- 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 2:40:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister, just like his carbon tax, is not worth the cost. The tax is already up to 17¢ a litre, higher than he promised it would go, and he plans to quadruple it further to 61¢ a litre; this, after it is a proven environmental failure. Canada ranks 62 out of 67 countries when it comes to fighting climate change, and this is precisely because what he has is a tax plan and not an environmental plan.
Why will he not adopt our common-sense plan for technology and not taxes?
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moved:
That the House call on the unelected Senate to immediately pass Bill C-234, An Act to amend the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, to remove the carbon tax on the farmers that feed Canadians, as passed by the democratically elected House.
He said: Madam Speaker, why is it that the House of Commons is green? The answer is that the first commoners met in the fields. They were overwhelmingly farmers who harvested a living from the fields of England. They were overwhelmingly taxed, though, by a greedy Crown that took out of their pockets and out of their hands the bread they had earned. As a result, they imposed upon King John, in 1215, the Magna Carta, the great charter, which required a whole series of restrictions on the power of the Crown. Among the most important of these was that the Crown could not tax what the commoners had not approved. Thus began the tradition that only the House of Commons can pass a bill to raise spending or taxes and only the House of Commons has the power of the purse.
That principle remains in place today. I have the rule book, O'Brien and Bosc, which the Speaker follows in his chair as he administers this chamber. It says, “The Constitution Act, 1867 provided that any bill appropriating any part of the public revenue or imposing a tax or duty must originate in the House of Commons”, with the commoners. It follows that the same principle be that if the commons votes to remove a tax, that tax must be removed.
This House of Commons has voted for a common-sense Conservative bill, Bill C-234, to take the carbon tax off the farmers who feed us. The farmers who feed us, of course, need energy to do so. They need the ability to power their drying machines to transport their grains and heat and cool their barns for their animals, all of which requires energy. The more tax the government imposes on that energy, the more expensive it is for them to produce the food we eat. Thus we have the misery and poverty that have resulted today in the same way they always have whenever the Crown, or in this case the state and the Prime Minister, takes too much.
We see what has happened. The government is rich and the people are poor. After eight years of the Prime Minister and his NDP government, there is record food bank use. This week we learned that under NDP policies imposed through the Prime Minister, 800,000 people in Ontario alone visited a food bank six million times. This is a record-smashing number. Nationwide, two million Canadians are going to a food bank. This is a 32% increase from when the Prime Minister took office.
After eight years of the Prime Minister, housing costs have doubled, rent has doubled, mortgage payments have doubled, down payments have doubled and tent cities have formed in every major city in this country. In Halifax, in the province of the federal housing minister, there are now 30 homeless encampments. This is in one city. We never had this before the Prime Minister.
What is his response? He divides to distract. He turns Canadian against Canadian. He gives out taxpayer-funded opioids to medicate people out of their misery. Later next year, he intends to bring in medical assistance in dying for the mentally ill so that people who are living with the total misery and isolation that his economy has created can have their lives ended altogether. We could not even have imagined that life would be this hellish for our people eight years ago.
What is his solution now? He wants to quadruple the carbon tax. He wants to raise it to 61¢ a litre on gas and diesel. Obviously this will make it unaffordable for people to drive to work and heat their homes. However, then there are the indirect costs, because when we tax the energy of the farmer who makes the food and the trucker who ships the food, we tax all who buy the food.
Let me give an example. In my riding we have Carleton Mushroom Farms. They supply mushrooms across the Ottawa-Carleton region and into western Quebec. They are spending $150,000 a year on carbon taxes, and now the Prime Minister wants to quadruple that tax. We can presume that their tax bill would go up to $600,000 a year for one farm. How is that farm supposed to feed people? The answer is that it will become mathematically impossible to do so. As the member for Foothills will tell the House, as I am splitting my time with him, we will see more of our food produced by foreign farmers in countries with poorer environmental standards.
This is the famous story of SunTech tomatoes, another great farm in my riding where the Prime Minister taxes the C02 they release into their greenhouse even though it is absorbed by the plant life. Apparently, he missed that day in science class. The problem is that it is now more expensive to buy a Manotick tomato in Manotick than a Mexican tomato. Therefore, the price signal the Prime Minister and the NDP send to the Manotick consumers is to buy the tomato that had to be trucked and trained across North America, burning fossil fuels from a less environmentally responsible country, to feed foreign food to our people.
This policy of quadrupling the tax on our farmers will mean more expensive food for consumers and more foreign food that sends our money, our jobs and our future out of this country, at the same time as sending more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We would be better to repatriate food production to Canada. We have the sixth biggest supply of arable land per capita in the world. We should not have to import any food, but here we are, more dependent on the rest of the world because the Prime Minister punishes the very farmers who try to feed us every day.
