Bill C-234

An Act to amend the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act

This enactment amends the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act to expand the definition of eligible farming machinery and extend the exemption for qualifying farming fuel to marketable natural gas and propane.

Carbon Tax

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians across this country are paying a high price for the NDP-Liberal government's tax-and-spend agenda.

After eight years with the carbon tax-obsessed Prime Minister, Canadian families are struggling to put food on the table, put gas in their tanks and keep a warm roof overhead, yet the Prime Minister only wants to punish them more. His April 1 carbon tax is only going to make things worse for the two million Canadians who are already lined up at food banks.

Bill C-234 is a common-sense piece of legislation that would remove the carbon tax on farm operations to help lower our grocery prices. However, the Prime Minister is hell-bent on quadrupling the carbon tax on farmers and on Canadians.

It is clearer than ever that the Prime Minister is simply not worth the cost.

Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2023

[Laila Goodridge, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is wonderful to be here today and to be able to speak to the amendment to this bill, an amendment I was very proud to second from our leader of the Conservative Party.

In fact, the Conservative leader, the hon. member for Carleton and Canada's next prime minister, delivered a really clear message to Canadians on Sunday: Axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget, stop the crime.

I hear from Canadians regularly, from right across Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, who are struggling. What they are seeing are higher grocery prices, higher home heating costs, higher electricity costs, higher gasoline costs and higher mortgage and rental costs, and they are seeing their limited paycheques being spread thinner and thinner.

Unlike the Liberal government, the hard-working people I talk to know that there are consequences, real consequences, for spending beyond their means. They understand that budgets do not balance themselves, and they, in turn, are making sacrifices to accommodate these inflated prices. They are angry when they see the Liberal government out jet-setting and this out-of-touch Prime Minister continuing with out-of-control spending.

The fall economic statement announced $20 billion in inflationary spending, further driving up interest rates, which further makes life harder. A record two million people visited a food bank in a single month. Housing costs have doubled. Mortgage payments are 150% higher than they were before the Prime Minister took office eight years ago. Violent crime is up 39%. Tent cities exist in almost every major city and in small towns across the country. Over 50% of Canadians are less than $200 away from going broke. Canadians who are renewing their mortgages will see an increase from 2% to 6% or even higher. The IMF has warned that Canada is the most at risk in the G7 for a mortgage default crisis, and business insolvencies have increased by 37% this year.

These results of the costly new spending spree can be summed up simply: Prices are up, rents are up, debt is up, taxes are up, and Canadians I talk to every single day have told me that they want the Prime Minister's time to be up. They want to see an election today. They want to make a decision on the leadership of our country, because they know that their finances cannot afford another year of this Prime Minister.

In 2024, for the very first time, we are going to be spending more money on payments to service our debt than we will on health care, more money to finance the reckless spending than on health care. More than $50 billion is going to be spent just on the interest payments to service the debt.

I think that this is shameful, and the Canadians I talk to totally agree. They are not running up their credit cards unless they have no other option, yet the government has options. It is just choosing not to take them.

The reckless spending risks a mortgage meltdown on the $900 billion of mortgages that will renew over the next three years. Personally, I am concerned about the countless people I have heard from who are currently under water on their homes. Their homes are worth less than what they owe to the bank. This is because of the government's relentless attack on Canadian energy, which has had a real impact on the home prices in many communities right across Fort McMurray—Cold Lake.

Our eco-activist environment minister has made no secret of the fact that he not only dislikes Canada's energy industry, having a socialist idea of government transitioning it to something else, but also seems to have a problem with the very concept that we have an energy industry here in Alberta. Quite frankly, there is a serious problem with having a Soviet-style transition away from Canada's energy industry.

I am proud to come from northeastern Alberta and to have grown up in Fort McMurray, seeing the major innovation that has taken place in our energy industry over decades. During this most recent Arctic vortex, just a couple of weeks ago, many energy workers were working outside. They were bundling up. They were going to work when the rest of us were very grateful just to get to stay inside. These brought temperatures across the Prairies of -50° and even lower in some areas, with the wind chill. In those temperatures, frostbite can set in in a matter of minutes, yet these energy workers bundled up so we could stay warm. That is, for the families who could afford to keep the heat on.

The Liberal government has consistently doubled down on charging the carbon tax on home heating in the Prairies, which continues to rachet up the cost of our home heating. We do not have a choice in the Prairies during an Arctic vortex or throughout the winter as to whether we can or cannot heat our homes. If a home is not heated in -50°C, the pipes will freeze. There will be additional costs, and people will die. That is the reality. Frostbite will set in in minutes, yet this government has decided to have a carve-out for Atlantic Canadians, allowing them to have a pause on the carbon tax because of plummeting polls. However, in the Prairies, where we were facing -50°C weather this winter, in those areas we continue to have to pay the carbon tax. Not only do we have to pay this punishing carbon tax, but it is set to continue to increase on April 1. That is no joke.

With plummeting polls, the Liberals are making it so that a Canadian is not a Canadian is not a Canadian. The Canadians I have had the opportunity to chat with thought that this unfair, callous and crass decision of carving out the carbon tax away from Atlantic Canadians was wrong.

Canadians are out of money, and this government is completely out of touch. Conservatives have been and will continue to stand up, clearly asking this costly coalition of the Liberal-NDP government to remove the carbon tax on everything for everyone. The government rejects this, but we continue fighting, so, in the interests of Canadians we have asked for a variety of carve-outs: eliminating the carbon tax for farmers, eliminating the carbon tax on first nations, eliminating the carbon tax on home heating and many others. However, make no mistake, a Conservative government will axe the carbon tax on everything for everyone. This is common sense. Canadians need relief, not higher taxes.

After eight years, the Liberal Prime Minister does not understand that if we tax the farmer who grows the food, the trucker who transports the food and the store that sells the food, we ultimately tax the family buying it. I have talked to moms who are having to make hard choices as to whether they put extra water in their babies' formula just so they can afford to feed their families. I talk to families who are struggling as to whether they are going to continue bundling extra sweaters onto their children, because they cannot afford to turn the temperature in their home up an extra degree or two to keep them nice and toasty.

This is why the Conservative Party introduced a very common-sense bill, Bill C-234, to axe the tax on farmers. It would have made the cost of food more affordable for everyone by saving farmers $978 million between now and 2030. It passed through the House of Commons, yet the unelected Senate gutted our common-sense bill under pressure from the PMO and the eco-activist environment minister. In fact, the same environment minister threatened to quit if there was another carve-out. The same environment minister even admitted during an environment committee meeting that he had called up to six senators to pressure them into voting to keep the tax on farmers. That is shameful. Now, all Canadians will have to pay a higher price at the grocery store.

Common sense means getting rid of the carbon tax to lower the cost of living for all Canadians. It means capping reckless spending and getting rid of waste to balance the budget and lower inflation and interest rates. Common sense means cutting tax to make hard work pay off again. This NDP-Liberal government needs to rein in spending and balance the budget so that inflation and interest rates can come down and Canadians can keep more of the money they work so hard for. They need relief.

