SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Hon. Pierre Poilievre

  • 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
  • Jun/4/24 2:24:08 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, if that were true, he would simply release the report with the real cost of the carbon tax that he has been hiding. However, the Auditor General released another report showing that the Prime Minister is not worth the corruption or cost after nine years; $123 million in spending in the Prime Minister's green slush fund broke the rules. According to one of the bureaucrats involved, the entire expenditure resembles the Liberal sponsorship scandal. Will the Prime Minister take personal responsibility for these costs and corruption, or will he just blame others again?
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  • May/29/24 2:25:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has had a revelation. In an interview with Halifax's The Chronicle Herald, he told how he responded to people asking for him to spend even more government money. He said, “As soon as you do that, inflation goes up by exactly [the same] amount. Right.” Right. Why did I not think of that? My goodness, spending money we do not have actually causes inflation. In the middle of having epiphanies, has the Prime Minister also realized that budgets do not balance themselves?
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  • May/29/24 2:24:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, now I understand the logic. If the government spends money sending cheques directly to Canadians, that causes inflation, but if it sends money to the federal bureaucracy, that does not cause bureaucracy, unless it comes with broken promises and a lack of services. It is true what the Prime Minister said. Spending money that we do not have causes inflation. Will he acknowledge that it is time for a common-sense dollar-for-dollar plan to fix the budget and reduce inflation?
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  • May/29/24 2:23:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has had an epiphany. In an interview with The Chronicle Herald, a Halifax newspaper, he said that when people ask him for even more government money, he tells them that as soon as the government spends money, inflation rises by exactly the same amount. Why did I not think of that? Spending more money than we have causes inflation. Can these revelations coax him to admit that budgets do not balance themselves?
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  • May/27/24 2:21:45 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost of mortgages, 76% of which will become more expensive over the next three years, according to the federal banking regulator, OSFI. This, after the Prime Minister said rates would stay low for long. We know that his massive government deficits have driven rates up two percentage points higher than they otherwise would be, according to Scotiabank. Will he accept my common-sense, dollar-for-dollar plan to cap spending and cut waste to bring down interest rates so Canadians can keep their homes?
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  • May/27/24 2:18:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, this Prime Minister is not worth the cost of mortgages, 76% of which will require higher monthly payments in the next three years, according to the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, which monitors Canada's banks. This comes after the Prime Minister promised that interest rates would stay low for Canadians. Against this backdrop, the Bloc Québécois is voting in favour of a $500-billion bureaucratic, inflationary and centralist budget that is causing interest rates to balloon. Why does the Prime Minister not cap spending and reduce the waste in order to lower interest rates?
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  • May/23/24 2:19:59 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, it is clear that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. Homelessness is up by 38% and a quarter of Canadians skip meals because they cannot afford to eat. The Bloc voted for $500 billion in centralist, inflationary spending to hire an additional 100,000 public servants and double spending on consultants. It says it had no choice, because the government would shut down otherwise. Could the government inform the Bloc that this spending was going to pass with the NDP's help, regardless of how the Bloc voted?
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  • May/22/24 2:59:24 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, this Prime Minister's inflationary and centralizing spending caused the inflation that is hurting Canadians. That is no surprise. The surprising thing is that the Bloc Québécois voted for $500 billion of that spending. These budget appropriations are not going to health care or to seniors, since those expenditures are already set out in legislation. No, that money is being spent on bureaucracy, or to double up on payments to consultants, as in the arrive scam case. Does the Liberal Party realize that more money for the federal level means less money for Quebeckers?
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  • May/22/24 2:52:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, three devastating reports in one day demonstrate the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is not worth the cost. First, we had Food Banks Canada and the Salvation Army that said that record numbers are forced to go to food banks and that over half of people are worse off than they were a year ago. Now the PBO says there is more homelessness. There is more homelessness and hunger. The Prime Minister has three explanations: One, he can blame the rest of the world for his mistakes; two, he can promise more of the spending that caused the problem or; three, he can own up and admit that he caused the misery Canadians are living.
