Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I, of course, agree with all the comments of my colleagues. It's very clear that Mr. Carney wants to be the leader of the Liberal Party. He's been going around the country and making speeches. He's been very clear about his intentions. Though it's clear that he doesn't want to axe the tax, he's made it very clear that he wants to axe the Prime Minister.
In his speeches on economic and fiscal policy, most recently, he attacked the common-sense Conservative plan to axe the tax, and he attacked Conservatives on a number of other levels. This includes using—it seems very odd to me—Brexit as a proxy somehow, and the rhetoric that was used around Brexit, to attack Canadian Conservatives.
It's very clear that he's posturing for the position of the Liberal leadership. He supports increasing the carbon tax. We need to know by how much. He has supported this government's inflationary spending. We saw just today that the PBO reported the actual increase in inflationary spending is $61.2 billion, not $57 billion, so it's even higher than we thought.
Canadians deserve to know what his position is on these types of things.
If he wants the top job, he owes it to Canadians to testify before this committee on his plans for spending, inflation and fiscal and monetary policy. I'm sure we'd have some very pertinent questions for him on monetary policy, given the fact that he was the governor of the Bank of Canada and the governor in the U.K.
On energy, my colleagues make a very good point. The Prime Minister keeps saying, “Well, you know, LNG is off the table. There's no economic case for exporting Canadian liquefied natural gas,” but we just had the President of Poland ask for Canadian liquefied natural gas to be exported to Poland. About a year and a half ago, the Chancellor of Germany asked for that as well.
It's very important that Canadians are made aware of his position on the sale of liquefied natural gas. This is just one issue. There are so many others.
As my colleagues mentioned, the door was open for him to come and testify on the fall economic statement, but he dodged the committee. I think it's important that he not be allowed to dodge this committee if he wants to be the Prime Minister of this country, so it's incumbent upon all members of this committee—Liberal, Bloc and NDP—to support this common-sense motion that would call on Mr. Carney to come here and answer some very important questions.
Another one I'll just touch on is that we don't know, for example, what his fiscal anchors might be. Would he actually bring forward a plan to balance the budget—something that hasn't been done by this government in nine years—or does he support the current plan of the minuscule reductions in the debt-to-GDP ratios that this government tabled in the most recent budget?
What will his fiscal anchors be? We just don't know. We're in the dark.
For all those reasons and the reasons of my colleagues, I will certainly be supporting this motion.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.