It is clear that after eight years of waste and incompetence, the NDP-Liberal government is not worth the cost. Canada's Conservatives have provided a clear, common-sense plan to reverse course and undo the damage the Liberals have done. Only common-sense Conservatives can be trusted to axe the tax, balance the budget, bring down inflation and interest rates, and build homes, not bureaucracy, to bring lower prices to Canadians. I'll say it again: Axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.

[Fraser Tolmie, Conservative, Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I would first like to congratulate my colleague from across the floor who represents LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, and I wish him all the best in his future endeavours and all the best to his family.

Further, I will be splitting my time with the member for Fort McMurray—Cold Lake.

It is an honour to speak to Bill C-59, the government's fall economic update, 2023.

In my time as a member of Parliament, I have focused on priorities that matter to the constituents of Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan. Sadly, those priorities are not in the government's update.

People in Saskatchewan will be disappointed but not surprised that Saskatchewan is not even mentioned in the finance minister's fiscal update, outside of a few tables in the annex, but this is something we should all expect in Saskatchewan and in the west in general. We have never been a priority for the government.

Agriculture is one of the industries, if not the largest, in my riding. Again, it is a topic that is ignored altogether in this update. Farmers are struggling. Conservatives have put forward Bill C-234 that would axe the punitive carbon tax on fuel used on farms. I have heard from farmers in my riding who are paying thousands of dollars a month on that tax. Instead of supporting this common-sense idea, the government is quadrupling that tax in April, which puts the burden of a punitive policy directly on the shoulders of the people who feed our country.

If the minister cared about lowering grocery prices for Canadians, that would be a tremendous first step. The adage, if one does not want to be questioned about what one is doing, one should look busy by walking around with a clipboard, looking important and pretending to do something, is being replaced by the minister having weekly photo ops to pretend to Canadians that he is doing something. That does not impress or fool the constituents of Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan, where we have seen a rise in food bank usage by a whopping 39%.

If agriculture is not the largest employer in Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan, then mining and its related industries are a close second. Potash has become one of Saskatchewan's prime exports. I am privileged to represent a riding that has several of the largest potash mines in the world, if not in Canada. As we all know, Canada is the world's largest producer of potash, an important fertilizer that is in huge demand globally. At a time when other large producers, mainly Russia and Belarus, are waging an illegal war in Ukraine, Canadian potash is even more important. While it is already a massive Canadian success story, it is sadly another key industry ignored by the government's fiscal update.

During this period of global instability, the world is looking to Canada for help. Time and time again, we are turning our backs on good trading opportunities with other nations in need, whether it is LNG or potash. During unstable global times, Canada has always been a nation the world can rely on to come to those in need. Time and time again, we have, as a nation, called upon our Canadian Armed Forces to answer the call. It is important work and a priority to support our armed forces and veterans.

As I hope everyone here knows, 15 Wing Moose Jaw is home to Canada's iconic Snowbirds, so the air force is an issue close to my heart. As we look around the world and see conflicts erupting everywhere, we should be investing in the Canadian Armed Forces. Instead, we are hearing top commanders say that they cannot meet basic requirements. Recently, the Department of National Defence's own report stated that the military's operational readiness is strained. It said that the military is not ready to conduct concurrent operations and is not meeting the requirements of Canada's defence policy from 2017.

I quote:

Readiness of [Canadian Armed Forces] force elements have continued to decrease over the course of the last year aggravated by decreasing number of personnel and issues with equipment and vehicles.

Adding to this, Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee, commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, has said that “the RCN faces some very serious challenges right now that could mean we fail to meet our force posture and readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond”. He added that the Harry DeWolf class, the navy’s new offshore patrol vessels, can currently only be deployed “one at a time” due to personnel shortages. Clearly, the Canadian Armed Forces is in a crisis and needs urgent investment, not vague commitments that government budgets will not affect the Canadian Armed Forces.

I have had the pleasure to serve on the veterans affairs committee since I was elected in 2021. I found it to be a tremendous committee that does some very important work that is, sadly, generally ignored by the current government. The fiscal update's sole mention of Canada's brave veterans is the statement that their benefits are indexed to inflation. Veterans on a fixed income are dependent on those benefits and, as we know, with all government payments, they are slow to reflect the inflation we are seeing now. Even if they do, the cost of many of life's necessities, namely groceries and housing, is easily outpacing the official inflation rate.

We are seeing more and more veterans turn to charities and not-for-profits to help feed themselves. It is heartwarming to see these organizations do this important work. Many are created by veterans for veterans; however, they should not be needed. Canadian heroes should never have to go to a charity to feed or house themselves because Veterans Affairs is not providing them with sufficient benefits.

The government's fall economic update falls short of the mark, and it has a negative trickle-down effect on other levels of government. There is only one taxpayer. School boards are realizing the effects of inflation. I recently received a text that the local school board is over-budget by $1 million because of the current government's inflationary spending and punitive carbon tax, which directly impact its operational and capital budgets. Next year, this school board will be another half a million dollars short, totalling $1 million in funds that local taxpayers will have to pay or find cost savings and measures.

Municipalities and police services are also being impacted. In Saskatchewan, the impact of inflation and the carbon tax is directly affecting its budgets, which are now increasing in double digits in communities in my riding, in my province and in this country.

The impacts will be negative. School budgets will be cut. Ten-dollar day care cannot help. Water, roads and other important infrastructure required to keep communities thriving will be cut, and that single taxpayer will receive less service for more dollars, which is a familiar theme with the current government. The future of our country is bleak if we continue to be held hostage by a coalition NDP-Liberal government. That is right. We are being held hostage by the government.

However, I have faith in the people of Canada to elect a Conservative government that is listening to our people. My faith in the next generation is being restored. I met Ashton, an 18-year-old university student studying accounting, and he is working at a local grocery store. His parents have traditionally been Liberal supporters, which is a rare thing in Saskatchewan. Ashton shared with me that he has overheard customers in the grocery store where he works say that this will be the first time they will need to visit the food bank in order to feed their families.

Ashton told me these stories are breaking his heart. He is a critical thinker and has made the choice to not vote Liberal in his first election and to break the family tradition. He sees that the current Liberal government is doing nothing concrete to help families struggling to feed themselves. Ashton knows that a Conservative government would axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. Let us hope, for everyone's sake, including Ashton's, that it comes sooner rather than later.

Public Accounts

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will say to Canadians that Conservatives on this side of the House will vote to axe the tax.

We are calling on the House right now to send Bill C-234 back to the Senate in its original form so we can give producers and farmers a break on the carbon tax so their input costs go down and Canadian families can pay less at the grocery store.

[Richard Lehoux, Conservative, Beauce, QC]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to say that I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Lambton—Kent—Middlesex.

I am very honoured to rise today in the House to represent the people of my riding, Beauce, and also, more importantly, on the issue of Canada's food security and sovereignty.

After studying the 14th report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, all of my thoughts on the matter have unfortunately been confirmed.