This tax compounds again and again. It is a tax that does not apply once like, for example, the sales tax. Sometimes on a single product, it can apply 20 or 30 times. It applies, for example, when the farmer buys the fertilizer. That fertilizer has already been carbon taxed. Then he has to bring the seeds to his field. The transportation of those seeds has to be carbon taxed. When the harvest comes out and he brings it in from the field, he has to be carbon taxed to dry those grains. Then, if it he is feeding those grains to his livestock, they might be in a barn. That barn has to be heated during the winter and so the barn is carbon taxed. Let us say they are hogs. When they are slaughtered, the slaughterhouse is carbon taxed. The trucker who ships the hogs to the slaughterhouse is carbon taxed. Then when the final cuts of pork are packaged and put in a truck to go to our grocery store, that truck is carbon taxed. Then heating that grocery store, which has a lot of space to heat, that heat is carbon taxed as well. By the time that piece of food gets onto someone's plate, it may have been carbon taxed 15 or 20 times.
People wonder why we have had the worst food inflation in 40 years after eight years of the Prime Minister. They wonder why food is so much more expensive in Canada than it is in the United States of America. They wonder why seven million people are skipping meals and not eating enough to remain healthy. They wonder why we have lineups around streets, around blocks; if the images were put in grainy black and white, they would assume they were watching something out of the dirty thirties. The answer is the Prime Minister is taxing the farmer who makes the food, the trucker who ships the food and every other person who works hard to bring that food to our table.
Common-sense Conservatives have a bill that has been passed by this House that would take the tax off. The Prime Minister has deployed his carbon tax minister to pressure senators to block that bill, in an undemocratic attack on the prerogative of the commoners to decide who pays what. The government cannot tax what the people do not approve and the people do not approve of this carbon tax. They want us to axe the tax; to bring home lower prices; to bring home our food production, our self-reliance and independence to this country; and to bring home more powerful paycheques, affordable food and decent homes to our Canadian people, the common people, the common sense of the common people, united for our common home; their home, my home and our home. Let us bring it home.
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- Oct/31/23 2:25:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister admits that he is keeping the tax on cleaner and lower-emitting natural gas. This is clearly not about environmental science; it is about political science. That political science with him is always to divide and conquer. It tears the country apart to serve his own narrow, personal interest.
Does the Prime Minister not realize that what he is doing is not just bankrupting Canadian households, 14% of which are living with unsafe temperatures because of higher energy costs, but also actually tearing our national unity apart?
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- Oct/31/23 2:23:39 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's panicked flip-flop on the carbon tax for oil heating proved that everything he said for eight years about the tax is wrong. It is not worth the cost. He said that the tax would make people better off. He has now admitted that it is not true. He said it is about the environment, but he leaves the tax on lower-emitting and more environmentally friendly natural gas. Now, the Prime Minister is dividing Canadians based on where they live.
Will he stop creating two classes of Canadians? Will he take the tax off all so Canadians can keep the heat on?
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- Jun/21/23 2:51:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has not hit a single environmental target with his tax, and Canada ranks 58th out of 64 countries in the Climate Change Performance Index. His plan is not working; it is just costing more.
In fact, the premier of Newfoundland said that the Prime Minister's claim that we need to tax to save the environment is “completely illogical, it's a false dichotomy, it's a false dilemma, and it's as insulting to us as it is simplistic.” The unanimous opinion of Atlantic premiers is that this tax will hurt their people without helping the environment. Why will the Prime Minister not axe his plan to raise gas prices by 61¢ a litre?
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- Jun/19/23 2:31:28 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what is nowhere is the Liberals' environmental plan. They do not have an environmental plan. After eight years of raising taxes on consumers, they still cannot hit their targets. They seem to suggest that if Canadians were just forced to pay more for gas, groceries and heat that forest fires would stop. That is ridiculous. All that has happened is a 40-year high in food price inflation, one in five Canadians skipping meals because they cannot afford food and 1.5 million going to food banks.
Now the Liberals want a 61¢-a-litre carbon tax. Will they axe the tax so Canadians can afford to eat?
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- May/29/23 7:24:20 p.m.
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Madam Chair, we agree, which is why we do not think that Quebeckers should be saddled with a new environmental tax.
Let us talk about the environment. Can the minister tell me what was Canada's ranking in the climate performance index out of 63 countries?
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- Nov/17/22 2:25:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is true that they have to meet environmental standards. We had real environmental standards under the previous Conservative government. In fact, the only way that the LNG Canada project in western Canada went ahead was by exempting it from the new anti-development, Bill C-69.
She is right also that first nations have to be consulted. One person is an indigenous grandmother from the Haisla first nation who told me that LNG Canada and projects like it meant that her autistic grandchild would have the resources for treatment. That means help for first nations, paycheques for people and clean energy for the world.
Why will the Liberals not get out of the way and let it happen?
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- Sep/29/22 2:20:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals and the Bloc want to punish Quebeckers for the crime of driving a conventional car by tripling the carbon tax.
The federal government is currently blocking the production of green electricity in Quebec for electric cars. The Quebec government wants to build dams to produce this green energy for electric cars, but federal red tape will block these projects.
Why does the government not cut the red tape, let Quebec build these environmentally friendly dams and, at the same time, get rid of the carbon tax?
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