lowest inflation. This was despite the fact that their European neighbours all had massive inflation crises because their central bank on that continent had behaved differently.
All these experiences were laboratories to demonstrate the folly of the government's actions. I called this folly out on the floor of the House of Commons as early as the fall of 2020, when all that cash was moving into our economy and already beginning to inflate the cost of living. Core inflation was already rising and starting to break above the 2% target, yet they continued when it was clear that there was—
663 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/7/23 8:27:41 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I think we can all agree that if the member from Kingston is our role model, that is a good reason why we are in so much trouble today.
This spending that has led to the inflation was utterly predictable, but its consequences have been utterly devastating. It is obvious by looking at the lineups at food banks across the country, which, in many cases, actually go many blocks down the street and around the corner. There are the cases of the young people who now estimate that they will be in their fifties before they will be able to move out of their parents' homes. These are not anecdotes.
Just the other day, one prominent financial institution estimated that if a family was earning a quarter of a million dollars, it would take them 25 years in Toronto to save up for a down payment. It used to be that 25 years was the term it took to pay down a mortgage, now it takes that long just to get a mortgage, which illustrates the immense contortion that our economy has suffered. This is not without notice around the world. The IMF now says that Canada has the economy that is most at risk of default crisis out of all the countries in the advanced and developed world. Right now, household debt is 107% of GDP, which is to say that the combined debt of Canadian families is 7% bigger than the entire GDP of our country, and we have the worst household debt of any G7 country.
This debt was not an accident. When governments create cash, they are sloppy about it. They do not simply print the money and hand it over to the Prime Minister to spend, although I think he might prefer that kind of efficiency, rather they have a central bank purchase government bonds on what is called the “secondary market”. In other words, the government sells the bonds to the financial institutions and the central bank buys them back.
This creates an artificial private-sector demand for government debt, which makes it very easy for government to borrow money. After all, if I say to members that I will sell them a bond today for $1.00 and buy it back tomorrow for a $1.10, it is pretty easy to imagine that members would accept that transaction so that they could arbitrage the 10¢ profit on the back and forth. This allows government to spend cash very easily and it also increases the money supply. It balloons government and the financial industries. It is why, when the Federal Reserve is engaged in this practice of so-called quantitative easing, it has been wildly popular in both Washington and on Wall Street among Democrats who like big government and among Republicans who like big banks, because both of them actually profit when government creates cash to inflate financial assets and to inflate the spending capacity of itself.
Therefore, what ends up happening is that those who benefit off government expenditures profit, those who benefit off the financial sector profit—
522 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Feb/1/23 2:45:52 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, a strong economy? It is like the Prime Minister is telling Canadians that they have never had it so good. Why does he not talk to the 1.5 million Canadians going to food banks in a given month? Some of them are asking food bank presidents for help committing suicide, not because they are sick but because they are too hungry.
It is as though he has not spoken to the nine in 10 young people who do not own homes and believe they never will because mortgage payments have doubled under his watch. It is as though he has not spoken to the 30,000 families who have lost loved ones because of the record overdoses that have happened under his watch.
Why will the Prime Minister not take responsibility for this disaster?
137 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