I will take a brief moment to read the conclusion of the report:

...there was no national emergency preparedness and response plan for Canada's food system and food security, despite the government having identified food as a critical infrastructure sector long before the COVID-19 pandemic began. And although AAFC had two emergency plans in place, it acknowledged that they were insufficient to deal with a crisis of this magnitude.

When I read the recommendations in this report, I see that these are watered down recommendations to mask the current government's failures. In every recommendation, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts asks the departments concerned for status reports. However, in my opinion, it does not really go far enough.

As Conservatives, we have been defending farmers and families from the beginning. We understand that food security starts on the farm and that our government needs to be there to support those who put food on our tables.

Under this Liberal government, the price of food has skyrocketed because of the carbon tax. Farmers are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. Canadians, too, are finding it harder and harder to put food on the table, as we have seen from the record use of food banks in our communities.

We have also seen a decline in our relationships with many countries, since the government has failed many times in the negotiation of trade agreements. Some countries do not even want to reopen negotiations with us because of the government's incompetence. That is why it is so important to have a national food system that works and that we can depend on today and in the future.

It is very simple. With grocery prices the highest they have ever been in our country, it is up to this government to find a way to reduce the cost of food. The easiest place to start is on the farm.

A great way to start would be to pass the original Bill C‑234 as soon as possible so as to exempt farmers from the carbon tax on propane and natural gas used to heat livestock buildings and dry grain.

I am appalled that the Prime Minister and his senators gutted this important bill in the Senate. The bill had the unanimous support of all parties in the House but one, the Liberal Party of Canada.

This legislation also had the backing of every ag sector stakeholder I talked to across the country. These farmers need relief from this crippling tax that is destroying their businesses and driving food prices sky-high. I talked to lots of farmers in my riding, and every one of them endorsed this bill. Winter is here, and they are very worried about how they are going to heat their henhouses and hog barns all winter long.

As the official opposition agriculture critic and as a member of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, I have personally attended every meeting since I was elected. We hear the same stories year after year.

Over the holidays, I volunteered at Moisson Beauce, a food bank in my riding. While preparing Christmas hampers for struggling families, about 2,500 in a single day, I learned that Moisson Beauce is now experiencing record usage and no longer receives enough donations to meet demand. That is not the Canada I remember. We are at a point where it is cheaper to import food than to produce it locally.

One comment I hear all too often from the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois is that the carbon tax does not apply in Quebec. That is absolutely false.

The carbon tax applies in Quebec directly and indirectly. I can show countless receipts from farmers for propane, for example, that include the federal price on pollution.

As I was saying, the carbon tax is also paid indirectly when we import goods from other provinces. Quebec is not self-sufficient; we import a lot of products from provinces that pay the entire carbon tax and that tax is passed on to us, the consumers, either through inflated prices or the cost of transportation.

Agriculture Carbon Alliance wrote to every federal member to express their full support for this bill. The alliance is 17 national agricultural groups representing more than 190,000 farms in Canada.

Canadian farmers are stewards of the land. They are very concerned about their animals and the environment. They work so hard to feed our families and support our economy. The lack of support from the Liberal government is incredible.

I must mention the rural members of the Liberal caucus. I cannot believe that only three Liberals voted in favour of this legislation. I suppose that only three of them want to keep their seat in the next election. The polls speak for themselves.

Who could forget what the Minister of Rural Economic Development said? She said that, if Canadians want relief, they should elect more Liberal members. If those rural Liberal members think they will ever get the farm vote back, they are sorely mistaken.

Another looming problem that will impact Canada's food security and food sovereignty is the Liberal plan to outlaw single-use plastics, a plan that the courts recently struck down but that the government plans to appeal at taxpayers' expense.

A study by the Canadian Produce Marketing Association makes it clear that if this ban goes through, fruit and vegetable prices will rise by up to 34%. The report also indicates that the availability of Canadian products could be reduced by half. We will also see a 50% increase in food waste.

Conservatives will always stand up for farmers and, most importantly, for common sense. Canadians are suffering. Many of them are on the verge of bankruptcy. How can the government turn its back on them when all they want is to feed their families affordably?

If the government does not take action, our farm families will keep disappearing, our country will become even more dependent on food imports, and our food system will be even more vulnerable. Right now, a vegetable grown in Mexico costs less at the grocery store than one grown locally. Does that make sense? It is contrary to their entire climate change ideology.

Canadians can count on the Conservatives to change that situation, which makes no sense. Canadians do not need departmental progress reports. They need real action to avert a disaster in our national food system.

With out-of-control inflation and interest rates that are still very high, Canadians will continue to experience financial difficulties. This report sheds light on the situation and shows that it is extremely important that we learn from the pandemic and take the appropriate action.

The Prime Minister has increased the size of the public service by 40% since he has been in office, so how is it that these departments cannot manage to do their work properly? That is incompetence.

At the end of her speech, my colleague from Lambton—Kent—Middlesex will move a motion to get our national food system back on track in order to guarantee our food security and food sovereignty in the future.

I sincerely hope that my colleagues will take this issue seriously and that we can come together to do the right thing for all Canadians by voting in favour of this motion.

Finance

[Jasraj Singh Hallan, Conservative, Calgary Forest Lawn, AB]

Mr. Speaker, first, we will cut the number of Liberal seats in the House and replace them with a common-sense Conservative government.

Let me give the fast and furious finance minister some free non-consultant advice. Why do the Liberals not cut woke policies and axe the carbon tax to bring down the cost of gas, groceries and home heating, and pass Bill C-234 for our farmers? Why do they not cut the $20 billion the Prime Minister gives to Liberal consultants to cover up the incompetency by his own cabinet?

After eight years, we all know the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. When will the Liberals fix the budget to bring down inflation and interest rates?

Carbon Pricing

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is uncommon to see a government ignore the fact that two million Canadians are going to a food bank every single month, yet the Liberal-NDP carbon tax coalition wants to quadruple the carbon tax, making farming unsustainable. When we tax the farmer who grows the food and tax the trucker who hauls the food, we are increasing taxes on Canadians who buy the food. Again, millions of Canadians are going to a food bank every month, but Bill C-234 in its original form would provide relief now.

Will the Liberals reject the Senate amendments, take the tax off and ensure that Canadians can afford to put food on their tables?

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Mr. Speaker, today the Prime Minister has an opportunity to help families struggling with high food costs. Bill C-234 is back in the House after Liberal-appointed senators delayed and gutted the bill. This is a common-sense Conservative bill that would give a carbon tax carve-out to farmers and ensure that Canadians have access to affordable, Canadian-grown food.

When the Prime Minister quadruples his carbon tax, farmers will pay $1 billion a year, driving up food costs even higher. Will the Liberals reject the Senate amendments, take the carbon tax off farming and lower food prices for Canadians?

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister must still have sand in his ears from his Jamaican vacation. That must be why he cannot hear the outcry from Canadians suffering from his carbon tax. While he was lining up at the all-inclusive, Canadians were lining up at food banks, and grocery prices jumped again, 38% higher than baseline inflation.

Now, a common-sense Conservative bill, Bill C-234, would help bring prices down by taking the tax off farm production. The only problem is this: Liberal senators gutted the bill.

