Natural Resources Committee on March 18th, 2024

[An hon. member]

No.

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Clerk, please call the roll.

(Amendment negatived: nays 6; yeas 5)

(Clause 111 agreed to)

There are no amendments submitted for clauses 112 to 114. Do we have unanimous consent to group them together?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

(Clauses 112 to 114 inclusive agreed to)

We have new clause 114.1 and we will proceed to BQ-19.

Monsieur Simard, would you like to move BQ-19?

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Mr. Chair, given that the changes in BQ‑19 to BQ‑26 were not retained in the first part of the bill, I assume they will not be retained in the second part of the bill either.

As a result, I will not be moving these amendments.

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Thank you, Mr. Simard.

We'll now proceed to—

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Chair—

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Go ahead, Mr. Patzer.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Which numbers are they again?

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Mr. Patzer and colleagues, Monsieur Simard has said that he is not going to be moving BQ-19 to BQ-26. We'll now go to clause 115.

(Clause 115 agreed to)

(Clause 116 agreed to)

We'll now go to clause 117.

Shall clause 117 carry?

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Just as a point of order, Chair, are we able to propose any grouping now that there are no amendments to a number of these?

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Okay.

Shall clauses 117 to 122 carry?

Please call the roll.

(Clauses 117 to 122 inclusive agreed to: yeas 10; nays 1)

We will now proceed to clause 123.

Shall clause 123 carry?

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Why did we stop it there?

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

We can group clauses 123 and 124. Do we have consent to do that?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Shall clauses 123 and 124 carry?

Please call the roll.

(Clauses 123 and 124 agreed to: yeas 10; nays 1)

(On clause 125)

I will now proceed to clause 125. Do we have a mover for CPC-10?

Ms. Stubbs, go ahead—or Mr. Falk, did you want to move it?

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

I think he just told you that he was speaking next.

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Go ahead.

[Shannon Stubbs, Conservative, Lakeland, AB]

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.

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Well said.

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Thank you, Ms. Stubbs.

We'll go to our speaking order.

I'll go to you next, Mr. Falk.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank my colleague Ms. Stubbs for providing this opportunity to this committee. We have a unique opportunity today, and that's to send the House of Commons the message from this committee, as a natural resource committee, that they need to end the increases to the carbon tax—and better yet would be to axe the tax completely.

As a committee, we have that opportunity here today. The Liberals and the NDP refuse to even debate it. They always move to adjourn debate as soon as they get the floor, and I think it's reprehensible: to not even willingly debate this issue that's costing every single Canadian thousands of dollars every year.

I want to talk a bit about exactly what this motion does.

It asks the House to stop the proposed increase to the carbon tax on April 1, when an additional 23% hike to the existing carbon tax will take place. We know the carbon tax has already crippled many households. A 23% increase to that tax is going to push them over the edge.

I don't think people fully understand the carbon tax when they hear the words “carbon tax”, thinking that it's just like the GST or it's like the HST or the PST. No. The carbon tax is very different. The HST, the PST and the GST are all end-user taxes. The carbon tax is a compounding tax. It's taxed on everything from the point of origin until it hits the consumer, and it's tax on tax on tax.

In the case of food—and this applies to whole goods as well—the producer pays the carbon tax. The transport company pays the carbon tax to get it to the processing facility. The processing facility pays carbon tax on the energy they use to process the product. Then the transport company again pays carbon tax on top of that to get it to a distribution centre. The distribution centre, whether it's a cooling or heating facility, pays carbon tax on what it does. Then, again, a transport company picks up the product and takes it to the retailer, and again pays the carbon tax. The retailer gets it, and he pays the carbon tax on his energy costs.

At every step along the way, for everything that consumers purchase, the carbon tax is compounded, Mr. Chair. That's important to note, because it's not a one-time GST. For that, all along the process there are input tax credits; this is a compounding tax. Canadians are wondering why everything costs so much, and it's because of this compounding tax. It's not a single end-user tax like the PST, GST or HST; it's a compounding tax, right from the grassroots to the end user.

People think, “Well, why is there such inflation?” That's because everything costs more. That's because this Liberal-NDP coalition has broken everything and then they've whacked every Canadian with this carbon tax.

Let me tell you what the Canada Gazette said about the clean fuel regulations and how they would apply to everyday Canadians—and the carbon tax is exponentially worse than the clean fuel regulations—but let me tell you what the Canada Gazette says:

...according to Statistics Canada, single mothers are more likely to live in lower-income households, and may be more vulnerable to energy poverty and adverse impacts from increases to transportation and home heating prices.

Seniors living on fixed incomes may also face higher transportation and heating costs resulting from the proposed Regulations. This may be the most acute for seniors living in the Atlantic provinces, where they account for a higher share of the total population compared to other Canadian provinces and are also more likely to experience some of the highest energy expenditures in Canada proportional to income.... It is possible that there could be other socio-economic groups that may have disproportionately lower income, may be at an increased vulnerability to energy poverty, or may be adversely affected by the proposed Regulations. However, these groups may not be fully captured in this analysis due to [the] lack of [available] data...scarcity of research, or under-representation...[available in other] studies.

That's what the Canada Gazette printed in response to the clean fuel regulations, and the carbon tax exacerbates that. We know that lower-income households, seniors and single moms trying to get by are exponentially impacted by the carbon tax. We know that it hits them the hardest. They are disproportionately affected by a carbon tax increase, unlike middle- and upper-class Canadians or higher-income Canadians. We know that. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. The carbon tax disproportionately affects low-income families.

It's interesting, because on my ride from the airport yesterday to the centre of Ottawa, my taxi driver said that in the last two weeks he's taken two families back to the airport that were moving away from Canada. They came here as immigrants in the last 10 years but decided to go back to their respective countries—one being in Africa and one in the Middle East—because they couldn't afford to live here.

Mr. Speaker, Canada used to be the country of promise. This used to be a place where people had hope, where people could afford to live, and that's no longer the case. Now this Liberal-NDP coalition wants to whack Canadians, and whack low-income people the hardest, with another 23% increase to this carbon tax.

Colleagues, today we have an opportunity to send the House of Commons a clear message that as the natural resources committee, we're asking the government to stop the proposed increase to the carbon tax, to spike the hike, to axe the tax. I'm asking, colleagues, that you support my colleague Mrs. Stubbs in her motion.

We have a unique opportunity. Let's exercise it.

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Thank you, Mr. Falk.

We'll now go to Mr. Aldag.

[John Aldag, Liberal, Cloverdale—Langley City, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Falk said it himself. He used the term “reprehensible”, so let's talk about reprehensible.

I want to indicate once again that the Conservatives' only climate plan is to let the planet burn. B.C. is already breaking temperature records in March. Communities are already working to impose restrictions on water and the use of water because of low snowpacks. Climate change is real. It's upon us, and the Conservatives have absolutely no plan. That's just been identified and called out by the B.C. premier, who indicated that Poilievre's campaign office and baloney factory request about cancelling the tax and spiking the hike....

I can't even keep up with the bumper-sticker slogans that they're coming up with for these false solutions to absolutely existential problems facing our planet.

With those as my comments, I now move to adjourn debate.

[The Chair, Liberal, George Chahal]

Thank you, Mr. Aldag.

We have a motion to adjourn debate.

(Motion agreed to: yeas 7; nays 4)

Debate is adjourned.

We'll now proceed back to where we were. We were on CPC-10.

I believe, Mrs. Stubbs, that you were moving CPC-10.