- 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
- Apr/18/24 11:35:43 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, it does not currently exist after nine years of this Prime Minister and roughly two years of the NDP joining the federal government. What we have is a promise that it will eventually exist, and we do not know when and if that promise will ever be fulfilled. We know that already there are many dentists who are refusing to participate because the program is so badly run, and we know that this and other programs are being run through hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts to profit-making insurance companies, once again with the support, ironically, of the NDP.
This NDP member has betrayed his constituents to support the Prime Minister doubling the housing costs, quadrupling the carbon tax and forcing two million Canadians to a food bank. He should go back and talk to that single mother and all single mothers and apologize to them for increasing their food, gas and heating bills and making it impossible for them to ever own a home.
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- Feb/5/24 2:22:17 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the advice is to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
The Prime Minister is not worth the cost and not worth the crime. We now are paying a billion dollars more in insurance premiums because he has led to a quadrupling of car thefts in Toronto.
I have a common-sense plan, which I rolled out today, to end house arrest and catch and release for career criminals, and bring in three years of jail for three stolen cars.
Will the government accept the common-sense plan?
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- Jun/7/23 9:01:16 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, that was an unusually helpful comment from the member across the way. He says that there is no guarantee that interest rates will be that high when people are up for renewal. There is no guarantee that I will get into a car accident, so why should I wear a seat belt? There is no guarantee that the plane cannot land itself, so why could the pilot not just have a nap while the flight is in course? There is no guarantee that I will die if the parachute does not open, so why do I not just forget to pull the cord? That is the kind of logic we get from the other side. It is so ridiculous, and we wonder why we are in such a mess.
There is no guarantee that the house will get robbed, so why bother locking the doors, right? There is no guarantee I will get into a car accident, so why buy insurance, right? Why would we mitigate against any risk because there is no guarantee that risk will manifest itself into any mal, right? That is exactly the kind of mentality that is getting us into this trouble. He is saying that because there is no guarantee that things will go wrong, we should do nothing to protect against it going wrong.
An hon. member: What would you do?
Hon. Pierre Poilievre: What would I do? Well, I have been telling them what to do for the last three years, and if they had listened, they would not be in the mess they are in today.
What can be done? Obviously, we have to find a way to bring rates down before those mortgages come up for renewal. As I said earlier, why did the rates go up in the first place? Government deficits led to higher inflation, which led to higher interest rates, which will lead to higher defaults. How do we reverse that? We bring down the government deficits so we can bring down the inflation, which allows the Bank of Canada to bring down interest rates, and this will allow us to bring down the defaults. That is my IKEA instruction manual for the hon. member today. That is obviously what we need to do to avoid the crisis that is ahead of us.
However, make no mistake, this is a crisis, and it is one that is coming quicker and quicker. It is like a train that is coming down the track, and if we do nothing to prepare ourselves to get off the track now, we will face that very real threat. Now, the member across the way might say “Oh, the debt crisis, who cares? That's something accountants and economists will fray about. They'll wring their hands and it will be discussions on business channels about what that means. Why should anybody really care?”
Well, let me tell members that a debt crisis is a massive humanitarian crisis. The human toll of debt crises are staggering. They produce massive unemployment, which leads to increased depression, suicide, alcohol and opioid addiction, overdoses and other miseries that we are already beginning to see.
Two Harvard economists who studied over 800 years of debt crises, Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, found that debt crises typically bring a 35% decline in house prices, leaving people with mortgages that are worth more than their homes. On average, GDP falls 9%, roughly twice the GDP drop during the COVID recession of 2020. Unemployment rises, on average, 7%, which lasts, on average, four years. That means not just a loss of livelihoods but also a loss of lives.
A University of Calgary study found that a 1% increase in unemployment increases the suicide rate by 2.1%. A paper by the British Journal of Psychiatry estimated that, in Europe and North America, the great recession is associated with at least 10,000 additional economic suicides between 2008 and 2010. There were 10,000 people who killed themselves. More people killed themselves during the great global recession in the United States than would otherwise have done so absent that financial crisis.
The same thing happened in Asia. According to researchers in the British Medical Journal, it is estimated that the 1997 economic crisis in Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong resulted in over 10,000 excess suicides.
The long-term job loss from a financial crisis would be at least as bad as what we experienced during the COVID lockdown with the devastating personal consequences. Unemployed men and women would have no job to go to in the mornings and nowhere they could afford to go in the evenings for recreation.
As a result, they end up isolated and alone. Many turn to alcohol and drugs. We are already seeing these pernicious mals exacting themselves on our people today.
Calls to one national suicide prevention line rose 200% over the period of COVID, according to CBC. That prompted one of our members, the member for Cariboo—Prince George, to introduce a bill creating the 988 suicide prevention line. Make no mistake, the forced unemployment that happened during COVID led to more suicides, and if we do have the kind of financial crisis I am trying to avoid, I am afraid to report to the House, then there will be similar desperation.