Will the government reject the Senate amendments so the tax can come off and food prices can come down?

The Economy

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, over the holidays, I heard how after eight years of this NDP-Liberal government, Canadians are struggling to pay their bills and keep roofs over their heads. They know that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost.

Our leader, my Conservative colleagues and I are back to show Canadians they have a simple choice in the next election. On the one hand they can have a costly coalition of the NDP and Liberals that takes their money, taxes their food, punishes their work, doubles their housing costs and unleashes crime and chaos in their communities or they can choose the common-sense Conservatives and our common-sense plan.

We are back to address the priorities facing Canadians, starting with a focus on passing Bill C-234 to take the carbon tax off farmers and to bring food prices down.

Our priorities are clear: axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.

Let us bring it home.

Carbon Tax

[Lianne Rood, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, after eight years of this NDP-Liberal government, life in Canada has become unaffordable. It is unthinkable to continue the inflationary carbon tax scheme while millions of Canadians are relying on food banks and are forced to choose between heating and eating.

The government surely understands there is no way to produce food without using energy to dry grain, to heat barns and to bring food to our grocery stores. The Prime Minister wants to quadruple the carbon tax from 14¢ per litre to 61¢ per litre. Farmers in my communities are paying thousands of dollars in carbon tax every month. The Prime Minister is just not worth the cost. The carbon tax carve-out is necessary for farmers to help fight food inflation. In response to the government's relentless pressure, the so-called independent senators gutted Bill C-234.

I call on the House to stop with the desperate tricks that are preventing farmers from getting the needed carve-out, drop the Senate amendments and send Bill C-234 back to the Senate in its original form.

Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2023

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Leader of the Opposition]

Happy new year, Mr. Speaker.

This is my first time rising in the House in 2024, and I want to wish everyone a happy new year.

It is 2024, and the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. That is the reality. That was the reality in 2023 and 2022, but the cost keeps going up every year.

That is why the Conservative Party has a very focused common-sense plan. We have four priorities that we want to work on in Parliament, and they are to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop crime.

After eight years in office, this Prime Minister has managed to drive up the cost of living at the fastest pace in 40 years by doubling the national debt and printing $600 billion. He has increased inflation and interest rates at the expense of the working class and our seniors, and he did so with the support of the Bloc Québécois. The Bloc Québécois completely agrees with the exorbitant spending increases and the cost of government, which are creating a burden for Quebeckers. The Bloc Québécois voted in favour of all of this government spending in the fall of 2023. It supported the tax increases on gas, which punish Quebec farmers and workers.

The common-sense Conservative Party is the only one offering an alternative to this destructive and costly policy implemented on the backs of Quebeckers.

First, we will eliminate the second carbon tax, which does indeed apply to Quebec.

Second, we will control spending by eliminating waste. We are going to get rid of the $35-billion infrastructure bank, which has not delivered a single project for Canadians. We will get rid of the ArriveCAN app and the so-called green fund which, according to the officials involved, is now a scandal on par with the sponsorship scandal. We will cut spending on consultants, who now cost every Canadian family $1,400. In eight years, this Prime Minister has doubled the amount spent on outside consultants. These are extraordinary costs that do not produce results for Canadians. It is work that could have been done by the government, by public servants, whose numbers have ballooned by 50%.

We are going to introduce a common-sense law, a dollar-for-dollar law. Every time ministers in my government increase spending by one dollar, they are going to have to find one dollar in savings to offset that spending. Instead of increasing the national debt, inflation and taxes, we are going to cap spending. Once the government is forced to reduce the cost that falls on the backs of our people, it will enable workers, businesses and our economy to grow.

Let us talk about our workers. There is a war on work right now. Workers are being punished with sky-high tax rates that claw back more and more of every dollar they earn. A common-sense Conservative government will lower taxes and reward work here in Canada, for our workers, small businesses and all Canadians, so that we can be a country that rewards work.

We will protect the paycheques of ordinary Canadians and ensure that they can earn bigger paycheques by doing away with unconstitutional laws that prevent natural resource projects from going ahead. We will allow Quebeckers to build dams and develop mines and other projects that generate wealth for our country, instead of sending money to China or other countries that are dictatorships. We will keep that money for ourselves, so that Canadians can have bigger paycheques. We are also going to build houses.

After eight years under this Prime Minister, the cost of housing has doubled, rent has doubled, the money needed for a mortgage on an average house has doubled, and the down payment needed to buy that same house has also doubled. In Montreal, it has tripled.

After eight years under this Prime Minister, the cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Montreal has increased from $760, when I was the housing minister eight years ago, to $2,200 now. Red tape has blocked the construction of 25,000 housing units over the past six years. Thousands of construction projects across the country are in limbo because of red tape. In Vancouver, whose former NDP mayor is incredibly incompetent, it is even worse. He added additional costs of $1.3 million to each housing development built. These increases are tied directly to the red tape and taxes charged by the governments.

In Quebec City, I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Trudel with my Quebec lieutenant. He told me that $500 of the monthly rent for these apartments goes toward taxes and red tape, the costs charged by the government. For apartments that rent for $1,000, half of that amount covers only the taxes and the bureaucracy. That cost is too high. That is why a common-sense Conservative government will encourage municipalities to speed up construction instead of obstructing it.

The federal government pays out $5 billion to municipalities through the sales tax program. Quebec receives about $1 billion. There are already a lot of conditions attached to that money, a lot of federal conditions. However, those conditions do not include accelerating construction. That is why we are going to work with the Quebec government on a new infrastructure agreement that incentivizes construction. We will tie the amount of money that each municipality receives to the number of houses and apartments completed in the previous year. That would mean that municipalities like Victoriaville, Saguenay and Trois-Rivières would receive substantial bonuses, because there has been a huge boom in construction there. Last year, for example, construction increased by 30% in those municipalities. That should be rewarded. Real estate companies are paid according to the number of homes they sell. Construction companies are paid according to the number of houses they build. We should pay local bureaucracies on the basis of the number of homes they allow to be built. This would encourage the acceleration of construction.

We should also insist that every transit station be located near apartment buildings. Transit stations should be surrounded by large apartment towers. Across Canada, in Vancouver, Montreal and elsewhere, we see beautiful transit stations, yet there is almost no housing around them. It is ridiculous.

The federal government provides funding, but often a third or a half of the amount needed. We should insist that this money not be invested if there are no apartment buildings where our seniors and young people can live next to a public transit station. That is how we are going to speed up home construction. We are going to insist that CMHC provide funding for apartment buildings within two months, not two years. Executives should be fired unless they meet that deadline. Finally, these homes should be located in safe communities.

After eight years under the leadership of this Prime Minister, crime has increased by nearly 40%. He has increased crime by allowing the same small groups of repeat offenders to keep committing the same crimes over and over, and by letting them out on bail the very same day they are arrested.

A Conservative government will replace bail with jail. We will target real criminals who use guns and seal our borders instead of targeting hunters and sport shooters. We will treat and rehabilitate people with drug addictions instead of decriminalizing crack, cocaine and other drugs, as the Prime Minister has already done in partnership with the NDP in British Columbia.

