Bill C-38

Canadian Fuel Affordability Act

An Act to amend the Excise Tax Act (extension of the federal fuel excise tax relief)

This enactment amends the Excise Tax Act to extend the temporary suspension of the federal fuel excise tax until January 31, 2027 and to temporarily set the excise tax rates on fuels to 50% of the regular rates for the period beginning on February 1, 2027 and ending on March 31, 2027.

Canadian Fuel Affordability Act

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate and thank my colleague for his speech, and I would like to remind the House that it will soon be two years since he was elected. He has been here for a year and a half. I was pleasantly surprised to hear him praise the elimination of carbon pricing on gas, saying that it had a direct impact on buying food, which has to be transported.

I know that he has been here for a year and a half, but his current colleagues spent 10 years saying that it was appalling to attack carbon pricing and that we, the Conservatives, had zero respect for the environment. The opposite is true.

Since he got off to a good start, since he applauded the fact that his government has done what we have been demanding for years, does he agree with our proposal to immediately abolish all federal taxes that affect transportation?

[Abdelhaq Sari, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for keeping track of how long I have been here; I learn something new every day. I will circle back to my colleague's question before I wrap up.

What I have learned over the past year and a half is that our government has introduced quite a few measures to help families and young people. These are targeted, temporary, one-off measures. They are designed to address the concerns that citizens have raised with us.

There is a question I would like to put to my colleague on the other side. We have been implementing measures to help families for a year and a half. However, as the new MP for Bourassa, I was very surprised to see MPs on the other side of the House voting against them.

That said, I would like to thank the member once again for his work.

[Karim Bardeesy, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry]

Mr. Speaker, I really enjoyed the speech by my colleague from Bourassa. As he pointed out, this bill is targeted and aims to address a very specific situation in today's global context.

Could he explain how this measure is in keeping with the government's wider range of efforts, including those he himself had in mind to improve affordability and the cost of living?

[Abdelhaq Sari, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his question. It gives me another opportunity today to reiterate a number of measures introduced by our government. As I said earlier, a family of four can receive up to $1,890, and a single person, up to $950. This assistance is geared to families.

As I mentioned earlier, something I hold very dear deserves reiterating. I am referring to the roughly 400,000 children a year who truly benefit from Canada's national school food program. This is the kind of practical action I am talking about. There are others, but time prevents me from listing them all.

What bothers me the most, however, is seeing people on the other side of the House vote against family-oriented measures aimed at helping Canadians. That disappoints me a lot.

[Tim Watchorn, Liberal, Les Pays-d'en-Haut, QC]

Mr. Speaker, as usual, my hon. colleague gave a very eloquent speech.

As I was saying earlier when I asked the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands a question, many of my constituents who have to sit in traffic will be able to benefit from Bill C‑38 by saving money on gas. Many of my constituents work in my colleague's riding.

Can my colleague expand on how these people will be able to benefit from Bill C‑38 by saving money on gas?

[Abdelhaq Sari, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this gives me an opportunity to go back to the scenario I described at the beginning of my speech. Imagine a woman in my riding who is a personal support worker and who has just finished her shift at dawn. This woman decides to only pump 20 dollars' worth of gas because she cannot afford to fill up her tank. Alternatively, imagine someone who makes a lot of deliveries and whose vehicle is their livelihood. There are people like that in my riding and in my colleague's riding. We are trying to fix these issues so we can help these people day after day with concrete measures.

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Battle River—Crowfoot.

It is good to be back in the House doing the work that Canadians sent us here to do. I think everyone agrees that it has been a long summer for the Canadian economy, for our trade relationships and for families, especially for families watching their bills climb faster than their paycheques. For three months, the doors of this Parliament stayed closed while government members were unable to answer for any of it, some because they truly did not know what was going on and some because they simply do not see their role as being accountable in this place.

Let me say it plainly. This sitting is overdue, this debate is overdue, this policy prescription is overdue and the people we represent right across the country who are being locked out of accountability deserve much better than this. Our approach to this session is very simple. When the government does something that helps Canadians, we will support it, and when it makes things worse, we will oppose it, as we always have, strongly and without apology.

Today's bill falls into that first category. This legislation would finally remove the federal excise tax on gasoline until January 31 and cut it in half until the end of March. That is real, although temporary, relief, and Conservatives will support it.