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  • May/22/24 2:49:31 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister brags about his billions in spending. People cannot live in “billions”. They live in homes, and his billions build bureaucracies that block those homes. In 2015, there were 284 homeless people in Halifax. Now, there are 1,211. There are over 30 homeless encampments in Halifax alone. Ten years ago, there were 3,000 Quebeckers who were homeless. Now there are 10,000. Why is it that the more he spends, the worse things get?
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  • May/22/24 2:27:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a school food program that has not served a single solitary meal, even though it was promised three years ago. What the Prime Minister is feeding is bureaucracy, not children. If all of his spending were working, then why is it that Food Banks Canada reported today that 25% of young adults had to go to a food bank in three months alone, and two million Canadians are lined up every month? With so many empty stomachs, is it not just a little bit wacko to be raising carbon taxes on farmers and food?
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  • May/8/24 2:53:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, since he implemented his big spending plan, interest rates have skyrocketed. Doubling the national debt inflates interest rates. Who could have foreseen this? In fact, anyone could have. Any plumber or mechanic could have told him that this is always what ends up happening. That is why Canada has the worst mortgage debt and housing costs in the G7. Will he finally follow my common-sense plan to have a dollar of savings for every dollar of new spending to reduce interest rates and inflation?
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  • May/8/24 2:51:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, now he is spending more to deliver fewer homes. It is certainly true that he is spending hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars. He has a new number every year, a new program worth billions more. However, people do not live in the billions and millions of dollars. They live in apartments and houses that now cost twice as much as they did when he took office. Does the Prime Minister finally understand, after spending nine years creating the worst real estate crisis in the G7, that the more he spends, the more it costs?
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  • May/8/24 2:28:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, while common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost after nine years. He has doubled the debt and doubled housing costs. He has increased spending by nearly 80%. What did we get for the money? We got the worst per person income growth in the entire G7 and the worst mortgage debt of all those countries. When will the Prime Minister realize that the more he spends, the worse things get?
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  • May/6/24 2:21:06 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Liberals are making more expensive promises, but this Prime Minister is not worth the cost after nine years. Worse still, the Bloc Québécois voted to support this Prime Minister's $500 billion in inflationary and centralizing deficits and spending. This has driven up interest rates for Quebeckers who are afraid of losing their homes. In addition, taxpayers are now paying more for interest on the national debt than for health care. When will the Prime Minister admit that he and the Bloc Québécois are not worth the cost?
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  • May/1/24 3:15:22 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, inflation and higher interest rates are the costs Canadians pay for the spending that the Prime Minister told them was free. It is not free. Nothing is free. Every dollar he spends comes out of the pockets of Canadians directly through taxes or indirectly through inflation and interest rates. Now he wants to do another $300 billion of binge borrowing. Will he put aside that radical scheme and, instead, accept my common-sense plan to fix the budget with a dollar-for-dollar law so we can bring down interest rates and inflation for Canadians?
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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/29/24 2:20:13 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years, this Prime Minister is not worth the cost to Quebeckers, who are paying twice as much for rent, housing and the national debt. This Prime Minister is spending more on interest on the debt, $54.1 billion, than on health care. Even worse than that, the Bloc Québécois voted for each and every one of this Prime Minister's $500-billion budget allocations. Once again, when will this Prime Minister and the Bloc Québécois stop impoverishing Quebeckers?
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  • Apr/18/24 11:33:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, there will be no conditions. There will be results. I will simply tell the municipalities that they will be paid for the number of homes built. That is not interference. That is results. The Bloc Québécois agrees that the government should make housing transfers. We simply disagree on the formula. The Bloc Québécois is proposing that money just be injected in building up local bureaucracies. I am proposing to pay the municipalities for the number of homes that they allow to be built. They can do that in several ways: fast-tracking permits, selling land, using any strategy that works for them. What we want to fund is the result. For its part, the Bloc Québécois wants to fund bureaucracy, especially the federal bureaucracy that it voted for in order to finance the spending of this Prime Minister's centralist government.
