Mr. Speaker, as the federal member of Parliament for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, I welcome this opportunity to inform Canadians about the deteriorating state of the nation's finances. It is clear, as evidenced by the fall economic update, just how out of touch the member for Toronto Centre as finance minister is with the concerns of ordinary, hard-working, middle-class Canadians.
A Conservative government believes in clean air, low taxes and a healthy economy. A clean environment and well-paying jobs are only possible when taxpayers are treated with respect. The out-of-control deficit policies of the Liberal Party stifle competitiveness and job-creating investment. A sustainable environment and a sustainable economy are only possible with a sustainable government.
The deficit budgets of this government are not sustainable. The government is not sustainable. We cannot spend more than we take in. This Liberal obsession with running huge budgetary deficits will only end badly. They always do.
The last time Canadians heard rhetoric about modest deficits was when the prime minister's father was on his throne. There is a reason Trudeau senior is known as the king of deficits. He started the cycle of spending more than what is collected in taxes. It was only supposed to be a temporary measure. He was the one who brought in the hated Liberal NEP, the national energy policy. Just like his father, the current Prime Minister was greeted by protesters when he visited Alberta.
The NEP was the first policy to load a carbon tax onto fossil fuels. Energy in the form of hydroelectricity was exempted from the NEP taxes that were collected to pay for Liberal bad spending. Today, the headline in the Financial Post reads “...we're facing a made-in-Canada energy crisis”. There is no doubt about it. This crisis was planned.
There is hope. At the end of senior Trudeau's reign, in the process of kicking the Liberals out of office, Canadians elected the most Conservatives to Parliament since Confederation in 1867. That led to the new Conservative government of the day starting the hard work of bringing the nation's finances back into order by balancing the current account deficit left from the previous government. That still was not enough.
Jean Chrétien, who at least understood that we could not spend more than we have forever, took the drastic measures known as the “decade of darkness”. In the process of slashing 60,000 public service jobs, programs and services were cut. Cuts in health care transfers meant hospital wait times increased. People in my riding were forced to go without a family doctor, thanks to the Liberal budget cuts. The budget was eventually balanced by the Liberals on the backs of ordinary Canadians. Deficit budgets do have consequences.
While the Conservatives took the political heat to bring in a consumption tax, the Chrétien Liberals campaigned against it before embracing it. During the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, they voted against our lowering the GST; the Liberals liked it so much as a revenue source. A carbon tax is a consumption tax.
My riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke is home to Garrison Petawawa, which is now Canada's largest army base. Before I was elected as the local member of Parliament, the future of the base was uncertain. That changed when the Conservatives were in government. Rather than balance the budget on the backs of our soldiers, Conservatives took a balanced approach, lowering taxes to increase revenues, putting more people back to work while using any surpluses to pay down the deficit and stabilize services to Canadians. The decade of darkness of the Liberal budget cuts was particularly harsh for women and men in uniform. Running continual budget deficits does have consequences.
The decision by the Liberal Party to play politics with military procurement is similar to what is happening today with the naval frigate replacement and the jet replacement programs, which would result in the unnecessary loss of lives in Afghanistan a decade later. The decision by the Liberal Party to cancel the EH101 helicopter to replace the then 40-year-plus-old Sea King helicopter meant Canadians would be forced to travel on roads in Afghanistan mined with improvised explosive devices. Those same terrorist bomb-makers, like Omar Khadr, are rewarded with multi-million dollar payoffs while our veterans, who were injured by those bombs, wait for justice.
Without strategic lifts, soldiers died on the bomb-laden roads. It was not until the Harper Conservative government purchased new Chinook helicopters that the death count dropped. I pray for the soldiers and their families that the decision to put off buying the proper equipment for our soldiers will not result in the unnecessary loss of life again.
We owe it to our soldier to provide them with the proper equipment when we ask them to go into harm's way. Budget deficits have consequences.
The bad news contained in Bill C-86 and the budget deficit increases contained in that legislation is the Liberal policy to load today's economy with future tax increases that will burden our children.
The debt burden for our children will be our burden first, as the federal carbon tax starts in a little more than a month. Every Canadian who understands anything about running a household knows that good times do not last. Our parents and our grandparents saved during the good times because they had lived through bad times.
Why does the federal government insist on huge deficits, spending dollars we do not have, by borrowing billions of dollars? The answer is “carb-a-geddon”.
Canadians may have heard of Apocalypse Now or the term Armageddon and understand what is meant by carb-a-geddon. Carb-a-geddon, the meltdown of the Canadian economy through carbon taxation, will reveal itself as the federal government begins to collect these new consumption taxes. These taxes are set to increase automatically every year.
The finance minister was forced to admit, after he delivered his economic statement, the budget would never be balanced as long as his party held power. Secret documents prepared by the finance department confirmed the truth about carbon taxes. They hurt Canadian families. The Liberals refusal to release these documents to the Canadian public confirms they have something to hide. Carb-a-geddon is real.
The worst part about carbon taxes is that taxing carbon dioxide in Canada does not help the environment whatsoever. The environment is a cloak the government wears for every bad policy. Adopting carbon taxes in Canada actually raises global carbon emissions by offshoring economic activity from relatively environmentally-friendly places like Canada to places with lax environmental laws.
Data from the World Bank reveals that China and other developing countries produce far more carbon dioxide than do western nations. China is currently building hundreds of new coal-fired plants, which will ensure its C02 emissions continue to rise for decades to come.
Every factory like GM, pushed out of Canada because of the Liberal carbon tax, will actually increase global emissions dramatically, and this will continue to be the case for decades to come.
The lntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has declared that for a carbon tax to be effective in saving the climate from its apocalyptic warming, the carbon tax would have to start at least at $135 a tonne and rise to $5,500 a tonne by 2030. The Liberals' carbon tax currently starts at $20 and rises to $50. Projections now show that Liberal commitments in 2016's Paris climate agreement will not be met unless the carbon tax is at least $200 a tonne to start.
Under the Liberals' carbon tax pricing scheme, additional taxes will be charged to fuel up our autos or heat our homes, with a charge on non-renewable fuels for fuel producers, distributors and importers. Large industrial emitters of pollution, big business, are exempted from the new carbon tax scheme.
A carbon price of 4.42¢ per litre will apply to gasoline as of April 2019 and will rise by 11¢ per litre by April 2022. While the Liberal Party intends to provide an election bribe in some form of rebate, the rebates represent about 30% of the carbon tax the federal government will collect, as far as we know today.
Pretending this new carbon tax grab has anything to do with "fighting climate change" is just a gimmick to raise taxes.