What I have been describing here is common sense. This is the kind of common sense used by ordinary Canadians. For decades, there was a common-sense Liberal-Conservative consensus that led to our extraordinary success. A Conservative government will rebuild that consensus to give Canadians back the country they love and deserve. That is our goal. We are going to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and, finally, stop the crime. It is common sense, and that is what we are going to do.

Madam Speaker, I wish you a happy new year. It is 2024 and the Prime Minister is still not worth the cost. He is not worth the crime. He is not worth giving up the country that we know and love. After eight years, everything costs more, crime is running rampant, housing costs have doubled, the country is more divided than ever before, and the Prime Minister seeks to distract and attack anyone who disagrees with him in order to make people forget how miserable he has made life in this country after nearly a decade in power.

Our common-sense counterpoint is very focused. In this session of Parliament, we will fight to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. That is how we are going to turn around the mess the Prime Minister has created in eight years.

Let us quickly touch upon that mess. After eight years of the Prime Minister, housing costs have doubled. This is after he promised that those housing costs would go down. In fact, they rose 40% faster than incomes, the worst gap in the G7 by far and the second worst among all 40 OECD nations. It is twice as bad as the OECD average, with roughly a quarter of OECD countries actually seeing housing affordability improve over the last eight years. Here in Canada, under the Prime Minister, we have seen it worsen at the fastest rate in the entire G7.

The Prime Minister has created a situation where only 26% of Canadians are able to afford a single-family home. It now takes 25 years to save up for a down payment on the average home for the average Toronto family, when 25 years used to be the time it took to pay off a mortgage. After eight years of the Prime Minister, it is now more affordable to buy a 20-bedroom castle in Scotland than a two-bedroom condo in Kitchener.

After eight years of the Prime Minister, a criminal defence lawyer reported on Twitter that numerous clients have asked if she can help extend their prison sentences so they do not have to live in this housing market and find a place to rent. In other words, the Prime Minister's housing market is worse than prison by the judgment of several people who actually live in prison.

After eight years of the Prime Minister, we have 16 seniors crammed into a four-bedroom home in Oshawa according to its food bank, which told me it had to house middle-class seniors together. They are all losing their homes because of the incredible rent increase the Prime Minister's policies have caused.

We have homelessness skyrocketing across the country. Every town and centre now has homeless encampments. Halifax has 30 homeless encampments for one medium-sized city. After eight years of the Prime Minister, who would have imagined that we would have 30 homeless encampments in one city, but that is the misery that he has created through his policies that are not worth the cost of housing.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister makes the problem worse. He gives tax dollars to incompetent mayors and bureaucracies to block homebuilding. The worst incompetence, of course, has been by the former mayor and the present mayor of Toronto, and the former mayor of Vancouver blocking construction in those cities and making it uninhabitable for many of the people who should be able to afford a home. We now have the second-slowest building permits of any country in the OECD. That is why we have the fewest homes in the G7, even with the most land by far to build on.

We were told that the media darling Minister of Housing, who was brought in in the fall, was going to fix all of this. He was going to hold photo ops right across the country, and all of a sudden there would be more building. What happened was that housing construction actually went down. There was a 7% reduction in housing last year under the leadership of the current housing minister.

Is it any surprise, when the guy who destroyed our immigration system was put in charge of housing, that we got a destructive result? It is not me accusing him of ruining the immigration system. It is his own Liberal successor. The current Liberal Minister of Immigration says that the system is out of control. In his own words, he claims that his predecessor was giving study visas for students to come and study at what he calls “puppy mills”. Those are his terms. I would never have used that term. It is insulting. They are actually human beings, not dogs. That is the language we get from the current immigration minister to describe the chaos that his own predecessor caused in the international student program and the temporary foreign worker program, not to mention countless other programs that have now been overwhelmed by fraudsters, shady consultants and bureaucratic incompetence. Now they take the guy who ruined all of that and say that this is the guy they are bringing in to resolve the housing crisis.

It is no wonder it gets worse and worse by the day. The Liberals' only defence is that they are spending lots of money. Failing is bad and failing expensively is even worse. That is what the Prime Minister has done after eight years. It is not only in housing. It is in generalized inflation. After eight years, inflation hit 40-year highs. After eight years, the Prime Minister has increased the cost of food so quickly that there are now two million Canadians, a record-smashing number, who are required to go to food banks in a single month. We have students forced to live in homeless shelters in order to afford food. We have seniors who say they have to live in tents in order to be able to shop and feed themselves, because food prices have risen so high.

In Toronto, one in 10 Torontonians are now going to a food bank, enough to fill the Rogers Centre seven times. If the monthly users of the food bank in Toronto alone were to go to the Rogers Centre, the place would have to be filled seven separate times, just to accommodate them all. Who would have thought we would have this many hungry people in Canada's biggest city, a city that has elected no one but Liberals since 2015? This is the result from that.

In that same city, crime and chaos rage out of control. In the adjoining suburbs, we now have stories of extortion, where small businesses receive letters saying that if they do not fork over big dollars to international crime syndicates, they will be shot at, their houses will be burned, their families will be targeted, and the government does nothing to protect them. Who would have thought that Canada would be so vulnerable to this kind of criminality and chaos that these foreign criminal syndicates would think Canada so weak and so easy to target that they could go after innocent small business leaders and their families in order to shake them down for money? Yet that is what has happened.

These same business owners go to bed at night with one eye open, because they know their car could be stolen as they sleep. I told some stories yesterday to the caucus, incredible stories of people in Brampton whose cars just vanished in the middle of the night. The cars go over to Montreal where they are put on a ship and sent off to the Middle East, Africa or Europe where they are resold at a profit. They are not even inspected as they go onto the ships in these containers.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister spends billions of dollars trying to buy back the legitimate property of licensed law-abiding firearms owners. He believes that the problem is the hunter from Nunavut or the professional sport shooter from Nanaimo, when in fact the real problem is the criminals.

Common-sense Conservatives are going to put an end to this madness. We are going to bring home the country we know and love. Let us go through the common-sense plan.

We are going to bring home lower prices by axing the carbon tax. It starts with passing Bill C-234 to axe the tax on farmers and food so farmers can make the food and Canadians can afford to eat it. Let us pass the bill unamended today and let Canadians eat affordable food. It is very easy. The House of Commons passed it once before. The Senate, under duress and pressure from the current Prime Minister, then sent it back with unnecessary amendments. Now the other opposition parties are flip-flopping and wavering. They agree in principle with the Liberal plan to quadruple the carbon tax, but say they might consider giving farmers a break on it. Now they are not so sure. They are siding with the costly Prime Minister again on keeping the tax on our farmers. Every time our people go to the grocery store and see those rising prices they will know that the NDP has betrayed working-class people in favour of greedy government with higher taxes on farmers and the single moms who are struggling to feed their families.

