- 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
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- May/21/24 2:29:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the minister does not even know that the target is 2%. Maybe that is one of the reasons she is missing the target; she does not know what it is.
The same goes for the interest rates we are paying on the national debt. The Prime Minister says that doubling the national debt is not a problem because the rates were very low. That is why I suggested locking in the rates with 10-year or 30-year bonds, when the rates were low, as it is done with mortgages.
That incompetent minister did not do that. Now we are going to pay more interest on the $400 billion that is going to be refinanced this year.
Why?
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- May/1/24 3:09:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, families are already living in austerity. The government is living in abundance. The people are poor, the government is rich. The more the government spends, the more Canadians pay. Interest rates are high, and the government's spending and borrowing are driving them even higher.
Have finance department officials briefed the Prime Minister on how much higher borrowing an additional $300 billion will drive up interest rates on families' mortgages?
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- Apr/8/24 2:23:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, while the common-sense Conservatives want to fix the budget to bring down inflation and interest rates, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost of mortgages.
According to Scotiabank's chief economist, this Prime Minister's inflationary deficits are increasing interest rates by 2% and preventing the Bank of Canada from lowering them. Canadians could lose their homes because of big multi-billion dollar announcements of inflationary spending. Will the Prime Minister acknowledge that this spending and these mortgages are not worth the cost?
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- Nov/22/23 2:26:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after all the experts warned this government that spending was driving up inflation and interest rates, the government added another $20 billion to our country's inflation. That means higher taxes, higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher rents and higher mortgage payments.
Will the government finally reverse its inflationary policies so that Canadians facing record payments on their mortgages can keep their homes?
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- Nov/21/23 4:58:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, those houses cannot be characterized with any adjective other than “non-existent”. They do not exist. The Liberals stand up day after day and list off the thousands of houses that they have not built. They have had eight years. It would be one thing if they were still promising to build homes in their first year, maybe their second year; okay, we will give them three years.
It has been eight years and the only thing they have accomplished on housing since promising to make it affordable is they have doubled the cost. They have doubled the rent, doubled mortgage payments, doubled the needed down payment for a home. Now we have $900 billion of mortgages that are coming up for renewal. That is two-thirds of all mortgages. The IMF says we are the number one at risk of having a mortgage crisis.
It is disgusting to think of the families who did everything right and risk losing everything because of the irresponsible policies of this Prime Minister and his NDP government.
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- Nov/21/23 2:22:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, austerity and cuts are exactly what Canadian families are living with today. Seven million of them are cutting meals because they cannot afford food prices after he has inflated them. Many are cutting homes and are forced to live in tents because mortgage rates have risen so fast under the Prime Minister's deficits.
Scotiabank now calculates that government deficits are adding two full percentage points to the rates. That is $700 per month in higher mortgage payments. In the next three years, $900 billion of new mortgages, or two-thirds, will come up for renewal. We risk a massive default crisis.
Will the Prime Minister announce a plan to balance the budget, to bring down mortgage rates, so Canadians can keep their homes?
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- Nov/20/23 2:23:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost of mortgage payments, which are already up 150%. The Bank of Canada and the Parliamentary Budget Officer now agree with me that his deficits are driving up interest rates. Scotiabank says that deficits are driving mortgage rates up 2%. That works out to $700 per month. Carpenters and nurses are already living in their cars, and the IMF says that Canada's mortgage holders are the most at risk of crisis.
Will the Prime Minister finally accept my common-sense plan and announce the date and the plan to balance the budget and bring down interest rates on Canadian mortgages so people do not lose their homes?
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- Nov/20/23 2:21:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, this Prime Minister is not worth the cost of mortgages. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer and the Governor of the Bank of Canada, I am right to say that this Prime Minister's deficits are contributing to inflation and interest rates. According to Scotia Bank, these deficits are increasing interest rates by 2%. That means a $700-increase to monthly mortgage payments.
Before Canadians lose their homes, will the Prime Minister finally accept my common sense plan and announce a date and plan for balancing the budget, reducing inflation and mortgage rates?
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It is proven that he is not worth the cost, just like he has not been worth the cost for housing. After eight years, the Prime Minister has doubled mortgage payments, doubled the rent and doubled the needed down payment for a home.
