Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to this motion on the Liberal-NDP carbon tax. I want to answer five questions in my remarks today.
The first is to talk a bit about the effects of the tax. There is certainly no doubt that the Liberal-NDP carbon tax is having a significant impact on affordability for all Canadians. We only have to look at how it layers on top of layers. When farmers are hit with the carbon tax, what do members think happens? Of course, it raises the cost of food. When those who transport those goods, whether it be our food or other goods, are hit with the carbon tax on the fuel they use for transport, what do members think happens? It increases the price of goods that everyone buys. When producers, stores and businesses are faced with all the cost increases that come along the distribution chain and on the inputs they have, what do members think happens? Of course, it raises the price of everything people buy. At the end of the day, who ends up paying for all of that? It is Canadians who are suffering. Canadians who are struggling to get by right now are faced with additional cost increases because of the Liberal-NDP carbon tax. That is the effect this tax has. Everything that Canadians buy and consume becomes more unaffordable. It makes it more difficult for them to feed their families, heat their homes and fuel up their cars to get to and from work, or their children's soccer practices, and things like that. That is the only effect it has had, quite frankly, because it has had no impact on reducing emissions. Its only impact has been to make life more unaffordable for all Canadians.
What have been the results? The claim here is what we have heard many members of the Liberal-NDP government and the Bloc Québécois say, which is that the whole point is to make people feel some pain. They want to make people feel pain so they will somehow adjust their behaviour, as if there somehow might be a choice in Canada for people to not heat their homes. I do not think there is a choice for most Canadians as to whether they will heat their homes or not. We live in a cold country and in the winter people need to heat their homes, so we are not going to incentivize them by saying that they will freeze in the dark in their homes. Frankly, that is not a choice that people can or should make.
When we talk about this idea that somehow it is going to have some impact and make people feel pain, yes, it certainly has made them feel pain. It has forced people to make those difficult choices of letting their kids go a bit hungrier so they can afford to heat their homes or afford to drive to work. There is no doubt it has made people feel pain, but has it had an impact on the environment? Certainly not. The Liberal government has never met an emissions target, because its only approach has been to try to make Canadians feel pain and to make life more unaffordable for them. That is not the way to approach the situation we face. All that has done is make people feel that pain needlessly. That has been the result.
Not only that, our oil and gas sector has been vilified, which is harmful to our economy. It harms people's paycheques and the opportunities for not only Albertans in my home province, but people all across this country, as well as their livelihoods, which in some cases have been taken away. In other cases they are struggling that much more to try and get by. If we hit them with a carbon tax and a second carbon tax on top of that, it just becomes more difficult for people to live their lives. That is what the result has been.
How has the government gotten away with this? We only need look at the text of our opposition day motion itself to provide that reminder to Canadians. It notes that the so-called clean fuel standard that the Bloc Québécois supports would raise gas prices in Quebec by a whopping 17¢ per litre. The Bloc has openly stated that carbon taxes need to be increased much more radically. This is, of course, absolutely ridiculous at a time when people in that province, like in every other province, are already struggling to make ends meet.
Of course, the NDP and Liberals have supported measures to quadruple the carbon tax to 61¢ per litre, which will only further burden already struggling Canadians, and they are empowered to do so by members of caucus from all regions of the country. I will give an example of the Atlantic Canada members of Parliament. They claim they are not in favour of carbon taxes, and yet they have supported carbon tax measures 23 times since the current government has been in office. Canadians absolutely deserve much better than that kind of deceptive behaviour. This is a clear indication that they have absolutely no regard for the financial well-being of their own constituents. Instead, they just have a blind adherence to their Prime Minister and their political party. It is those parties' penchant for ignoring the real costs and the true impact on the taxpayer, who is paying the freight. That is what is happening.
We are in a position in this country where the Liberal-NDP government constantly demands more and more from Canadians to fund its agenda. It ends up trapping them in a vicious circle where those same policies that fire the very inflation leave them with less and less to pay for them. No government measure illustrates that better than the Liberal-NDP-Bloc carbon tax.
I would like to touch on the outcome of those Liberal-NDP-Bloc policies. I mentioned earlier that the Liberals have never met an emissions target in eight years, so it is clear that their carbon tax, which they claim they have to charge in order to curb emissions, is just simply a monumental Trojan Horse concealing what is simply a monstrous cash grab. Their so-called price on carbon raises the cost of absolutely every good and service as it gets downloaded through manufacturing, production and distribution chains to land on the Canadian consumer. Not only is the carbon tax buried in the price of everything that we buy, Canadians also find it as a direct line item on their utility bills for essentials, such as home heating, and many of the other products that we need.
We have seen that Liberal policies have accomplished the absolute opposite of what government policy should do. The intent should be to help those who are most vulnerable in our society and, at the very least, to cause them no harm. Unfortunately, the Liberal carbon tax has been causing outsized harm to those same vulnerable groups. The tax has led to an increase in the cost of goods and services that most impacts those who are already struggling to make ends meet. We are seeing that first-hand in the struggles of low-income families, seniors on fixed incomes and people living in rural areas when they are faced with higher transportation costs and what that means to an already stretched household budget.
Instead of helping the most vulnerable, the Liberal carbon tax has created those burdens on people who can least afford it. Since Parliament resumed last week, we have heard Conservative members explain the impacts on the cost of food, for example, that inflation, the carbon tax and other government measures are having. I will not get into those details, but we have heard them. They have been elaborated on quite significantly in this House by many members of my party. Liberal members heckle and seem to be tired of hearing about it, but the truth is, because they do not want to hear it repeated, that when we tax the farmer, when we tax the trucker and tax everyone involved in the supply chain, we tax the consumer and make life more unaffordable for Canadians.
At the end of the day, we need to see the carbon tax axed so we can bring down the price on everything for Canadians. There is only one party in this House of Commons that will do that, and it is the Conservative Party.