We are going to axe the tax on home heat not just for some or for a short time, but for everybody, everywhere, always. Common-sense Conservatives call on the Prime Minister to be consistent and not just temporarily pause the tax in regions where his polls are plummeting and his caucus is revolting, but rather let us axe the tax for every Canadian household to heat their homes in this devastatingly cold winter. It is incredible how cold it was in Edmonton, -50°C, and the Liberal member for Edmonton Centre voted to tax the heat of Edmontonians. Not only that, the Liberal member for Edmonton Centre wants to quadruple the carbon tax on the home heat of Edmontonians, so over the next several years, as the winter cold comes in and people crank up their heat, their bills will rise increasingly faster. In some places now the carbon tax is more expensive than the actual gas that people are buying. We are going to be sharing the bills that some of my caucus members have so that everybody knows how badly the Prime Minister and his NDP coalition are ripping off Canadians for the crime of heating themselves in -50°C weather. We are the only party that will axe the tax for them and for everyone, everywhere, always.

Our common-sense plan to bring home lower prices includes capping the spending that has driven inflation, the $600-billion increase in spending and debt, which means printing money. Printing money bids up the goods we buy and the interest we pay. In fact, government spending is up 75% since the Prime Minister took office. He has nearly doubled the cost of the government at a time when the economy has barely grown at all. In fact, it is shrinking while the government is expanding, which means it is gobbling up an increasing share of a shrinking pie and there is less left for everyone else. Right now the government is rich and the people are poor, because the Prime Minister cannot stop spending, and his greedy NDP coalition counterparts push him to spend even more of other people's money. Our common-sense plan would cap spending and cut waste. We would get rid of the $35-billion Infrastructure Bank, the $54-million ArriveCAN app and the billion-dollar so-called green fund, which is really a slush fund.

We would cut back on the money wasted on consultant insiders, who now consume 21 billion tax dollars a year, an amount that is equal to $1,400 for every family in Canada. We would cut back on this waste to balance the budget, and bring down inflation and interest rates, so that Canadians can eat, heat and house themselves.

We are going to unleash the growth of our economy. Instead of creating more cash, we would create more of what cash buys. We have the most powerful resources, perhaps the greatest supply of natural resources per capita of any country on earth, and we are very good at harvesting those resources to the benefit of our people and our environment at the same time.

The Prime Minister, with the help of the NDP, has been driving the production to other countries, where they pollute more, burn more coal and add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The Prime Minister would drive the production away from Canadians, who use among the cleanest electricity grids on Planet Earth, instead of bringing it home to this country. Our common-sense plan would repeal Bill C-69 and replace it with a new law that would not only protect the environment and consult first nations but also get projects built so that we can bring home paycheques for our people and take the money away from the dirty dictators of the world.

I was able to recently announce our new candidate in the Skeena—Bulkley Valley riding, the great Ellis Ross, former chief of the Haisla Nation. He is responsible for bringing Canada the biggest-ever investment in its history, which is the LNG Canada project. It is a project that was approved by the former Harper government, and the only reason it was able to go ahead under this government is that it gave the project an exemption from the carbon tax. Had the tax applied, the project never would have occurred. Had Bill C-69, the anti-resource law, been in place, the project never would have happened.

By the government's own admission, this project will reduce greenhouse gas emissions around the world by millions of tonnes because it will displace dirty, coal-fired electricity in Asia by sending clean, green Canadian natural gas, liquefied using hydroelectricity and our natural cold weather, and sent abroad on our shortest shipping distance, which means burning less fossil fuels to get it to market. This will displace more emission-intensive forms of energy in countries where they need to cut back. That is a solution to fight climate change and protect our environment, and thank God we had the visionary leadership of the great Ellis Ross to make that project happen, along with that of Stephen Harper.

Unfortunately, the Prime Minister has blocked every other LNG project from coming to fruition. There were 18 of these projects on the table when he took office, not one of them is completed. Only the aforementioned—

Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate we have to rise to speak to Bill C-234 once again.

Before I get into the meat of the speech that I want to bring up today, I do want to give some thanks. I want to thank the member for Huron—Bruce for bringing this private member's bill forward, as well as the member for Northumberland—Peterborough South, who brought this bill forward in the previous Parliament, which shows how much work we have put into this legislation.

I would also like to thank those senators in the red chamber who made the right decision, one based on facts, not fiction. I know there was a lot of intimidation and bullying going on in the Senate as the Prime Minister and the environment minister were personally phoning senators to support the amendments to this very important bill. However, about 40 senators stayed strong; they represented their regions and represented the facts of the discussion and debate. I think that what this all comes down to today is to try to get the amendments removed and get the bill back into its original form and back to the Senate. This is a discussion about fact and fiction.

My comments today are going to be for my colleagues in the Bloc, the NDP and the Green Party who have strongly and staunchly supported this legislation all the way through. They have done so because they understand the importance of agriculture. They understand the importance of the economic viability of Canadian farm families and the critical role they play in feeding not only the world but also Canadians, ensuring that we have affordable, nutritious food grown right here in Canada to support Canadian families and Canadian consumers.

Unfortunately, the Liberal government is making decisions based on ideology and fiction. The environment minister was very clear that if there were another carve-out of the carbon tax, he would resign as environment minister. Therefore, we now know that the whole fallacy of the carbon tax being an untouchable part of the Liberal climate change policy is not true. The Liberals have already done a carbon tax carve-out for home heating oil that was focused basically on Atlantic Canada, but when it comes to a piece of legislation that is supported by every opposition party in the House, and even by a handful of Liberals, they are not willing to listen. It is about picking and choosing winners and losers when it comes to who gets a break from the carbon tax and who has to pay it.

Here is a fact: Passing Bill C-234 and offering an exemption to the carbon tax for propane and natural gas would save farmers close to a billion dollars by 2030. That is a billion dollars that farmers now have to pay the Liberal government, when they are already paying record-breaking input costs on feed, fuel, fertilizer and many other inputs. We found out early last week not only that the billion dollars is being taken out of the pockets of farmers by the Liberal government but also that the GST is being charged on top of the carbon tax.

We have all known that, so we have been putting private members' bills forward. My Conservative colleague has put forward a private member's bill to remove the GST from the carbon tax. However, we now know the numbers, and they are staggering. The GST on the carbon tax alone cost Canadians almost $500 million last year. By 2030, it will be a billion dollars. Cumulatively, over the past several years and by 2030, Canadians will have paid $6 billion for GST just on the carbon tax, not on every other good and service they use. It is no wonder that Canadians cannot afford to put food on the table, put fuel in their car and pay their mortgage. Certainly, it is no wonder that farmers are struggling every single day. They are looking to these types of pieces of legislation that would offer them some financial relief.

The next fiction of the Liberals is that there are commercially available alternatives to propane and natural gas on farms, especially when it comes to heating and cooling barns. We know that is not true. Electric heat pumps are not going to heat a 100,000-square-foot chicken barn that is built with state-of-the-art technology. The Liberals should be applauding Canadian farmers for what they are already doing.

Here is another fact: The average global emissions that come from agriculture are about 26%. In Canada, the emissions that come from agriculture are 8%. This is a stat that we should be applauding every single day. It shows what our farmers are doing to ensure that they are the strongest environmental stewards of their land, soil and water. However, instead of being a champion for Canadian agriculture and applauding what farmers are doing, the Liberals are punishing them with the carbon tax and defending it every step of the way.