However, I would ask the government to be honest about something: where the idea came from. We have been calling on exactly this since the spring. This is once again the government adopting a Conservative solution after insisting for months it was not at all necessary and after looking families in the face and saying no. We are pleased that the Liberals have come around, but we simply ask why on earth it too so long and, more importantly, why it stops here.

It is worth remembering what the Prime Minister said before he had this job. In February 2025, he built his entire leadership pitch around fiscal discipline. He said, “spend less, invest more”, warning that Ottawa could not keep borrowing from the future to pay for today. Let me be clear. We are not opposed to this relief, as we have been asking for it since the spring, but relief and recklessness are not the same thing, and the difference is simple: find the money.

Conservatives have identified $150 billion in savings from wasteful spending precisely so that Canadians can get relief without adding another dollar to the tab that their own kids will pay for. The government has not done the work. It simply added this tax measure onto a deficit it has already doubled, a deficit that has strangled families at home and that has made it less affordable to buy food, groceries and gas.

The question is not whether to give Canadians relief. It is whether the Prime Minister still believes what he told Canadians before he had the job and whether “spend less, invest more” is just something one says to win an election, not something one does after it has already been won.

Here is the other answer. This is the part we see very clearly and that I think Canadians ought to see very clearly, and it is where some in the House may be confused. It is what this bill tells us about the government's real position. The government cut the excise tax, but it left the clean fuel standard in place. It left it completely untouched. That is not actually an oversight. It is a regulation that exists specifically to keep fuel expensive in this country, and it is by design. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, not just some newspaper article, it is already adding seven cents a litre and is set to climb to 17¢ by 2030. That is not real relief. It is not even temporary relief. It is policy by design to keep gas expensive in this country.

I am sure I can continue when we resume after question period, but I want to end with this. The government wants Canadians to believe that it is fighting for cheaper gas. That simply is not true. It is protecting the one policy that guarantees gas gets more expensive in this country every single year, more expensive than the last. It cannot claim relief at the pump on one hand while holding the other hand on the tax that keeps prices high. If people take one thing from this debate, it should be this, because it is not a change in policy. It is a temporary relief measure for Canadians that we will absolutely support, of course.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-38, An Act to amend the Excise Tax Act (extension of the federal fuel excise tax relief), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will start off where I ended just before question period, just to say that one tax cut on one product does not undo an affordability crisis 11 years in the making.

Let us just be clear about where Canadians actually stand today. Nearly one in four families cannot afford the housing they live in. One in 10 people in Toronto relies on a food bank. Gas still sits over $1.80 a litre in Toronto today, and over $2.06 a litre in Vancouver, the highest gas price in the country. Inflation sits at 3%, the top edge of what the Bank of Canada considers tolerable, and we lost 42,000 jobs in August alone before the latest round of tariffs even hit.

Behind every one of those numbers is somebody like Hamid, a constituent who wrote me this month. Despite doing everything right, searching for work, trying to keep up, he told me that he is now in debt and struggling to afford basic necessities, including a pair of glasses that he needs to see clearly.

We are in Canada. That is not a policy footnote. That is not just some random example. These are real people with real stories. That is the real cost of 11 years of decisions made in this building. That is the story that the government needs to hear, because the promise of this country has always been simple: If a person works hard and follows the rules, the country works for them too. Right now, for too many Canadians, it simply is not working.

If the government is serious about affordability and not just borrowing language along with our policies, here is how the Liberals could finish the job they started today.

Go further on gas. Do not just cut the excise tax, but scrap the clean fuel standard and the GST on fuel too. That is another 15¢ a litre for every fill-up, and 15¢ a litre on every fill-up for a guy like Hamid means something. In fact, it means something for a lot of Canadians right across the country who are struggling. Do not stop at March. Hold it for a full year or longer if Canadians are not seeing the benefit by then. That is roughly $1,000 back in the pockets of every average family, not a few hundred, but $1,000, and that is a meaningful difference.

Scrap the GST on new homes. That alone can save a family $65,000 on a new build. It is the difference between renting forever and actually owning a place they can call their own for their families, to have kids and for their kids to have.

Get the spending under control. We have said this before. The government has doubled the deficit it inherited. In fact, it was the front members on the Liberals' bench who added to that deficit. They have actually inherited something they have done themselves. We have identified $150 billion in savings, which is roughly $10,000 for a Canadian family. That is the cost of three and a half average Canadian mortgage payments. That is real relief for real families everywhere across the country.

