Mr. Speaker, there is one message the Conservatives have for the Liberals when it comes to their overall approach in bills like Bill C-4: Get out of the way.
On the surface, the Liberals are selling Bill C-4 as a way to give a tax break to 22 million Canadians, among other components. That is the headline. That is the label on the package. What is in the fine print on this packaging? The Conservatives took a look. The fine print is about embedding this proposed tax break in the bigger picture of Liberal deficit spending.
We just passed a new budget running a $78-billion deficit. The government is adding $90 billion in new spending. That is $5,000 per Canadian household. Meanwhile, the tax break on offer for Canadians in Bill C-4 checks out to $90 per month. Anything on offer in the bill is already wiped out by interest on the Liberals' deficit spending. The central-planning Liberals are committed to interventionist tactics. We, as Conservatives, are simply asking them to get out of the way of hard-working Canadians so they can build our country strong.
We are in a shameful situation in this country, where over two million Canadians are visiting food banks every month. At the end of every month, paycheques are not going far enough. Why is that? The Liberals want to deflect and blame this solely on the trade deficit. However, there is a simple economic fact: When we create more units of currency and map them to an economy that is not meaningfully producing more units of goods and services, we get inflation. As a case in point, in the last five years, grocery prices have risen more than 20%. We cannot print our way out of economic stagnation. We are already in this situation because of all the deficit spending engaged in during the Trudeau years. Why are we doing more of the same?
How insulting it is to hard-working Canadians for the Liberals to create a macro situation where paycheques are not enough for food and rent, then pat themselves on the back for doling out welfare in various guises. It is no different from throwing rocks at household windows and offering window replacement services, or pushing us into a pool and offering us a floater, yet this is the world view of the interventionist, nanny-state central planners. The interest payments on our debt already exceed what is transferred to provinces for health care, yet the modus operandi of the nanny state is rather to add to this debt instead of simply letting the natural drive of hard-working Canadians carry our economy forward.
Instead of getting out of the way, the Liberals choose to continually stand in the way of a naturally productive, real economy. How can we meaningfully affect prices at the grocery store when the industrial carbon tax makes it harder to grow food, when the fuel standard makes it harder to ship food and when the packaging tax makes it harder to sell food? The Liberals operate in a system of intervention and then propose branded, one-shot measures to create the image of doing good by Canadians. If they stopped their environmentalist overreach, Canadians could do good by themselves.
I want to affirm, right now, that all parties in the House seem to me to be committed to making lives more affordable for Canadians. What separates us is not only our methods but also what we can call accumulated technical debt from previous approaches. No matter how many one-off, targeted measures the Liberals put on offer, they are weighed down by the second-order effects of having engaged in far too much deficit spending. The cumulative path of dependence on 10 years of out-of-control spending is a national situation where monthly income cannot meet monthly bills. Therefore, what we must address here is the root of the mindset behind all the deficit spending.
Allow me a moment to address how the Liberals could get out of the way and, in so doing, alter the course of Canada's affordability crisis. We can do this only by empowering hard-working Canadians to take the lead.
The first shift is one of mindset. Do the Liberals believe in the capacity of their fellow citizens? Do they believe in the entrepreneurs and businesses that move the needle economically in this country? If they do not, I completely understand why they are so attached to interventionist measures. It all makes sense. Otherwise, if the Liberals actually believe in the people, they should get out of the way and create opportunities for everyday Canadians to step up through grassroots initiatives.
The second shift consists of removing all the hidden taxes that pile onto the price of groceries. The Conservatives will keep on repeating this until the Liberals hear us: Remove the industrial carbon tax, remove the fuel standard and remove the packaging tax. When I say, “Get out of the way”, there is a very literal way to do this. Why are the Liberals hindering every single step of the grocery supply chain? Food is such a fundamental part of total monthly spending, and this is the one, single area where a concerted effort to get out of the way would yield genuine results. The Liberals do not need a history lesson from me, but one of the core drivers of the French Revolution was the elevated price of grain. There is no area where the Liberals should be more incentivized to get out of the way than the total supply chain that affects grocery prices. When it comes to food, the issue extends beyond partisanship. This is life or death.
Finally, the third shift is amplifying the power of a common Canadian paycheque. Canadians are already putting in the hours, day in and day out. Why can Canadians not afford basic necessities through the income they are already earning? It is an insult to every hard-working household to receive handouts after putting in an honest day's work. I believe the Liberals need to do some soul-searching around how they have created this macro trap where the average monthly salary is not enough to afford the average monthly bills.
The bottom line here is very clear: The $90-per-month benefit in Bill C-4 is wiped out by the $5,000-per-household cost of deficit spending in the new Liberal budget. If the Liberals want to address affordability, their first step should be tackling the basket of items in every Canadian's monthly spend: groceries. They can do this by stopping their nanny-state, central-planning interventions, stopping the industrial carbon tax, stopping the fuel standard and stopping the packaging tax.
My Liberal colleagues, please get out of the way of hard-working Canadians and have the conviction that people can make this economy thrive.
