Cheryl Gallant

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2024]

Madam Speaker, perhaps the member does not realize I am from Ontario, but what I do support is the ability for my constituents and all Canadians to live a good life, to have a house to live in, to have food to eat, and to have hope for the future and a peaceful retirement where they do not need to worry about money when they go to sleep at night.

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2024]

Madam Speaker, I explained that in terms of supply and demand.

Just because a carbon tax is not itemized on one's grocery bill does not mean it is not there. It is insidious. It is hidden.

Let us talk about groceries. They want to get rid of all one-use plastics. How are we going to get our fresh oranges that the member just talked about? They have to be put in plastic to protect them. Anyone who goes to Florida and picks them up will know they are in the plastic netting.

What is worse is that a study came out today, and to get the value and the benefit of any reduction in the use of petroleum products out of a reusable grocery bag, that bag has to be used 710 times. A person can get more uses out of a plastic grocery bag that they can line their wastepaper basket with.

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2024]

Madam Speaker, let us talk about how the carbon tax is exacerbating one of the most critical pieces of Canadian life right now, our housing crisis.

To cut the lumber, they need a machine to take down the trees. That machine takes energy. They then need a machine to drag those logs out of the forest and another picker to pick them up and put them on the truck. That takes energy. The truck has to go to the sawmill. That takes energy and carbon tax on the fuel for the truck. It gets to the sawmill and is taken off, and then the people who work at the lumber mill have to saw those logs so that they can be in the right shape to make homes. That sawing takes energy, and there is a tax on that. Finally, it gets shipped to the lumber yard, and the lumber yard brings it to the job site, and that costs carbon tax.

All those taxes at each step along the way are one of the reasons their carbon tax is—

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2024]

Madam Speaker, I will say that getting rid of the carbon tax will decrease inflation immediately by 20%.

Let me give a real-life example of what their carbon tax is doing. It takes energy to cut the trees that—

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2024]

Madam Speaker, common-sense Conservatives have a real plan to turn that hurt into hope. It starts with axing the carbon tax, which is pushing up the cost of everything. Canadians understand that, when a government has an official policy to increase the cost of energy, it increases the cost of everything that requires energy, which is everything. However, the socialist coalition members think Canadians are stupid. They think all they need to do is slap a new label on their carbon tax and Canadians will just forgive them for increasing the cost of living.

Unfortunately, the Liberals are not the only ones who think Canadians can be fooled. The far left media allies are already hard at work, rebranding the carbon tax. It is no longer called a tax. Now they call it a “carbon price”. How long will it be before the CBC starts to rebrand income tax as a “price on earnings”? They can rebrand GST as a “price on shopping”. They can call it whatever they want, but Canadians know that a tax is a tax.

It does not matter how much carbon the Liberals burn to keep their gaslights burning bright; the truth outshines it all. The truth is this: Their carbon tax is going up in April. Therefore, as long as these proud socialists hold on to power, it will go up year after year. It will keep going up until they have redistributed every last dollar from hard-working Canadians in small towns without transit to the wealthy urban elite, such as the finance minister, who brags about how easy it is for her to get around without a car. Of course, most Canadians would find it a lot easier with a personal chauffeur, a six-figure salary and a taxpayer-funded luxury SUV.

What about Canadians like Edmund? Edmund lives on a fixed income. His after-tax income is $20,000. He just received his climate bribe for this fiscal quarter. He also received his natural gas bill for December. The carbon tax on that bill was $72.36. That means he paid $9.41 in HST on the carbon tax. That is for just one month of winter. One month eats up half the quarterly rebate, and that is before Edmund has driven a single kilometre.

I would seek unanimous consent to table his tax statement and gas bills, but I already know the Liberals are too cowardly to face the truth. They would prefer to stay in their nostalgia-infused fever dream, where everything is awesome. They desperately want to take Canada back to the 1960s, when the CBC was popular, the UN was relevant and Canadians loved a prime minister named Trudeau. They really believe they can control the weather with a tax. They just wave their Liberal wand and say “zap, you are frozen”. Only a Liberal could summon the level of arrogance required to believe that, if they just tax Canadians hard enough, it will stop flooding.

The carbon tax is about punishing the types of Canadians these Liberals call “unacceptable” and rewarding the ones who vote for them. It is a tax plan, not an environmental plan. The fact is that it is generous to even call it a plan. The Liberals' agenda is little more than a string of slogans, such as “30 by 30” or “net zero”. Now, they have gone all-in on expensive, dirty electric batteries, just as the oil and gas industry is discovering vast reserves of clean hydrogen. That is why the Liberals are adopting Soviet-style car sales mandates. The only way their battery subsidies will not bankrupt us is if they force people to buy cars that do not work in the cold weather. Before any of my colleagues jump up and shout about what all those electric cars in Norway are doing, I would remind them that the average temperature in January in Ottawa is three times colder than that in Oslo.

Even the Liberals' net-zero promise is a fantasy. The only way to reach net zero is with direct carbon capture. Carbon dioxide molecules make up only .04% of the atmosphere. It takes a lot of energy to remove carbon dioxide molecules, but these proud socialists oppose cheap electricity. Many of these radical environmentalists even oppose carbon capture. They claim it is a way of keeping on using oil and gas, but if all the emissions are captured, why would they still oppose it? Maybe this was never about reducing emissions in the most economically sensible way but about reducing capitalism and increasing the size and the scope of the state.