The Liberals can find this savings by cutting consultants. They can find it by cutting corporate welfare, boondoggles like the Alto rail project or a gravel pit launch pad that went nowhere. That money can go back to Canadians, or at minimum it could stop being borrowed against their children's future. None of this is complicated.

A tank of gas should not cost a day's wages. A home should not cost a lifetime savings for a down payment. Everyone in this place knows that this is not an ideological position. This is how this country is supposed to work. This is the deal that this country has on offer for every single Canadian, no matter where they came from and how they got there.

I will close with this. It is day two after three months of silence from the other side, and we have already passed something real, or we are about to. Imagine what could have been done for Canadians if this House had sat all summer, instead of shielding the government from questions it did not want to answer. Imagine if it was not all summits and MOUs, and it was real relief for real people who are undoubtedly scratching their heads today and wondering if this year is going to be any different than last year or the year before.

What is before us today is a step. It is a small one in the right direction, and we think it should go further. We will keep saying this every single day. We will keep saying it for the millions of Canadians who have entrusted us with the responsibility to fight for a more affordable future in this country, to fight to save them money, to fight for every single Canadian no matter where they live, where they came from and how they got here. We will support the bill and we will push until the government actually finishes the work that we started for it.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to pick up on the member's comments in regard to the summit. It is truly amazing the degree to which the government has been so successful through the leadership of our Prime Minister at opening the world to Canada. All one needed to do is go to Toronto, where they would have seen economic powerhouses from around the world looking and having control over literally hundreds of billions of dollars. For the first time in Canadian history, we hit close to half a trillion dollars in terms of commitments. The Conservatives can say what they want, but to try to deny the reality that we have a Prime Minister or a government that is working hard to deliver on jobs, investments, trade opportunities is completely off base.

I am wondering if she would reflect on her comments with respect to the summit.

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is still all talk and no results, and we will continue to see no results. What we cannot do with commitments on projects that cannot get built in this country is fill a car full of gas. We cannot put food on the table. We cannot pay our mortgage. Every single Canadian who is scratching their head wondering what these summits and MOUs mean for affordability in this country is going to continue to keep scratching, while the member all the way from Winnipeg looks to Toronto and looks at a bunch of commitments that are not real.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Winnipeg North just talked about commitments. Well, we cannot eat commitments. Let us ask the people in Ingersoll about Stellantis and those commitments, which all left our country because of the Liberals' failed policies. Every Conservative here is here to save money for Canadians.

How much money would Canadians have saved if the Liberals had actually taken our policy months and months and years ago to take the tax off gas so they would be able to drive to their work and actually take their kids to school and put food on the table?

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the answer is simple: It is a whole lot more. What I want to say is, on this side of the House, for the last 11 years, we had members turning themselves in circles, screaming about burning the earth down because we would lower the price of gas in this country. Let us make no mistake about it, they can go a lot further. They can scrap the clean fuel standard and make sure to take 15¢ a litre off the price of gas for eternity, but they are not doing that. That is a policy choice.

The member brings up a good point on the summit. We cannot put a commitment in our gas tank. We cannot put a commitment on our table. For so long, this deal book has been full of deals that Canadian private capital said no to long ago. They said no because of the job-killing, energy-killing policies of the last 11 years that are continuing from the government.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is rare when New Democrats and Conservatives agree on something, and we certainly agree that it is critical that we provide relief to people who are struggling right now. However, we believe that big corporations and big oil and gas should be paying for it, not creating more debt to taxpayers. One more thing we agree on is, as my colleague talked about, the lack of debate on the greatest threat to the Canadian economy with the tariffs and the countertariffs that are happening right now. I think about small businesses in my riding that have sales less than $1 million. There is no relief for them right now from the government. There is no debate happening to talk about those issues taking place right now, and it did not happen this summer, like my colleague talked about.

Could the member talk about how this is impacting small businesses in her community, which are not getting any help during the greatest threat to our Canadian economy right now in our history?

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is rare when I agree with my NDP colleague, but a clock is right twice a day. He is right about one thing. This place was shut down for three months, and nobody from the government, including a whole bunch of backbench Liberal MPs who probably do not know the answer because they are not in the know either, along with a number of ministers, would answer to the Canadian people on the biggest crisis we face. That biggest crisis is affordability. It is an affordability crisis for every single Canadian, an affordability crisis that has people scratching their heads as to why these guys do not come to work and why these guys do not answer to the public.