Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to a Conservative motion that is not what it pretends to be, presented by a Conservative leader who is not who he says he is. What I mean by that is that this motion pretends to be an analysis of the causes of inflation in Canada, except that it only includes one factor, which is government spending and government deficits. Yes, there is a deficit. Yes, there has been government spending. Yes, some of that may have contributed in some ways to inflation. However, that is far from the whole story. Canada has had deficits at the federal level in periods when there has not been inflation, or at least not inflation of this significant type that we are living with today. It has been inflation within the target zone. The seven consecutive large deficits that the Harper Conservatives ran when they were in power did not coincide with the kind of significant inflation we have seen.
Obviously, there are other factors at work here. It is dishonest to pretend that only government deficit is what is driving inflation, or even that it is the major factor in what is driving inflation. There are supply chain constraints that arose through the pandemic, a reordering of purchasing, first towards goods and then back towards services. There are a number of strictly market forces that we could talk about. Chief among those is the role that corporate greed plays. It is a glaring deficiency of this motion, and not just this motion but also the Conservatives' analysis generally, that they do not talk at all about the role that corporate greed has been playing in fuelling inflation.
What do I mean by that? When we look at corporate profits, for instance, in the grocery sector, at the very same time that Canadians are struggling, and we are hearing more and more about Canadians having to choose between paying rent and paying for groceries, we have seen massive increases in the profit margins of Canada's largest grocery retailers. That is not a function of their simply passing on costs from the carbon tax, supply chains or whatever else to their consumers. If they were just passing on the cost, their profits would not be increasing. The fact of the matter is that the profit is going up because they are charging Canadians more than the additional costs they are facing right now. That is important to talk about.
When it comes to the Liberal government, corporate greed is just as much missing from their analysis of what is driving inflation as it is from the Conservatives', and they are doing just as little about it, which is certainly a frustration of ours in the New Democratic Party. The Liberal government called the big grocery retailers to Ottawa to give them a slap on the wrist, ask them to do better and ask them to not reduce but stabilize prices, which is to say, to consolidate the gains they have made by raising prices unfairly over the last number of years so Canadians have to continue to pay that going forward, rather than talking about ways to try to make food more affordable than it currently is.
We cannot look to the Conservatives for solutions on food prices, because they have nothing to say other than to reduce the carbon tax, as if those very same grocery retailers who have shown that they are quite happy to raise prices to eat up whatever extra disposable income Canadians get would not just turn around and do that very same thing. Conservatives are silent when it comes to corporate greed in the oil and gas sector, which has been driving inflation for Canadians. When we talk about the role that energy costs play in driving inflation, it is important to note that the price increases on energy far exceed the increase in the carbon tax. That is why, from 2019 to 2022, oil and gas companies in Canada saw an increase in profits of 1,000%. Where is the analysis from the Conservatives on what that does to grocery prices?
If oil and gas companies are going to gouge the farmer who grows the food, gouge the processor who makes the food and gouge the shipper who ships the food, Canadians are going to get gouged at the grocery store, notwithstanding anything that happens in this place or the level of tax. They are going to get gouged based simply on the outsized increases in oil and gas prices that oil and gas companies are using to pay larger dividends to their shareholders and bigger cheques to their CEOs.
We have to talk about that if we are going to get real about the challenges Canadians are facing. We have a Conservative Party that talks about very little else other than inflation and about the housing sector. Canadians are experiencing pain, but to pretend that somehow deficits derived from payments so kids can get their teeth fixed is causing inflation in the housing market is either stupid or dishonest. The fact of the matter is that there is a ton of private capital in the Canadian real estate market, domestic capital that is bidding against Canadians when they are trying to buy a family home, in order to turn that house into a long-term investment. That is a big part of the story of what is going on.
Conservatives talk about how we need lower taxes in spite of the fact that now, 1% of Canadians own 25% of the wealth in this country, while fully 40% of Canadians have to live sharing only 1% of the wealth being created in this country. The 1% that owns the 25% is a big part of the problem in the housing market. They have a lot of extra cash, which they did not get from government and which they are investing back into the housing market to buy up more housing and make more money off the backs of Canadians who are already strapped.