Last month, I reached out to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and the Minister of Environment. I asked if they could provide technical experts to explain the government's proposed protocol to reduce enteric emissions from beef cattle to farmers in my riding. After watching this train wreck of a government mishandle the communications about reducing nitrogen emissions on farms, I wanted to make sure my constituents knew exactly what the government was proposing.

I naively thought the government would jump at the chance to prevent misinformation or promote its protocol. Instead, both offices took a pass on the offer. Considering the massive farm protests in Europe, a competent government would have jumped at the chance to engage with farmers. Therefore, it was up to me to explain to farmers what this socialist coalition government was proposing.

Reducing enteric emissions is bureaucratic language for reducing cow burps. The proposal is that farmers could undertake measures to reduce methane emitted from belching beef cattle. In return, they would receive offset credits for every tonne of methane they reduce from a set baseline. Several farmers in my riding are pioneers in the field of capturing emissions. I wanted to ensure they would earn the credits for the innovations they are already undertaking. They are farmers like the Klaesi brothers, who built Canada's first biodigester to turn manure into electricity that they could sell back into the grid, and farmers like Don Russell, whose patented technology eliminates methane from manure.

As the member of Parliament for these leading-edge farmers, I wanted to make sure they knew what was coming. While they had many questions, everything always circled back to the bottom line: How much will it cost? How much will they earn? They are basic questions everyone operating a business will ask. Unfortunately, the government does not have those answers, and not just because members could not be bothered to drive out to the Ottawa Valley. The government does not have the answer because it does not know.

It even admitted it on its website. Here is what the government says about the price of the carbon offset credit: “The price of offset credits is primarily influenced by supply and demand. If there are many offset credits available with little demand, prices will be low. If there are few offset credits available and a large demand, prices will be higher.” There it is, in digital black and white. The offset credit is the real carbon price, a price that emerges from the intersection of supply and demand. A tax is set by government decree. The carbon tax is not a price on pollution. It is a tax on energy. It is a tax on mobility. It is a tax on life.

The government knows what the tax on carbon is, and Canadians know the tax on carbon is going up on April 1. That is why Conservatives are calling on the government to cancel the tax hike. Canadians know we are going to axe the tax, just like Canadians know that we will build more homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. The longer the tired, flailing NDP-Liberal socialist coalition ignores the will of Canadians, the bigger the reckoning will be.

To increase the tax when everyone knows it is not long for this world is to rub salt in the wounds of high inflation. No amount of rebranding, gaslighting or fearmongering will work. It is time for the Liberals to listen to Canadians struggling with the cost of living fuelled by reckless Liberal spending. It is time for them to stop punishing Canadians for heating their homes. It is time for common sense.

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2024]

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte. I am proud to rise on behalf of my constituents in the common-sense riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke.

After eight years of the NDP-Liberal government, Canadians are hurting. They are hurting because of bad policies—

[Carbon Pricing, February 1st, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the NDP-Liberals, my constituents are hurting. Edmund from Whitewater is a senior who lives on $20,000 a year. Since November, he has paid $200 in carbon tax on home heating alone. His quarterly climate bribe was $118, yet the Prime Minister says that Canadians are somehow getting ahead.

The Prime Minister is not worth the cost. Will the Liberals stop the April 1 carbon tax hike so groceries, gas and home heating do not get more expensive for Edmund?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 29th, 2024]

With regard to government research related to home equity, since November 4, 2015 and broken down by department or agency: (a) what are the details of all contracts entered into by the government for research, polling, publications, projects, or any other activity related to the topic of home equity including, for each, the (i) date, (ii) amount or value, (iii) vendor, (iv) description of goods or services; and (b) what are the details of all polling or analysis the government has conducted related to home equity, including, for each (i) who conducted the polling or analysis, (ii) what specific questions were polled or analyzed, (iii) what were the findings?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 29th, 2024]

With regard to Canadian Forces Housing Agency (CFHA) rental properties at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa: (a) what is the electrical capacity of each unit; (b) what is the type and age of the heating and cooling units at each property; (c) is internet included with the rental of properties, and, if so, what is the internet speed; (d) how many maintenance or repair requests has the CFHA received, broken down by year from 2017 to date; (e) what is the breakdown of (d) by type of issue (mold, water leak, broken heating unit, etc.); (f) what is the current age of the roof of each property; (g) what renovations or upgrades have been completed since 2017, including the date and the unit to which each renovation was done; (h) what is the total number of units, broken down by the type of unit; (i) are any of the units in (h) uninhabitable, and, if so, which ones and why; and (j) what is the current retention factor value of each unit?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, January 29th, 2024]

With regard to funding provided by the government to the United Nations and other international organizations for the purpose of fighting climate change since January 1, 2016, and broken down by year: (a) what was the total amount spent; (b) what are the details of each funding agreement, including, for each, the (i) date, (ii) recipient, (iii) purpose of the funding, (iv) amount of the funding; and (c) for each funding agreement in (b), (i) what has the government done to ensure that the money was spent appropriately, (ii) has an audit been conducted, and, if so, what were the findings?