Let us just review the housing hell he has caused since he promised to lower housing costs. It now takes 25 years to save up for a down payment in Toronto. Before the Prime Minister, a person could pay off a mortgage in that time. Families are now stretching out their mortgage terms to 90 years and 120 years, because interest rates on their exorbitant mortgages have stretched out the amortization. People used to pay off an entire mortgage 25 years in and then they could retire mortgage free.
Now, not only will they never be able to pay off their mortgage in their entire lifetime, but even if they hand their house and mortgage to their kids, they might not be able to pay it off in their lifetime. They would then have to hand the house to a third generation that would still inherit a mortgage. So much for the government taking on debt so Canadians do not have to.
Under the Prime Minister, homes cost 50% more than they do in the United States, and a person can buy a castle in Sweden for the price of a two bedroom in Kitchener. Toronto is now ranked the worst housing bubble in the world by UBS Bank. Vancouver is the third-most unaffordable housing market on earth, when we compare housing costs to income, and Toronto is the 10th. Vancouver is now more unaffordable than New York, London, England and Singapore, which is a tiny island with 2,000 times more people per square kilometre than Canada.
Canada should be the cheapest place in the world, because, of course, we have more land per person than all but four countries on the planet. In other words, we have a lot of space, just not a lot of homes. In fact, we have fewer homes per capita than all other G7 countries even though we have by far the most land on which to build. In fact, we have fewer homes per capita today than we did eight years ago when the Prime Minister took office, promising more homes and more affordable homes.
If members want the best all-in-one measurement of the Prime Minister's performance on housing, look at the OECD, which compared housing costs to income, starting in 2015 to present, among all 37 OECD countries. How has the ratio of home prices to family incomes grown in Canada relative to the other 36 OECD countries? We are the second worst. In other words, housing costs outgrew incomes in Canada at a faster pace than in all but one of the other 36 OECD countries. This is a new problem that occurred after the Prime Minister took office and it is a problem that is unique to Canada. He cannot blame some prior government and he cannot blame other countries, because it is worse than Canada has ever been and worse than almost anywhere else in the world.
This is a made-in-Canada problem unique to the Prime Minister. Why? Because he has spent the last eight years building bureaucracy rather than building homes. He brags that he has the most expensive housing programs. He complains that when I was housing minister, my programs did not cost as much, and he is absolutely right about that. I had far more affordable housing programs. In fact, there were far few billions in my housing programs than there are in his programs, but we do not measure the success by how expensive we can be. We measure success by how affordable we can be.
He even made up a fact. He looked at a CBC headline, which is always a dangerous thing to do, and he said that when I was minister we only built 99 homes with $300 million. I thought, “What the heck is he talking about?” I have a mind like a steel trap. I would have remembered if I had announced a $300-million housing project, and so I checked into it. Here is what actually happened.
First, the program was created in 2008, a half decade before I even became the minister. Second, it did not spend any money. The program was designed to encourage private home ownership by first nations. It invested capital of $300 million, but did not spend a penny. Because the money was invested commercially, it actually grew to $380 million. Also, it was not 99 homes; 7,000 homes were built, purchased or renovated for first nations people.
It did not cost any money. It made a profit and it built, renovated and bought 7,000 homes. By the way, the entire thing is run by first nations themselves. No wonder the Liberals do not like any of that, but forget the facts. If I had to deal with the bare body of facts in litigating the housing file, I do not know what I would do. I might have to hallucinate to come up with some other facts too. I might even get desperate enough to read CBC headlines as well.
In the meantime, let us talk about the real common-sense plan to bring in homes Canadians can afford. Let us talk about my bill, the building homes not bureaucracy act.
Principle number one is that it will require cities to boost home completions by 15% per year or they will lose federal infrastructure money. We give them $5 billion a year in direct transfers. They can pretty much do whatever they want with that money. I am saying that this is going to be a housing incentive. We are going to start paying city bureaucrats the way real estate agents get paid, on volume. They get housing completed, they get more money. They do not get it completed, they get less money.
The bureaucrats will have to wake up every morning and think about how they can approve as many permits as quickly as possible so Canadians have a place to live. It is going to be very mathematical. I will require them to hit 15% more home building per year. If they beat that by, say, 10%, they get 10% more money. If they miss it by 10%, they get 10% less money. Maybe then the bureaucrats and the mayors will wake up everyday and think about how they can get it done quickly. Mayors would then be forced to move their offices right into the permitting room, a big open room with big screens. Permitting times would be on one wall showing the number of homes waiting, how many people are on hold right now and how many homes are being held up. Imagine if they had big screens in city hall and all the bureaucrats were busy motoring away, trying to get to a “yes” and getting things done. Would that not be incredible if we actually focused on results, rather than on building more bureaucracy? That is what my bill would incentivize.