There are no other commercially viable options. There is no way to change behaviour for farmers who need natural gas and propane to heat their barns and to grow their food in greenhouses.

During the recess, we had three or four days in southern Alberta when it was -37°C. I guarantee everyone that a heat pump was not operating and not sufficient to ensure the health and safety of cattle, pork and poultry in those operations. However, at -37°C, those farm families are still out there making sure that we have quality, affordable food to eat every single day.

Here is another fact: The amendments we are discussing today, which were passed by the Senate, were already proposed by the Liberals in the House of Commons at the agriculture committee. Those amendments were voted down by the elected members of that committee. We have gone through this discussion but, again, fiction.

This is not about viable options for the Liberals. This is about trying to kill a bill that would provide a carbon tax carve-out for farmers.

Another fact is that, in his food report study, Professor Sylvain Charlebois at Dalhousie University reported that policies such as the carbon tax on farmers are going to increase the wholesale cost of food by 34%. Again, these are costs that are being put onto the backs of farmers, but, down the road, they will impact Canadian consumers who are struggling to put food on the table every single day.

We have two million Canadians accessing the food bank in a single month. It is unbelievable that this is happening in a country like Canada.

This is a discussion about fact and fiction, and I want to thank the members of the opposition parties who have stood by facts. They have stood by Canadian agriculture and the importance of growing affordable, nutritious food here in Canada. I hope they will continue to stand with us on Bill C-234 while the Liberals focus on fiction.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, here we go again with Bill C-234. It does not seem to want to go to the Governor General just yet.

As previous colleagues have said, this is a bill I am intimately familiar with. We did see a previous version of the bill in the 43rd Parliament, and of course, now that we are here at the beginning of 2024, the bill has had an approximately two-year journey to go through both houses of this Parliament, only to end up back in the House because the Senate has decided to amend it.

I want to remind hon. colleagues and all Canadians who are watching this debate of something, because I know a lot of the agricultural sector is probably tuning in right now, and members of the Agriculture Carbon Alliance have a very real interest in this bill and want to see us pass it in the same form it was passed by the House at third reading. What I want to remind everyone of is that the third reading vote is quite remarkable. The bill passed by a vote of 176 to 146. Just so everyone realizes this, that Conservative bill would not have made it to the Senate if it had not been for the support of the New Democratic caucus, the Bloc Québécois caucus, two Green Party members and a handful of Liberals.

We tend to try to bring a narrative in the House that it is just one party doing all of the work. The beauty of a minority Parliament is that sometimes the opposition can come together on an idea that has its merits and can use its combined majority vote to pass legislation the government may not agree with. It is a far better experience for members of the opposition than I ever had during my first four years in this place, when I was facing a majority government. It is a lot more worthwhile to members on this side of the House because we are able to work in a collaborative environment and to actually get things done when they may be in opposition to official government policy.

It was a notable vote, and that vote was the result of a lot of deliberation not only in the House of Commons but also at the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, of which I have been a proud member since 2018. We have heard quite definitively from many witnesses with intimate knowledge of the agricultural sector that these exemptions are necessary.

I was here in 2018 when the original Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act was brought in. I believe, if memory serves me well, it was part of a budget implementation act at the time. If we look at the original legislation, the existing statute of the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, we can see that when the Liberal government at the time drafted the legislation, it included significant exemptions for farming activities. There is a list of eligible farming activities, fuels and equipment, because the government realized that agriculture is in a unique position and that sometimes farmers do not actually have an option to switch to a different kind of fuel source. Many sectors in agriculture are still reliant on fossil fuels to conduct their operations, and that is going to be a fact for the foreseeable future, hence the exemptions that were put in the original act.

When I look at Bill C-234, I think the language in the bill that was passed by the House at third reading is in line with the spirit and intent of the original statute, which is why I gave it my support. It is why I will continue to give my support for the version of the bill that was passed by the House at third reading.

The basic premise behind carbon pricing is to incentivize a change of behaviour to a less polluting fuel source. However, we heard very clearly from many people who are involved in the agriculture sector that there are not commercially viable alternatives for the farming activities referenced in this bill. If we cannot use this tool to incentivize a change of behaviour, it is not going to be very worthwhile. This is why, when we look at the text of the bill and how the agriculture committee amended the bill, we recognized some technologies may be coming online and showing signs of early promise but are not in any shape or form ready for commercial viability.

We also wanted to signal to the sector that we are putting a short time frame on this. That is why we see referenced in the language of the bill the fact that there is an eight-year sunset clause, so the provisions that originally existed in the statute will come back into force after eight years, giving the industry a break for a short amount of time and giving it the signal that we expect change in the coming decade.

With respect to the carbon tax debate in this place, I am filled with a lot of remorse at the state of debate. I do not think it actually does great service to the complexities and dangers that climate change is presenting to Canada and many countries around the world. I regret very much that the state of debate around the carbon tax is that it has been reduced to a rhyme on a bumper sticker. That is a great disservice to the very clear and present danger that climate change presents to our agricultural sector.

If we want to look at one of the key reasons food price inflation is so high, we need only look to the state of California, which has been going through unprecedented drought-like conditions because of a changing climate. Since California acts as a breadbasket for much of Canada, when farmers are unable to produce as much as they did in years previous, that, of course, means there is going to be a supply shortage and increased prices.

I am very worried about what the upcoming summer is going to be like. Look at the summer we went through in 2023, with fires burning out of control in so many different provinces, levelling a clear and present danger to many agricultural operations. We can see the snowpacks that are in such a reduced state in the Rocky Mountains right now. They feed all of the major river systems in the Prairies. What are we going to do when farmers start running out of water in our prairie provinces? That is going to be a monumental crisis, and I do not think the debate around the carbon tax gives enough attention to the significance of that.

I also do not think we give enough conversation to the fact that farmers are dealing with massive input costs. There are gross farm revenues, but the farmer gets only a small portion of that at the end of the day because of the input costs: fuel, fertilizer, transport and so on. Farmers have enormously high input costs, and one of the best ways we can serve our farmers is to put in effective policy dealing with those input costs, helping them change the way they farm and putting in strategies to help them reduce fertilizer use, because it is possible to do that and also maintain the same kinds of yields.

As well, we need to talk a lot more about the power imbalance that exists with the corporate-controlled grocery sector. That is why farmers have been on the front lines of asking parliamentarians to put in a grocery code of conduct.

Last but not least, if we are not going to talk about the ridiculous oil and gas profits, we are doing an extreme disservice to everyone who is listening to this debate. We can go on and on about the carbon tax and its costs for Canadians, but if we are not going to talk about the fact that since 2019, the oil and gas sector has seen over a 1,000% increase in net profits, that is a disservice to the debate. I keep asking my Conservative colleagues to confront the elephant in the room, which is that the real reason people are paying through the nose for so many goods and services is that oil and gas companies are milking Canadian families for all they are worth. High profits mean someone is paying. It is Canadian families from coast to coast to coast that are lining the bank accounts of a very profitable oil and gas sector.

