Thank you, Mr. Chair.
With your indulgence, I would just like to congratulate all of the members and witnesses whom we heard on our week of travelling from coast to coast. I thought there were great questions and even better answers from many of our witnesses. I had the pleasure of being there for Quebec City, Toronto and Winnipeg. I'm sure all stops were great.
As I said earlier, I just want to make sure my comments are anchored in the motion. I'll just read the first line of the motion:
Celebrates the Canada Pension Plan as the foundation of a secure and dignified retirement for tens of millions of Canadians and a pillar of Canada’s economy;
My remarks will focus mainly on Canada's economy per the motion.
We are of course, in an extremely difficult economic time, really with extremes that we haven't seen since the Great Depression. Philip Cross, of course, the noted academic and statistician has said that we have the worse GDP since the Great Depression. We're actually contracting. I believe it's per person GDP. Those numbers are obscured a little bit.
For those Canadians listening at home, they may be confused when they hear the Liberals say, we had an increase in GDP. Our increase in population is obscuring the actual economic numbers because while the absolute numbers are higher, the actual per Canadian numbers are lower. This government is in some respects successfully obscuring the truth. But you know what, Canadians feel it. The people of Northumberland—Peterborough South are very much aware of the economic times.
We see other indicators such as food banks being at record levels. I believe it's two million Canadians per month who visit food banks. I heard a statistic just this morning that fully a third of food bank attendees, customers—I guess "clients" may be the best way to refer to them—are new. These are folks who have never been to a food bank before. I heard a great interview this morning of one of the individuals who is in charge of a food bank.
You can imagine the energy, exhaustion and the stress it would take for someone who had never been to a food bank and probably never thought they would ever go to a food bank. Yet this government, instead of focusing on these very critical issues, is obsessed with scoring political points, to sow division. We all know from the first Prime Minister Trudeau of policies that, if not a willful, are certainly negligent, and of efforts that have alienated large portions of our country. Traditionally that might be viewed as western Canada, but I can tell you that in rural Ontario it's the same thing.
The folks in my riding, in part of rural Canada, very much feel like they are alienated and aren't thought about or cared about by this government. You see that even more so in the carve-out from the carbon tax. Yes, I'm glad that the Prime Minister got the memo from the Atlantic members of caucus who said that they can't campaign on this. We can't go back. We can't face our residents with a carbon tax at $80 a tonne.
I'll just remind people on the record as well, because there was some confusion—I'm sure it was honest confusion—on the road when I said carbon taxes had quadrupled. In 2019, the carbon tax was $20 per tonne. It is now $80. Four times $20 is $80. Sorry, it will be in the spring of 2024. I should correct that. We have the quadrupling of the carbon tax and in many cases a very meagre rebate coming back the other way.
We get this exemption, this carve-out, this acknowledgement that in fact the carbon tax is leading to an affordability crisis, as we heard from Tiff Macklem. He shared with us that 16% of inflation is actually directly because of the carbon tax and that 33% of inflation over target is directly because of the carbon tax. Those are all numbers.
I'm sure this is honest confusion, but I have heard many Liberal and even NDP members in the House, and even in this very committee, get very confused on that point and say things like it's only 1.5%. That's just not true. That's not what the governor said. The governor said, and he confirmed it, that it was actually 60 full basis points, which is 16% of inflation.
There is no doubt that by having that exemption, that carve-out only for Atlantic Canada.... I should be fair, though. I want to be completely transparent and make sure that we have all the facts. It does apply to other people across the country who heat their homes with oil. The reality is that the majority of people who heat their homes with oil are out on the east coast, which is where the Prime Minister's caucus was very upset. It's going to make many Canadians feel left out in the cold, literally and figuratively.
It's the logic, Mr. Chair, that really.... I don't understand it. I hear Minister Wilkinson say, you don't understand. Fuel oil is really bad for the environment, so we have to take the carbon tax off it. But then that same guy will say, you don't understand, gasoline is really bad for the environment so we have to quadruple the carbon tax. There's a complete gap of logic.
Every time I hear this debate, not even as a partisan or as a Conservative but as someone who studied philosophy at university, I don't understand the logic of it. Either the carbon tax leads to less of something, and so we should put it particularly heavily on bad things, or it doesn't, and then we should remove it all and, instead, allow Canadians to have the resources they need to make the decisions they need to. Actually, that brings me to Bill C-234.
As some of you might be aware, I originated Bill C-206—it's a private member's bill—back in 2019. That was the predecessor to Bill C-234, which was to remove the carbon tax from propane and natural gas for farmers. This would affect farmers from coast to coast to coast.