moved:
That, in the opinion of the House, given that the government's tax increases on gas, home heating and, indirectly, groceries, will fuel inflation, and that the Parliamentary Budget Officer reported the carbon tax costs 60% of households more than they get back, the government must eliminate its plan to triple the carbon tax.
Mr. Speaker, today we are debating the government's decision to break its electoral promise by tripling the carbon tax on gas, home heating, groceries and all other essential items Canadians need to survive.
We have to recognize that this is a tax increase that will apply everywhere in Canada and will increase the prices in every province, even in the provinces where there is no refund from the federal government.
This tax hike comes at a time when inflation is at a 40-year high and nine out of 10 young people who do not already own a home do not think they ever will. It comes at a time when students are living in shelters because they cannot afford rent. It comes at a time when four out of five Canadians have to cut back on food because they cannot afford groceries. It comes at a time when Canadians cannot even fill up their car or truck to go to work. This is exactly the wrong time to raise taxes on paycheques, gas and other things.
Let us start by talking about fried green tomatoes. The little miracles of Manotick, SunTech tomatoes are from a beautiful little tomato farm about 40 minutes south of here, in the heart of the great Carleton riding, where some entrepreneurial farmers opened a greenhouse to sell beautiful local produce to residents in the area. They are delicious and they are legendary right across the region.
Unfortunately, the farmers learned that the carbon tax from the government would apply to the CO2 they release into the greenhouse. Now, of course, CO2 is required to expand growth and increase the produce that comes out of the greenhouse. This CO2 does not even go into the atmosphere; it goes into the plant life, something the Liberals may have missed in grade 4 science class. The reality is that it makes the tomatoes more expensive.
What is the consequence of the tax on these tomatoes? Well, it is, at times, more expensive to buy a Manotick tomato in Manotick than a Mexican tomato in Manotick. Why? It is because the taxes are lower in Mexico, even though the pollution is higher. What does this price signal do? It tells the customer to buy a tomato from the other side of North America, which has to be trained and trucked all the way up to Canada, burning fossil fuels the whole way there and increasing emissions along the way.
What happened to the local 100-mile diet that environmentalists used to promote? Well, this tax makes that diet more difficult and less affordable, the big logical fallacy of the Liberal carbon tax. It drives up the cost of domestic production and drives that production to foreign, more polluting jurisdictions that then require higher transportation costs and more emissions to bring products back to Canadian consumers here at home.
Our approach should be exactly the opposite. We should bring production home and have our food, our energy and our resources right here in Canada.
Let us look at the three falsehoods of the Liberal carbon tax.
The Liberals said it would help us meet our targets for emissions reduction. They have now been in power for seven years and have not hit a single solitary emissions reduction target. In fact, even in the year 2020, when large parts of our economy and our population were locked down and unable to even drive, they came nowhere close to reaching their targets. Let me tell the House how far they missed them. They missed them by 57 megatonnes. That is equivalent to all of the emissions of the four Atlantic provinces or equivalent to our entire electricity sector.
In other words, if we had turned off all of the electricity in Canada in that year, in addition to having been locked down during COVID, then we would have still fallen just short of meeting the targets the Liberals set for themselves. In order words, the carbon tax did not hit those targets. It did not come anywhere close and, in fact, we expect the emissions will again start rising now that the lockdowns are fortunately behind us. That is the first falsehood.
If the Liberals were really serious about reducing emissions, they had many options. They could have signalled their support for small modular nuclear reactors so that we could use our prodigious know-how to supply Canadians with emissions-free nuclear energy. We have the biggest supply of uranium as feedstock right in Saskatchewan and the best nuclear engineers right here in Ontario. We have a need for this electricity in provinces nationwide. We have provinces that have signed on to memoranda of understanding to replace high-emitting sources of electricity with small modular nuclear reactors, but of course our Minister of the Environment has said that he does not even agree with nuclear. I do not know where he expects electricity to come from, but certainly nobody is going to invest in creating these modular reactors if the Minister of the Environment himself is against them.
The Liberals could have backed up carbon capture and storage, of which the Canadian energy industry is leading in the world. It is the industry putting carbon back in the ground where it came from, the carbon trunk, which allows that carbon to go back to geological formations where it can be safely stored. The government was slow to support it and insufficient in that support.
The Liberals could have incentivized industry to further reduce emissions. They could have also used Canada's clean energy production to displace dirty foreign production. We have 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas right here in Canada. With the hydroelectricity in Quebec, Newfoundland and British Columbia, we can liquefy that natural gas without any emissions at all. In fact, we have the shortest shipping distances from North America to both Asia and Europe, allowing us to reduce the cost and the emissions necessary to get that energy to those markets. That clean Canadian natural gas could displace dirty coal-fired electricity around the world.
Liberals might want to dispute this today, but that was their contention not long ago. The Prime Minister showed up for a photo op to take credit for the previous Conservative government's approval of the LNG Canada project in northern British Columbia. He said at the time, “We know LNG produces...half the amount of carbon emissions as coal.” He then said that this project would have the effect of reducing global emissions by displacing dirtier sources of electricity in Asia. This is the quote: “So by sending Canadian LNG to markets that are today powered by coal, we will help those jurisdictions transition away from this energy source.”
According to Rob Seeley, president of E3Merge Consulting, “for every unit of GHGs that British Columbia produces to get that LNG to market, the overseas production of GHGs goes down by a factor of 10.” In other words, by replacing foreign coal-fired with our Canadian energy, we can reduce emissions.
Further, this same expert said:
Shipping LNG at design capacity from Kitimat to displace coal-generated electricity in China would reduce global GHG emissions by 60 to 90 million tonnes annually, equivalent to the annual production of GHGs in all of B.C....
Would that not be something? What an achievement that would be.