I will conclude by saying that with respect to Bill C-234, New Democrats are going to honour the third reading vote that we presented to the House last year, part of the 176 votes to 146 votes. Therefore, we support a message to the Senate rejecting their amendments and honouring the bill in its form at third reading in the House.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Mr. Speaker, although it is already January 29, I do not think it is too late to extend my best wishes to everyone. I hope we can engage in constructive politics. That is exactly what we are going to try to do this morning.

Listening to the speeches, I feel as though this is being treated like an either-or issue. One side is saying “axe the tax” while the other side is saying that we need to send some sort of message and that they will be there to help. The Bloc Québécois falls somewhere in between. We are reasonable people. We believe in sending a message and offering incentives for the climate transition, but we also believe in a climate transition that is fair and equitable for everyone. That is what I am going to talk about this morning: the agricultural exemption.

The agricultural exemption is an expression I am using more and more often in an attempt to get it to stick in people's minds, so that everyone understands that farmers—the people who feed us, who work extremely hard and whom we thank—deserve respect and support. There are different ways of offering support. Bill C-234 granted an exemption to a specific sector, and that is why we were in favour of it. There needs to be more support for sectors where there are fewer or no exemptions.

I paid close attention when the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government was speaking. He said his government is there for farmers and is supporting them, but that is not what I am seeing on a daily basis. If the Senate amendments are adopted, I want the government to make a formal commitment to supporting the climate transition in meaningful ways, especially in sectors where there is no alternative, such as grain drying. Farmers are being asked to use less pesticide and herbicide, to protect shorelines and wetlands, to maintain grasslands, to recultivate maginal land. We have to support them as they do that and give them the help they need. We have to be smart about this. That is the point of my speech this morning. If there is no exemption, there has to be compensation. There has to be support, intensive research and development and investment programs to help these sectors. That is key.

We have been talking about Bill C‑234, known in the previous Parliament as Bill C‑206, for the past four years. In the beginning, the bill was about grain drying. As the study progressed, the heating and cooling of certain buildings was added. Then an election was called. After that, Bill C‑234 was introduced, and it specifically addressed grain drying and the heating and cooling of certain buildings. We studied the bill. Now the Senate has sent it back to us with an amendment that cuts out buildings and shortens the bill's lifespan. It is certainly not the same bill that we passed. Obviously, we have some reservations. However, it is back in alignment with the original bill and puts the focus where it is needed the most.

I have to say that I am concerned about the Conservatives' tactics this morning. I am not entirely comfortable with all the parliamentary procedures, but when I see the opposition responding to the Senate before the government does, I have to wonder whether the procedures were followed. Could this not have been discussed earlier?

I thought the Conservatives' goal was to set targets and come up with slogans. When I talk about the Conservatives' goal, I do not include my colleague from Huron—Bruce in that. I know he cares about farmers and is doing this for the right reasons. I am talking about the strategy in general. Do the Conservatives want to turn this fight into a slogan, so they can go back to the kind of aggressive partisan politics we saw when this bill was being studied in the Senate? I would remind my colleagues that when we were debating a motion here dealing with this, bullying was a very serious problem.

That is why I said at the beginning of my speech that I wanted us to engage in constructive politics. I invite everyone to proceed in an intelligent way, to present intelligent arguments and content, and to engage with people from other political parties to reach a consensus in order to move things forward. We should not just be trying to score political points ahead of the next election.

What we should be doing right now is having a look at the work done by the Senate. We should be analyzing and improving it. How can we improve it? We have two options. We could reject the amendments and refer the bill back to the Senate. That would probably lead to a ping-pong match, forcing us to redo the work and set new deadlines. Bill C‑234 stayed in the Senate for a long time. Will it come back to the House? How long will it take? We have no control over the date of the election.

We have no control over whether the bill will be sent back. When will it come back? Is the second option not better? It is worth taking time to consider this bill. We could make tangible progress now and establish the principle of the agricultural exemption. The purpose of Bill C‑234, beyond the grain drying exemption, is to establish the agricultural exemption, the fact that there are some sensitive sectors that need to be supported or exempted. If the bill is adopted as amended, that is the message it will send. That will be a win for grain farmers with respect to grain drying. This was very well explained by my colleague from Huron—Bruce just now.

They have no alternatives, nor do they control sales prices. When costs go up, their profit margins go down. That is just not right. We cannot do that to the people who feed us.

At the same time, with the amendments that the Senate is proposing, we would continue sending a message about the environment. We cannot forget that side of things either. We need to continue doing that. Pollution must have a price, but sectors like agriculture must not be the ones who have to pay that price. They need to be supported in all of this. When it comes to buildings, perhaps the alternatives are not so far out of reach. Of course, for many farmers, many of those solutions have not actually been implemented, but they are more within reach than in the case of drying.

I would like to ask the government the following question: Is it committed to quickly implementing a bold and substantial program? I am talking to the parliamentary secretary, but this question is also for the Minister of Environment and Climate Change and the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. We need to give farmers access to the technology that we are asking them to have but that they are unable to get. That is the key.

We must not forget that the the carbon tax is a federal tax. It was created for the provinces that were doing nothing for the environment. We need to think about that too. If we were to do away with the carbon tax, as the Conservatives are proposing, what message would that send to the other governments? Would we be sending them the message that they too can do away with the carbon tax?

For the benefit of my Conservative friends, I would point out once again that the carbon tax does not apply in Quebec. The fact that the Bloc Québécois has supported Bill C‑234 from the beginning is a major gesture of goodwill toward the farming community, because the measure puts Quebec farmers, who are not currently entitled to the exemption, at a disadvantage. It sends a message to all governments that an agricultural exemption is inescapable. That is why we supported the bill. That is why Quebec farmers encouraged us to do so, to show their solidarity with westerners. That is why we did it, at their urging.

At the same time, we are putting our people at a disadvantage by voting for Bill C‑234. I would like to drive that point home for everyone. We are putting our people at a disadvantage. The proposal we are debating this morning may strike the right balance. Could the Senate's amendment be the ideal way to achieve the mission we were given, the mission to establish an agricultural exemption? Would it not create an exemption without placing Quebec producers at an undue disadvantage? I am asking the question.

We are well aware that some farmers will be disappointed if the Senate's amendments are adopted. However, there are other ways to get things done. We can take the grain drying exemption now and prevent the bill from getting bogged down again thanks to the kind of intimidation, threats and other things that have absolutely no place in a democracy. We can put the matter to rest, move on and keep working on the buildings issue in a different way. I will not turn my back on farmers. We will not turn our backs on them. We need proper dialogue, research and development.

Bill C‑234 must succeed. It would never have seen the light of day without the initial and ongoing support of the Bloc Québécois, which also agreed to officially recognize the agricultural exemption principle. I thank my colleagues for that. My question is this: Do we want to send the bill to the Senate and keep bickering over it, with media clips and slogans, or are we willing to grasp the tangible gains within our reach? The answer should be obvious.

We always try to do politics with the future in mind, not the next election. We intend to stick with this approach.