The number of overdose deaths in B.C. alone in 2021 was by far the highest on record, and more than twice as high as it was in 2019. In Ontario and Alberta, opioid deaths spiked almost 50% during the lockdown periods. All of this could be associated with unemployment. Researchers have found that, when unemployment in a country rises one percentage point, the opioid death rate jumps 3.6% and opioid overdose emergency room visits jump 7%.
When the greek debt crisis happened, there were problems with wages, pensions and social programs, and desperate people flooded into the psychiatric units across the country. The Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe wrote in a report, “Most patients admitted under this regime are unemployed persons, bankrupt businessmen, or parents who have no means of taking care of or feeding their children. Most are reported to be over 40 years old and have never shown previous signs of mental illness.”
Then there are the painful government policies that follow debt crises. Some of the harshest austerity measures, of which we have been warned by the Prime Minister, happened in Greece under a Marxist government. It was led by something called the coalition of the radical left, an alliance of communist, eco-socialists and anti-capitalists.
Why would a party, that has an ideology that believes in boundless government programs, slash public spending so dramatically in Greece? It is for the same reason that the federal Liberal government slashed health care and 45,000 public servant jobs in the 1990s. It is the same reason that the Saskatchewan NDP, a party that credits itself with inventing Canada's medicare program, shut down 52 hospitals in Saskatchewan in the 1990s.
Why? They ran out of money. That is what real austerity is, it is when we run out of money. That is the result of major debt crises like the one I am trying to warn against right now, which proves that debt crises actually do not care about ideology. Numbers are not partisan. Merciless mathematics trump political philosophy in a debt crisis.
When the money is gone and no one will lend more, where the funds have been exhausted, how do we pay the wages of the public servants, the pensions of the retired, the hospital bills, the schools, the food and other essentials? As Pythagoras said, “numbers rule the universe”. Austerity is almost never a choice. It happens when irresponsible governments, like that one over there, make it mathematically unavoidable.
Harvard economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, also found that financial meltdowns cause government debt to further explode. It is an explosion within an explosion, and a crisis on top of a crisis. That is why it is always most humane to protect the country's finances in advance to avoid the need for austerity. That is what we, as Conservatives, do. We protect the finances, not just so that an accountant can be happy with the balance sheet, but because we care about health care, education and the social safety nets that we desperately need.
That is why we want to protect our finances. That is why we want to avoid the nasty and ruthless cuts that the Prime Minister has in store for this country if he succeeds in bankrupting the nation's finances. We have seen these ruthless mathematics under his father, who gave us not just inflation, but also stagflation. He was successful at delivering both record highs in inflation and unemployment at exactly the same time.
Look at the years of 1980 and 1983. During those years of the Trudeau debt crisis, unemployment and inflation both hit 12% at the same time. That means we had a misery index of 24. Inflation plus unemployment is the misery index. That drove interest rates up to an almost unimaginable 19% a year. I remember those days. In fact, some of my earliest memories—
An hon. member: You would have been in diapers.
Mr. Pierre Poilievre: That is pretty close, actually. A member says I would have been in diapers. I was born in 1979. I just turned 44.
My earliest memories started to appear around 1982-83. I remember the horrible strain and stress my parents faced. There was actually the national energy program, whereby the Trudeau government demolished the Alberta economy, where I was growing up. We were largely protected from that because my folks were teachers, so they did not lose their jobs, unlike many of the unfortunate but greatly patriotic and courageous Albertans and Saskatchewanians who were hit directly. However, my folks had a few little rental properties that my mother had scrounged and saved to make possible, and we were all hit with the higher interest rates, rates that could not be paid with the rent the tenants were paying. We could not pay our mortgage, so we had to move to a smaller house.
That period was very stressful. There was massive dislocation. It is no wonder that the misery index reached its highest level, because misery is the best way to describe it. Some people cannot take the misery. During that time period, the suicide rate reached a record high. In 1983, when I would have been four years old, the suicide rate hit 14.8 per 100,000 people, an 8% increase from 1980. Seven of the eight worst years for suicide rates in Canada happened when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister. That is because people's lives were coming apart.
Members can just imagine. It is not just money. It is not just the desire to have more stuff. It is the shame of coming home to one's kids and saying, “You can't go on that little camping trip. I'm cancelling your hockey. We have to leave this house and move into a tiny, little apartment.” That is the real, human anxiety, the guilt, the pain and the frustration that literally break families apart and cause divorce and suicide. People lose hope, and everything falls apart.
When I talk about the possibility of a very real debt crisis, with all of these mortgages that were locked in at low rates three years ago, two years ago, even one year ago, I am not talking about an accounting phenomenon. I am talking about a human phenomenon, one that we have a duty to avoid. We have a duty now to foretell the dangers that are coming and to protect our country against the ravages they would mean for our population. We know how to do that. We know there are simple, common-sense decisions that we can make in order to avoid such an eventuality here in our country, as we have seen all around the world and that we could replicate if we do not change course now.