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  • Apr/18/24 10:52:19 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not finished. I will continue in English. I want to share this great speech with English-speaking Canadians. After nine years of the Prime Minister's deficits doubling the national debt and doubling housing costs and a new budget that brings in $50 billion of new unfunded spending on promises he has already broken, this budget, just like the Prime Minister, is not worth the cost, and Conservatives will be voting no. Before I get into the reasons, and my common-sense plan to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, I would like to pay the Minister of Finance a compliment for a page in her speech I thought was extremely illustrative. She said, “I would like Canada’s one per cent—Canada’s 0.1 per cent—to consider this: What kind of Canada do you want to live in?” Before I go any further, let us point out the incredible irony that, as she and her leader point out, Canada's 0.1% are doing better than ever after nine years of the Prime Minister promising to go after them. Yes, they have benefited from the tens of billions of dollars of undeserved corporate welfare handouts and grants, ironically supported by the NDP; of corporate loan guarantees that protect them against losses in cases of incompetence or dishonest bidding; of contracts, of which there are now $21 billion, granted to outside and highly paid consultants, many of them making millions of dollars a year in taxpayer contracts for work that could be done inside the government itself if that work if of any value at all; and finally, of those grand fortunes that have been inflated by the $600 billion of inflationary money printing that has transferred wealth from the working class to the wealthiest among us. That 0.1% is doing better than ever after nine years of the Prime Minister pretending he would get tough on them. Let me go on. I am interrupting myself. The Minister of Finance asked, “Do you want to live in a country where you can tell the size of someone’s paycheque by their smile?” Wow. How many Canadians are smiling when they look at their paycheque today? People are not smiling at all because a paycheque cannot buy them a basket of affordable food, according to Sylvain Charlebois, the food professor. He has said that the cost of a basket of food has gone up by thousands of dollars per year, but the majority of Canadians are spending hundreds of dollars less than is required to buy that basket. That means they are not getting enough food. We live in a country now where the average paycheque cannot pay the average rent, so nobody is smiling when they look at their paycheque. The minister went on to ask, “Do you want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry?” According to the Prime Minister, one in four kids are going to school hungry after his nine years. I look here at a press release his government released on April 1, on April Fool's Day of all days, where he says, “Nearly one in four children do not get enough food”. In fact, it says that they do not get enough food “to learn and grow.” No, we do not want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry, but according to the Prime Minister's own release, we do live in a country where one in four kids do go to school hungry. The Minister of Finance then said, “Do you want to live in a country where the only young Canadians who can buy their own homes are those with parents who can help with the downpayment?” No, we do not want to live in that country, but we do live in that country today. According to data released by RBC Dominion, for the average family to afford monthly payments on the average home in Canada, the family would have to spend 64% of its pre-tax income. Most families do not keep 64% of pre-tax income because they pay so much in taxes. Therefore, most families would have to give up on eating, recreation, clothing themselves and transportation to be mathematically capable of making payments on the average home. For young people, it is even worse because they do not have a nest egg. They cannot afford a down payment that has doubled in the last nine years. That is why 76% of Canadians who do not own homes tell pollsters they believe they never will. Do we want to live in a country where the only young people who can afford a down payment are those whose parents can pay it for them? No. However, that is the country that we live in today. “Do [you] want to live in a country where we make the investments we need in health care, in housing, in old age pensions, but we lack the political will to pay for them and choose instead to pass a ballooning debt on to our children?” Are we living in the twilight zone here? These are the minister's words: Do we want to live in a country where we pass the bill on to our children with “ballooning debt”? She asks this as she is ballooning the debt by adding $40 billion to that debt. She asks this while giving a speech about the perils of passing ballooning debt to our children. She is the finance minister for the government that has added more debt than all previous governments combined in the preceding century and a half. It is worth noting that the Prime Minister has added his deficits as a share of GDP that are bigger than we had in World War I, in the Great Depression and in the great global recession of 2008 and 2009. I should also note that the majority of debt that