That is not to knock business. Small and medium-sized businesses are an important driver of economic growth in this country. They are important employers. They help make the world go around, and there is a lot of room for legitimate business. We know that a lot of small and medium-sized enterprises are actually struggling right now. They are not the ones that are the problem, so let us not conflate our criticism of big corporations and big capital with the small business owner who is providing services in their community and trying to break even in a very difficult time.
I heard earlier from a Conservative MP, “Well, don't go after the wage payer if you want to help the wage earner.” When we talk about the oil and gas industry, look at what happened the day after the Alberta election. A big oil and gas company laid off 1,500 workers, despite the fact that it is extracting more oil than ever and making more money than ever. The fact is that more and more employment in the oil and gas industry has been decoupled, through technological advances and other things that do help with productivity growth, from the employment of Canadians. That oil and gas company timed the announcement of those layoffs in order to help its political friends in the Conservative Party in Alberta, to spare them the embarrassment of bringing that fact to light during an election.
That is why this motion is not what it pretends to be. Furthermore, as I said earlier, it has been presented by a Conservative leader who is not who he pretends to be. He talks about the housing crisis. In fact, earlier in his speech on this very motion, he took credit, naming himself as the minister who was responsible for housing in the Harper government. This was the government that lost 800,000 affordable units during its tenure. It was the government that, when operating grants to create affordable rents were set to expire because they were tied to 40- or 50-year mortgages signed in the sixties, seventies and eighties in order to make rent more affordable, took the decision not to continue providing that operating grant money but to let it drop.
That is why we are seeing places like Lions Place on Portage Avenue in Winnipeg get sold off because, without the operating subsidies, they cannot continue to provide the deeply affordable units that they were providing. What happened there? A big corporate landlord swooped in. It is going to superficially renovate the building, kick out the existing tenants and start charging a lot more rent for the people who can afford to move in. I do not begrudge those folks the housing, because we know that no matter where one is in the housing spectrum, there is a need. We do not have enough supply of any of those kinds of housing.
I will not begrudge Canadians' taking the opportunity to find a home they can afford, but it is no excuse for a government that is not willing to do what it takes to make sure that those people who need those deeply affordable units have a place to go. That is where we need a federal government that is willing to take responsibility for that. I am sorry, but we have not seen that from the government. We are not building enough deeply affordable and affordable units in this country. We are simply not. If we leave it to the market, it will never get done. As a developer at the finance committee said yesterday, they are never going to build affordable housing. It is not their job. Their job is to build housing that they can make a buck on, and they are not going to make a buck if they undercharge on the rent.
We know that. That is why the federal government for decades made serious repeated, regular and predictable offerings in the social and affordable housing space for a generation. That is why, during that generation and for a little while after, we did not have the kind of housing crisis we currently have. The problem is that we have a government that is focused too much on simply effecting market solutions in the very market that let us down and that said it would not fix the problem.
If we look to the Conservatives, how are they different? They are not, because they too only offer solutions predicated upon the market. It is not that we do not also need market solutions, but if we focus too much and only on those market solutions, we are never going to get to where we need to be. We have a Conservative leader who wants to talk about housing and says that he has the answer, but who, just like the government, is overly focused on market mechanisms instead of the kind of non-market housing that we need and used to have in the past, in the period when Canada was not facing this kind of housing crisis.
He is not who he pretends to be. He says that he wants workers to have powerful paycheques. I agree; I want workers to have powerful paycheques. That is why when workers are on strike, I am out on the picket lines with them, supporting them to bargain for better wages, working conditions and health and safety standards in their workplace. I have never run into that guy on a picket line. I have never seen a picture of him on a picket line. I have never seen him support picketing workers with a tweet, a post or anything. What I have watched him do is vote with the Liberal government on back-to-work legislation to prematurely end strikes on terms that are favourable to the employer, so do not tell me that this guy has the backs of workers.
We watched as he sat at the cabinet table and raised the age of retirement from 65 to 67, denying Canadian seniors their old age supplement for a further two years. Why was that done? It was to keep them in the workforce. That is not having the backs of Canadian workers who have worked their whole life in order to be able to enjoy their retirement. Anyone who has had a member of their family fall ill with cancer in their sixties knows how precious those two years can be and what a difference it can make in their life and that of their family in benefiting from some of the things they worked hard to build during their life. Those two years are not nothing.