We know what the necessary steps are today. It is about spending less and creating more. The member across the way will instantly assume that if something costs less, it must be of less value. This is a fundamental breakdown in his understanding. The Prime Minister is the worst for this. He thinks that if something costs more, it must be worth more, as though the half-billion dollars he wanted to give to WE Charity was worth more than, for example, just having a passport actually delivered to people on time. Just because something costs more does not mean it is better.
For example, the government has a housing program. It has spent $89 billion on it. In fact, the number one bragging point it has is that its housing plan is really expensive. One can almost imagine a restaurant running an advertisement: “Come dine with us. We have terrible ambiance; the service is garbage; the food is rotten. It might even make you sick, but guess what? It costs 1,000 bucks a plate. Therefore, it must be the best, because it is the most expensive.”
Let us take this back into the government realm. When I was employment minister, we had a program, which I believe is still in place today, to help visually impaired Canadians read books by sending them CDs with the books on them. They could then put them in their computers, hit play and listen to them. One of my constituents was actually capable of listening to books at four times the speed, because she had trained herself. To the rest of us, it would sound like gibberish, but she had trained herself to speed read using audio players. It was a wonderful program.
However, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind said there was one problem, which was that it did not use CDs anymore, so we did not have to pay Canada Post to ship these CDs to people's homes. It had come up with a technology that would allow the Canadian government to simply pay the cost of having radio personalities go into an audio room and record the book, and then it could be sent as an audio file, a particle of light through cyberspace, and people could read the book without having to have a cassette.
It turned out that this reduced the cost of the program by about 80%. Furthermore, we signed a deal with the other countries that had the same English-speaking and French-speaking books as we had. We said we would waive copyright on all of our recordings, and all the authors would agree to waive copyright if the other countries did the same. That way, the other countries could give all the books they had to us and we could give all the books we had to them. Therefore, everyone would have more books, and because there was no longer a physical copy of any of these books, we were going to massively increase the number of books by something like 500,000, all of a sudden.
The cost of the program went down by 80%. Using Liberal logic, Liberals would say that was a savage cut and ask how we could do such a thing, even though it meant more convenience, more books and a faster turnaround in customer service for people. Just because it cost less did not mean it was not worth more. This is common sense.
Let us think about it this way. We have had these arguments with the Prime Minister. He says that my time as housing minister was no good because I did not spend $89 billion on housing, but housing cost half as much. When I was housing minister, the average mortgage payment was $1,400 and the average rent was $900 for a single-bedroom apartment. The average down payment needed for a house was $22,000. Now it is double, double and double.
However, the Prime Minister would say that his is a success, because even though nine in 10 young people believe they will never be able to afford a home, he has the most expensive housing program in Canadian history; therefore, it must be the best. He thinks that the price is equal to the value. There is a difference between value and cost, a distinction that the government never makes. That is why it has spent so much to achieve so little.
How can we organically impose discipline on government to ensure that it gets more for less? One way is to impose the simple law of nature, called scarcity. Every creature in the universe, every bird in the trees, every fish in the sea, must live with the law of scarcity: maximum use of scarce resources. They can have this or that, not this and that, or they can find a bargain on this and that. The single mother who wants to build a new porch might pass up on the vacation, or she might go to the local lumber yard to see if she can get a bargain on the lumber to build the porch for a lower price and maybe get a bargain on kids' camp so that she can do both. That is the common-sense budgeting that families do every single day.
Politicians are the only creatures in the universe that do not have to live by the universal law of scarcity, because by using inflation, taxes and debt, they externalize the scarcity on everyone else. They push austerity out of government and into the living rooms of the people, into the small businesses and onto the farm gate, where someone else has to deal with more scarcity because government is pushing its costs onto everyone else.
What if we internalized that scarcity? What if we required that government make the same trade-offs, the same common-sense bargains that the single mom, small business person or farmer makes every single day? What if we passed a common-sense law, called the “dollar for dollar law”, that required a politician to find a dollar of savings for each new dollar of spending?
I promise, by the way, to be conservative in my remarks, if members promise to be liberal in their applause. That is my idea of a bipartisan speech: Conservative content and Liberal applause.
This—
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- Nov/28/22 2:22:13 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the question was about home heating.
The New Democrats have voted to raise home heating prices. They voted against our motion to take the carbon tax off home heating, and did it right before a winter when analysts expect that home heating prices will double. Now the Liberals are saying they will buy everyone a heat pump, which insurance companies say will not be insured because people need a backup heat supply in order to keep the pipes from freezing.
Instead of coming up with new schemes, why do the Liberals not just cancel the tax so Canadians can stay warm this winter?
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