Right now, by contrast, the current housing minister has come up with a program that works very simply. He calls up the mayors. He says to them that everyone knows housing is hell after eight years of the Liberal government. He asks if he can go to the town and take credit for homes that it were already going to build. He then will write a big cheque for it if the town does that. He shows up and notes that there was already a subdivision being built. If the town gives the minister credit for that, in exchange he will stroke a big cheque for $40 million with which the government can build more bureaucracy. Then the bureaucrats will be happy, the politicians will be happy and everyone else will be miserable. That is what he has been doing.
We know that this is not leading to more housing construction, because housing starts this year are down 9%. Yes, he can show up and say, “Look at these 24,000 homes, which were already going to be built”, but the overall housing starts, the number of shovels put into ground, is down 9%. Two years after the so-called housing accelerator was created, not a single solitary new house has been completed; a $4-billion housing program that does not build housing. My plan would create a strict, mathematical formula that pays for results.
The second principle is that we will require federally funded transit stations to be surrounded by housing so people can live right next to the bus or train. I have been right across the country and countless stations do not have housing. In fact, in Winnipeg, the gatekeepers actually stepped in to block 2,000 new homes right next to a transit station that was built for those homes. They had to get slapped down in the courts. What did the Liberals do? They gave more money to the incompetent politicians at Winnipeg city hall to block housing for the people who needed it.
I am going to put all the federal funds for transit stations into a trust. The city will not get the money for the transit station until there are apartments occupied all around the station. That way they will have to hurry up and approve the housing if they want to get that money. We will, again, pay for results.
Next, the bill would require that the federal minister of public works do a full inventory and come to the House within months to announce all the buildings that would be sold in order to build housing. The Prime Minister promised that eight years ago. In eight years, with all the 37,000 federal buildings, the 6.2 million square metres of office space, and the thousands of acres, how many homes has he managed to build on that federal land and in those federal buildings? I asked him and he did not know either. It is 13; not 13,000, not 1,300. My bill would make it mandatory by law that the minister come here with a plan to sell off 15% of all federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land so that we can build on that land that is being used for nothing.
On the fourth principle, federal bureaucrats will have to get their act together as well. I was speaking with a builder who builds beautiful environmentally friendly homes and apartments in Atlantic Canada. He is in the process of building a carbon-neutral building right now. It will be the greenest apartment complex in the world. He had to wait two years for CMHC to approve the financing on that building.
The benchmark is supposed to be 60 days, so here is how life is going to work around here when I am prime minister with what is in this bill. CMHC bureaucrats will have to hit the 60-day target within six months. If they do not, I am cutting their pay in half. If they do not do it within a year, I am firing the entire executive. It is right in the bill. That is life. If a barber does not cut hair well, they get fired. If a mechanic has an engine block fall out, they get fired.
In the real world, when people do not do their job, they do not get bonuses. That is not how life works under the Prime Minister for the senior, six-figure bureaucracy. This bill would put an end to that. We are going to pay for results, not for bureaucracy and the privilege of incompetent bureaucrats who make life miserable and costly for everyone else.
The building homes not bureaucracy act is common sense, 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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- Oct/23/23 2:25:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, the national housing strategy of which he speaks has doubled housing costs. It doubled the cost of mortgages, rent and down payments. Yes, it cost many billions more than what we spent when we were in government, but we delivered housing that was half the cost of what it is today.
Now, on to restaurants: Today, we learned that one-third of restaurants are losing money. That leaves them three choices: shut down, cut wages or raise prices for Canadians.
Will the government reverse the carbon taxes and the inflationary increases to interest rates that are forcing our restaurants to go under and costing waitresses and servers their jobs?
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- Oct/17/23 2:21:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years, eight long years, this Prime Minister is not worth the cost of mortgages. The cost of housing has increased by 100% since he took office. He printed $600 billion, which inflated real estate prices and forced people to take out large mortgages. Then, his deficits drove up interest rates.
When will he reverse his inflationary policies to lower interest rates and allow Canadians to keep their homes?
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- Oct/4/23 2:48:13 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, he will not tell us the facts because he does not even know the facts.
This is a man who is going to borrow $421 billion this year. If the government bought 421 billion apples, the price of apples would go up. When it borrows $421 billion, the price of debt goes up in higher interest rates. That is why Canadians are paying 150% more on their mortgages.