has been added under the Prime Minister was unrelated to COVID. The “dog ate my homework” excuse, of blaming COVID for all that is wrong in Canada, no longer works. I will add that we are now three years past COVID and the deficits and debt continue to grow, putting a lie to that entire endless, nauseating excuse that the government has made. The Prime Minister has added so much debt that we are now spending more on interest for that debt than we are spending on health care; $54.1 billion in debt interest this year; more money for those wealthy bankers and bondholders who own our debt; and less money for the doctors and nurses whom we await when we sit for 26 hours in the average emergency room right across the country. No, we do not want to live in a country that passes on a ballooning debt to our children, but after nine years of the Prime Minister, that is exactly the country in which we live. The Minister of Finance asks, “Do [you] want to live in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury?” Who does that remind us of? Somebody who flies around in a private jet to stay on secret islands on the other side of the hemisphere, where they treat him to $8,000 and $9,000-a-day luxuries, and he pays for it with the tax dollars of Canadians and emits thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, somebody luxuriates in that way at the expense of everyone else. He shall remain unnamed because we cannot say the Prime Minister's name in the House of Commons, so I will not break that parliamentary rule. However, I do point out the irony. I will start again. The Minister of Finance asks: Do [you] want to live in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury but must do so in gated communities behind ever-higher fences using private health care and private planes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less-privileged compatriots burns so hot? She says that the wrath of the majority of less privileged compatriots burns so hot. She is right that some people do not have the ability to live in gated communities, behind armed guards. Those people are told that they should leave their keys next to the door so that the car thieves can just walk in and peacefully steal their cars. Communities across the country are being ravaged by crime, chaos, drugs and disorder. What she has described is exactly what is happening after nine years of the government. We have nurses in British Columbia hospitals who are terrified to go to work because the Prime Minister, in collusion with the NDP Premier of B.C., has decriminalized hard drugs and allowed the worst criminals to bring weapons and narcotics into their hospital rooms, where they cannot be confronted. We have 26 international students crammed into the basement of one Brampton home. We have a car stolen every 40 minutes in the GTA. We have 100% increase in gun killings across the country. We have communities where people are terrified to go out. We have small businesses across Brampton and Surrey that are receiving letters weekly, warning them that if they do not write cheques for millions of dollars to extortionists, their homes will be shot up, and their children will have bullets flying through the windows as they are sleeping. That is life in Canada today. Do we want to live in that country? No, we do not want to live in that country. After eight years of rising costs, rising crime and rising chaos, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. We will replace him with a common-sense Conservative government that will bring home a country we love. What does that country look like and how will we get there? Fortunately, we have a common-sense plan that will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. Let us start with the carbon tax that went up 23% on April 1. Now we see the raging gas prices at the pumps across Ontario. There is chaos as people are desperately trying to get to the pumps and fill up before the latest hikes go ahead. The Prime Minister celebrates, saying that high gas prices are his purpose, and he has the full support of the NDP leader on most days, when the NDP leader can figure out what his policy is. The NDP leader has voted 22 times to hike the carbon tax. Both parties, along with the help of the Bloc, have voted for future increases that will quadruple the tax to 61¢ a litre, a tax that will also apply on home heating bills and, of course, a tax that applies to the farmers who produce the food, the truckers who ship the food and therefore on all who buy the food. That is why common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax to bring home lower prices. We take exactly the opposite approach of the Prime Minister when it comes to protecting our environment. His approach is to raise the cost on traditional energy we still need. Our approach is to lower the cost on other alternatives. We will green light green projects, like nuclear power, hydroelectric dams, carbon capture and storage, mining of critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt, copper and others. We will do this by repealing the unconstitutional Bill C-69 so that we can approve these projects in 18 months, rather than in 18 years. Here is the difference, the Prime Minister wants taxes, I want technology. He wants to drive our money to the dirty dictators abroad, I want to bring it home in powerful paycheques for our people in this country.
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