Before I speak to the subamendment, I'm just going to say that all of the comments that were racist, prejudiced, mean-hearted and evil—those aren't Conservatives. I reject them wholeheartedly. I know my colleagues do as well.
I think we all find it really difficult to go through our comments and try to delete every single rude, obnoxious, racist, sexist and prejudiced comment that people make. We're not all perfect. You can't always get it right. We are responsible for the comments that we make.
I hope people will find that I've always been judicious in the commentary I make. I joke that I'm a minority in my own family because my kids are part Jewish and part Chinese, so I'm very sensitive to that type of aggressive commentary. My partner is from Iran, so I see that people even post nasty commentary as well on her comments that she sometimes makes publicly.
We reject them wholeheartedly. They don't represent the Conservative Party of Canada. They don't represent the Conservative movement either. That's easy to say.
On the subamendment that I moved at the last meeting, now we have a development. A beautiful, 12-word non-confidence motion is now available to the House to consider. It's that the House has lost confidence in this government—I'd move so—and that we finally have that carbon tax election this motion calls for now.
If it passes with my subamendment, and I hope we'll find agreement from all parties to do so, I really hope that we can get to the point where we can pass this subamendment to have a carbon tax election.
To prepare for this meeting, I looked up as many supporting documents as I could from different parliamentarians and legislators at the provincial level to try to persuade my colleagues that my subamendment is what the Canadian population wants.
We have three provincial elections coming up. In all of them, either the carbon tax will feature prominently as the main issue or it'll be a carbon tax election. When Premier David Eby is agreeing and now saying that basically he wants to abandon their own retail carbon tax in British Columbia, that's a carbon tax election.
I think it's incumbent upon us as parliamentarians to accept my subamendment, which will go along with the main motion to basically tell the House that we want a carbon tax election.
I've now heard rumblings that perhaps this non-confidence motion that's being moved in the House will get support from one of the other opposition parties. That's regrettable. I hope they change their minds. They have many more days to be persuaded of that, but in the interim, we could approve my subamendment and we could still report it back to the House. I've asked the clerks at the table, since I sit so close to them, and it would be a novel way of inducing perhaps another non-confidence vote in the government through this report that we would table after the motion is passed.
There was some commentary from the B.C. premier and NDP leader David Eby to scrap the carbon tax in British Columbia. This appeared in the Vancouver Sun on September 12. I'm going to quote him here.
He said, “A lot of British Columbians are struggling with affordability.... The political consensus we had in British Columbia has been badly damaged by the approach of the federal government”, so if it “decides to remove the legal backstop requiring us to have a consumer carbon tax in B.C., we will end the consumer carbon tax in B.C.”
The article goes on to say, “Eby argued that large increases to the federal tax”—