Thank you, Chair.
I will be happy to move this amendment in a second, but right before that I want to move the other motion for which I gave notice on March 15. I know, Chair, that you saw that Mr. Falk wants to speak immediately after me.
Related to my last intervention, I want to give the NDP, Liberal and Bloc members on this committee another opportunity to vote in favour of their constituents' being able to afford the basics that are necessary to live in this big cold northern country and being able to afford groceries and being able to provide for their families and for their own daily lives.
Therefore, I would like to move the second motion for which I gave notice on March 15. I move:
Given that,
i) 1 in 5 Canadian households are living in energy poverty,
(ii) Energy poverty means that households cannot afford to pay for energy costs that meet their daily needs and maintain healthy and safe indoor temperatures,
(iii) the Liberal government's 23% carbon tax increase on April 1st, 2024, is going to make household energy use even more expensive, making it even harder for those already living in energy poverty,
In order to help the 1 in 5 Canadians living in energy poverty, the committee report to the House its recommendation to immediately cancel the Liberal Government's 23% carbon tax increase on April 1st, 2024.
I hope the members of the other parties will find some sense of compassion and of common sense and will listen to what Canadians are saying.
The willingness to ignore the vast majority of Canadians who are also being represented through their provincially elected representatives—like the seven out of 10 premiers calling to “spike the hike”—is mind-boggling but also perhaps instructive, when the Prime Minister many years ago said he admired the basic dictatorship in Beijing and refuses to listen to the people crying out, with more Canadians going to food banks than ever before, people with skyrocketing power bills and now unreliable sources of power because of this government's anti-energy, anti-private sector, anti-resource development agenda.
There are Canadians who can't afford to fill up their gas tanks but who also have no other options for getting around; Canadians who live in remote and rural and northern regions where the basics are already more expensive, with the situation made even worse by the carbon tax and a government hell-bent on quadrupling it on April 1; and Canadians who are the working poor, the most vulnerable among us, the people who can least afford it, nine years into this costly coalition's refusal to back away on the carbon tax, despite all the evidence and all the harm that it is causing.
It is mind-boggling to think that those Canadians—the working poor, the vulnerable people—as Conservatives have warned for nine years, would be hurt the most. The facts today show exactly that—that the carbon tax hurts those people the most—because when you hike the cost of energy, you hike the cost of everything. You hike the cost of everything required to live in this country, including, at the top of the list, groceries. The costs at grocery stores are skyrocketing, and more Canadians than ever before have to visit food banks. Food banks are sounding the alarm this early into 2024, saying they anticipate that across the country a million more Canadians will be forced to go there to feed themselves, to feed their families and to help out their loved ones.
This is not acceptable in 2024 in Canada, but it is particularly immoral and short-sighted and unacceptable because the NDP-Liberal costly coalition have all the power in their hands to solve this problem. They caused the issue in the first place with their inflationary spending and by hiking taxes on nearly everything and plowing ahead with this carbon tax despite the warnings that Conservatives have given for nine years—all of which have turned out to be true—and despite the majority opposition of premiers representing seven out of 10 provinces across the country.
The Prime Minister and the NDP-Liberal costly coalition are ignoring all of those Canadians, ignoring the hurt and the harm and the pain they have caused, ignoring the stress and the anxiety and the unprecedented worry that Canadians of all ages in all areas of this country are experiencing because they can't afford the basics anymore.
I mean, that is truly immoral, isn't it? It's truly short-sighted and it's actually anti-democratic.
Once again, I hope that members around this committee will demonstrate right now that we all know and we all remember what we're here for, which is to represent the people who elected us, and the vast majority of Canadians who elected us say they can't afford the carbon tax. It is more blindingly obvious than ever that the carbon tax is not worth the cost.
Giving this immediate relief to Canadians is in the hands of the NDP-Liberal costly coalition. The NDP-Liberal costly coalition, after nine years of being the Government of Canada, wasn't some innocent bystander while all of this has happened, and the results are what they are today: more Canadians struggling in more communities across the country than ever before, young people losing hope that they can afford to buy homes or pursue their dreams, parents and grandparents telling their kids that they probably shouldn't try to make a go of life in rural Canada because they can't afford to do it any more, and more Canadians than ever before moving into multi-generational homes to try to get by and make ends meet.
Meanwhile, in turn, for these NDP Liberals who have been in power for nine years, and for the NDP, who prop them up now and act like they've been kind of hanging out while all of this has occurred in front of them, first, that's not true, and second, you have the power right now to stop this madness, to stop this insanity and to stop this cold-hearted, cruel April Fool's joke.
At least, at the very minimum, spike the hike for April 1 and, obviously, axe the tax for all for good.