I have watched the Conservative leader bring three opposition day motions in the last five months. He has put them in his name. He has given the lead speeches for them. I watched a special debate about the allegations that the Government of India had killed a Canadian on Canadian soil as a result of his political beliefs and activity. I watched as just about the whole Conservative caucus, except for its House leader, was silent. I watched a very intense protest and counterprotest on the rights of children to be safe and to make some of their own judgments about what is safe or not in their home. I watched as the Conservative leader told his members not to go, not to speak and not to post.
This is the apparent champion of freedom of speech, but just not for his caucus, I guess. I watch as Conservative MPs rehash the same member's statement over and over again, clearly formulated out of the talking points of their leader, who says that he wants people to say what they will. I want to know why, if the Conservative leader does not trust Conservative MPs to speak for him, Canadians should trust Conservative MPs to speak for them in this place. I watched when the Conservative leader was a member of the Harper team that pioneered the electoral tactic of telling its candidates they were not allowed to go to local debates, speak their own mind and offer their own position. Perhaps he is worried that if they speak too much, they will reveal that he is not who he says he is.
I noticed earlier that the Conservative MP for Tobique—Mactaquac got up and said that he never supported a carbon tax. Maybe if he had read his platform in preparation for debate in the last election, he would have noticed there was a carbon price in that platform. Maybe the Conservative leader does not want his MPs talking too much in this place or elsewhere because they would expose the fact that what he is saying now is not what they have said in the past and is not what they will do in the future.
I heard the member say that we cannot support wage earners without supporting wage payers in respect of the oil and gas industry. As I said earlier, the wage payers in the oil and gas industry are making more money than they have ever made before and are laying off workers, so I really do not think that is an example we can take to heart.
This motion calls for a financial plan with a path back to a balanced budget, which is fair enough. I don't think that is a bad thing. Perhaps we will see something like that in the fall economic statement, but I will not hold my breath. We listen to this guy talk about the incompetence of the government, and there are some very compelling arguments on that front. We may not make all the same arguments, but we certainly have our own. Then he wants Canadians to believe it is plausible for them to come up with a plan to balance the budget in a week's time. Come on. It is not serious, and fundamentally, the Conservative leader is not serious.
This motion is not serious either, because it does not get to the bottom of what is driving inflation in Canada. It just singles out one thing that incidentally is to his electoral advantage to have people believe and leaves out all the ways he will help the corporate players that are driving inflation in Canadians' household budgets. He does not want Canadians thinking about that, because then they would know those problems will persist.
He likes to quote a former Liberal minister, John Manley, which is curious because we have seen him be very disparaging of anyone with any connection to the Liberal Party. I understand the impulse, but I find it passing strange that a long-time Conservative and strong public servant of this country, David Johnston, could have his character assassinated by the leader of the official opposition when he happened to not necessarily agree with everything the Conservative leader thought. Then he is willing to turn around and hold up a former Liberal minister, whose advice I never took very seriously but who is now suddenly an authority for the Conservative caucus.
It is the surest sign of despotic tendencies in a political leader when they are willing to disparage and engage in character assassination, even of their own folks who come out of their own political movement, for the simple cry of disagreeing with the leader and then hold up people they would otherwise criticize as authorities when they agree with them. To do that in a context where he has shown he is quite happy to silence his own people in order to make sure they do not expose some of the web he is weaving and the wool he is pulling over Canadians' eyes is another sure sign.
It is just like when it comes to the opportunity my private member's motion offers to Conservatives to curtail the powers of the Prime Minister to unilaterally prorogue this place and dissolve this chamber, providing more political accountability for that. One would think the Conservative leader would be interested in putting some meaningful constraints on the gatekeeping powers of the Prime Minister, but he is not. The Conservatives were first out of the gate to say they would not support that motion, and it is because this leader wants those powers for himself, not because he has an objection to the gatekeeping powers of the Prime Minister's Office.
Those are just some of the reasons the Conservative leader is not who he says he is, just as this motion is not what it says it is, and that is why the New Democrats will be voting against it.
