Madam Speaker, the member does not seem to care that the price of food has gone up for Canadians. He laughs when I bring up things about food banks. He simply cannot stand to hear the truth, and he wants to make it worse.
The member for Kingston and the Islands wants to vote to make gas prices higher. He wants to vote for less money in the pockets of Canadians. He can defend that, and I will defend cutting taxes and holding the line for Canadians.
If the member is not hearing from his constituents about affordability, that means he is not listening, which would put him in good company with the Liberal government. All of us on this side of the House are getting messages. A message I received said the following:
Budgets were tight and money was short before, and now with rental prices almost doubling, gas higher than we've ever seen, and grocery prices increasing, it is getting impossible to afford the bare necessities.
Having a child, I'm not left with many options. I already have a second job, living in my car is not an option and moving back with parents also would not work so I'm not sure what else I can do. Will there be any solutions? I know I'm not the only one struggling.
For this constituent, the solution is not to have more money taken off her paycheque. The solution is not to have more money taken away from her when she has to fill up her car to take her son to school. She said she had to drop out of university because the affordability is so bad under the government.
Another constituent wrote:
My husband and I work full time [at] great paying jobs and we are still struggling. [We] can hardly afford groceries because the costs are rising in B.C. The fact that families cannot even purchase groceries without repercussions is astonishing to me. We are dual income...and we struggle. We don't spend on anything but the bare minimum necessities and even then sometimes we try to do without.
People are struggling and the government is threatening to make things worse. It is set to raise taxes on paycheques on January 1. This motion calls for it to stop that. It is set to raise prices on gas, groceries and home heating in April. We are calling on the government to stop those tax hikes.
We will be voting to protect the interests of Canadian workers and Canadian families, and to leave more money in their pockets, because they know how to spend it better than the wasteful Liberal government.