By the way, 60 million to 90 million tonnes of greenhouse gases is exactly what the Liberals promised the carbon tax would eliminate. It did not happen, but this project would have allowed it to. However, projects like this are not able to go ahead because of government gatekeepers standing in the way.
When this Prime Minister took office, there were 15 LNG proposals on the table. Not a single one has been completed, seven years later. Imagine the emissions we could have reduced and the paycheques we could have grown if we had gotten out of the way and allowed these projects to proceed.
We could export more of our civilian-grade uranium, so that foreign jurisdictions could shut down dirty coal and replace it with clean Canadian energy. We could support Quebec and Manitoba as they attempt to export and get better revenues for their hydroelectricity. There are countless ways we can combat the emissions of our country and the world without taxing and punishing our citizens, and if the Liberals had done that, maybe they would not have missed every single target they have set.
The second promise the Liberals made is that the carbon tax would make everyone better off. Everyone would pay this tax, but there would be a cheque in the mail that would compensate them for it. It sounds like one of those scam emails that I get that say, if I just give them my bank card information, they will make a big deposit and I will be rich, and it is always from an uncle on the other side of the world somewhere. It turns out that the cheque bounced.
According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and I am looking at the numbers right here on the table he set out, the net cost to Albertans of this carbon tax when it is fully implemented will be $2,282 per household. In Saskatchewan it will be $1,464 per household, and in Manitoba, it will be $1,145 per household. In Ontario it will be $1,461. That is in net costs, so it is with the rebates the government has promised.
That is, by the way, the least of the problem. For the six provinces that do not get any rebate, they will be far worse off. We must remember that the carbon tax may be provincially administered in British Columbia, Quebec and some other regions of the country. However, it is federally imposed, so even if provinces have their own regimes, they will have to triple their carbon tax in order to meet the mandate the federal government has put in place, and they will get no rebate at all. Those provinces will be vastly worse off than the cases I just mentioned.
This, at a time when Canadians cannot pay for their groceries, cannot gas their vehicles and are fearing the cost that winter will hit them with in just a few short months. This is exactly the last time we need to raise a tax. Think about it. The Liberals are proposing to bring in a 40¢-a-litre tax on gasoline. How many of the single mothers, of the working farmers, of the welders or of the waitresses can afford to pay another 40¢ a litre in gas taxes. Every party in this House, except the Conservatives, want to hit those working people with those higher taxes. We will stand in the way. We will fight back. We will defend consumers against this tax.
The final falsehood is that the Liberals said this carbon tax would never go above $50 a tonne. That was it. They said at $50 a tonne they would be done. That was before the election. After the election they said the tax would have to be tripled. They said it was so ineffective that they needed to make it three times the size in order to do the job, and that is just what we know about. If they are going to triple the tax after just one broken election promise, we can imagine if they were, God forbid, given another mandate. What surprise would we hear the next day after the election? How high would the tax have to go, a dollar a litre in new taxes or tripling home heating bills?
What other costs would the Liberals surprise Canadians with if they got the chance? They have broken their promise on this. They have broken their promise on income taxes, which they said would go down. They have broken their promise on countless other taxes, and we can expect that they will only break more promises, because they need to raise taxes in order to feed their insatiable appetite for spending.
Canadians will not let them. Conservatives will run on a low-tax agenda in the next election, and we will win and deliver that low-tax agenda.
We forget sometimes that it is our small businesses that will be asked to bear a disproportionate burden. They get no rebate at all. Unlike large industrial corporations that get a complete exemption from the carbon tax, small businesses have to pay it on the cost of heating their restaurants, firing up their stoves in order to feed their patrons, transporting their goods and running their factories.
All of them have to pay those taxes, because they are not big enough to get the exemption that the large industrial corporations have received. Therefore, we can expect more small businesses to make up the difference by having to raise prices on consumers or lower wages on their workers, all making Canadians worse off at a time when they can least afford it.
Small and medium-sized businesses do not get an exemption. The tax will cost them more, three times more if the Liberals stay in power thanks to their coalition partners, the New Democrats. That is why we are going to keep standing up for our small and medium-sized businesses, which are creating jobs and providing goods and services to consumers. The Conservatives will always stand up for small and medium-sized businesses by cancelling this tax increase.
Of course, this tax comes on top of other taxes. The Liberals propose to raise taxes on paycheques. Starting January 1, they will raise EI and CPP payroll taxes, even though they have enough funds at the current rates to fund both of those programs, including with the regular increased benefits that can be expected. They want to jeopardize the paycheques of Canadians to raise taxes and run big surpluses in the EI account, which they then will use to fund overall government spending rather than to provide workers with protection against unemployment. Conservatives believe that EI should not be a cash cow for government. It should be a protection for our workers, and we will not support any increase in the EI payroll tax.
Our theory, our principle, is that a dollar left in the hands of the person who earned it is always better than in the hands of the politician who taxed it. We want this to be once again a country where hard work pays off, where the person who puts in that extra hour, takes that extra shift or earns that extra bonus keeps that money to give their kids a summer a camp or to give their family an opportunity for a small camping trip or, God forbid, to upsize their house or move from an apartment into a place of their own. This should be a country of opportunity, of boundless possibility, for anyone who is prepared to put in the work.
It is appalling to me that a single mom of three earning $55,000 a year who goes out and earns another dollar loses 80¢ in government clawbacks and taxes. That is according to a study by this very finance department of the current government. We are punishing the people who do the work of this nation.
Our workers deserve rewards for their work. Our small business owners who take risks and mortgage their homes to survive and to supply our communities with services and our people with jobs deserve to keep the fruits of their labour. That is why Conservatives will always stand on the side of the people who work hard, who pay their taxes and who play by the rules. We will put Canadians back in control of their money, their lives, right here in Canada, the freest nation on earth.