How much will the government force Canadians to spend on national debt interest this year?
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- Sep/19/23 2:24:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one of the ways that the Prime Minister doubled housing costs was by flooding the economy with $600 billion of newly created cash, which bid up the price of homes and forced Canadians to overpay. Then many bought at rock-bottom low rates because he promised that they would never go up. His inflationary deficits pushed them up, and now one-fifth of all Canadians are actually unable to pay the interest on their mortgages. Their mortgages are growing in size and when they renew, it will be on a bigger principal at a higher rate.
How many Canadians will go bankrupt? Will we have a mortgage crisis when that happens, yes or no?
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- Jun/21/23 2:59:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, last year's exorbitant increases in interest rates were incredible and unprecedented. They were caused by this government's inflationary deficit. Canadians are worried about losing their homes. According to the Bank of Canada, the average Canadian could see a 40% increase in their mortgage payments. The International Monetary Fund says that Canada is the country most at risk of experiencing a default crisis.
Will the Prime Minister finally eliminate his inflationary deficits to lower interest rates on mortgages and ensure that Canadians can keep their homes?
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- Jun/21/23 2:37:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister expects to be judged on his promises rather than his results.
The results are these. Eight years ago, housing was affordable, taking a modest 40% of average income to pay mortgages on an average house, which is something that is now up to 60%. The average cost of a house has nearly doubled. The cost of a mortgage payment has doubled. The cost of monthly rent has doubled. It is double trouble after eight years of this Prime Minister.
Unfortunately, the Prime Minister wants to keep doing what caused the problem in the first place. Will he instead stop funding gatekeeping that blocks construction and bring down the deficits that are driving up mortgage rates?
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- Jun/21/23 2:30:15 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's $80-billion worth of programs are not working. They have led to a doubling in the cost of an average down payment, double the necessary monthly mortgage payment, and a 120% increase in the average rent. This is way out of line with what is happening in other countries. Meanwhile, he continues to drive up interest rates on mortgages with his deficits, and to give money to local bureaucracies to block home building.
Will the Prime Minister get off the backs and out of the way of Canadians so they can finally afford a home?
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- Jun/20/23 2:29:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what is overwhelming is the debt he has imposed on the backs of hard-working Canadians, Canadians who now face the loss of their homes as a result of his inflationary policies. After eight years, the cost of rent has doubled. After eight years, the cost of a mortgage payment has doubled. After eight years, the needed down payment for the average house has doubled. Now, because of the massive mortgages he told Canadians would be consequence-free, which they now hold and now pay higher interest rates on, many could lose their homes.
Will he reverse these inflationary policies so Canadians can keep their homes?
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- Jun/7/23 3:16:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, 2021-22: I will tell us what was happening. I will tell us what he was doing. He was trying to stuff a half-billion dollars into the WE Charity to help a group that had paid off his family.
We know that he gave money to Frank Baylis's company. We know that 40% of all of the deficits he added had nothing to do with COVID, according to the PBO. We know that he added $100 billion of debt before COVID ever happened and now he is adding hundreds of billions more now that COVID is done.
He has got to stop using the COVID excuse and start answering the question. People do not know how they are going to pay their mortgages. That is why I have had to ask 20 times about that question.
Will he finally answer it?
How will they pay their mortgages?
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- Jun/7/23 3:15:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has caused the mortgage crisis we now face. Back in 2021-22, he flooded the economy with cheap and excessive cash that went into the mortgage system. It bid up the price of housing. House prices had doubled under his leadership and then Canadians were forced to take on massive, and in some cases, million-dollar, mortgages in order to buy a home.
He promised them that rates would be low for long but then his deficits juiced inflation, which pushed up interest rates and now, over the next three years, many of those same families will face 40% increases in their mortgage payments.
How is he going to save their homes now that he put them in peril?
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- Jun/5/23 2:23:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, what is truly reckless is driving up inflation and interest rates on Canadian consumers who are the most indebted in the entire G7. In fact, the combined consumer debt is almost bigger than the entire Canadian economy. When the monster mortgages that Canadians took out, with the advice of the government back in 2021-22, come into higher rates for renewal there could be a massive mortgage meltdown.
Therefore, will the finance minister do what she promised only six months, and that is to stop putting fuel on the inflationary fire, balance the budget to bring down inflation and interest rates, yes or no?
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