Debates of Oct. 3rd, 2023

Affordable Housing and Groceries Act

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Madam Speaker, the Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers has stressed that restrictive covenants in lease or purchase agreements, a form of vertical restraint that is not currently reviewable as a competitor collaboration under the Competition Act, have a serious impact on the food supply for a significant number of Canadian communities. The International Center for Law & Economics also agreed that collaborations between any two actors have the possibility of harming competition, and that the Competition Act should not be limited arbitrarily in the sorts of agreements that it can review.

In conclusion, the consultation process revealed many significant areas of concern for our Competition Act, informed by each stakeholder's unique perspective and valuable insight into the Canadian economy. The proposals that the government has chosen to advance were chosen to carefully target the most critical issues impacting affordability for Canadians in the near term and were informed by the inputs of a variety of actors.

These three reforms represent much-needed updates to the Competition Act. They allow the Competition Bureau to better serve its mandate and will help make Canada a better place to live and do business. I hope all members will join me in supporting this bill's speedy passage.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my neighbour from Whitby for taking an interest in this very important legislation and debate today.

We were together in Oshawa on the weekend, and I know that he has a strong interest in my community. I received an email today from Christine, which says that she, her fiancé and their two children have been homeless for about five months with nowhere really to go. Her fiancé is on sick leave. She has called every shelter around, from Oshawa to Toronto, Kitchener and back, and from Ajax, Whitby, Bowmanville and Courtice, all the way to Cobourg. Everything is full. Even Cornerstone has a three-month waiting list. Children's Aid is giving them a hotel for a couple of days.

People are hurting, and things are very urgent. I was wondering if my colleague for Whitby could tell us in the House what the act before us would do to provide affordable housing for people in Durham region before the winter.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Madam Speaker, it was good to see my hon. colleague out in Oshawa this weekend as well. We share an interest in fighting homelessness and solving the affordable housing challenges that Canadians find themselves in.

Our government, unlike previous Conservative governments, has made a historic investment, through the national housing strategy, of $82 billion, which has repaired units, built new units and lifted many people out of homelessness across Canada. That is work that is still under way. There is still money rolling out for those investments through the rapid housing initiative, and we have since added measures on.

Bill C-56 would add a new measure, and would be to lift GST for rental construction, which is itself anticipated to help create or unlock 200,000 to 300,000 more units of affordable housing for Canadians.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech. I was glad I could provide at least some sort of an audience.

I want to go back to the question that my colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé asked another colleague earlier.

Instead of introducing measures that are little more than publicity stunts, that may have some short-term effect but that do nothing to provide a modicum of predictability to address future labour shortages, would it not be better to force the government to dedicate 1% of its budget to building affordable and social housing? That would be a long-term solution to prevent future crises. It would be the responsible thing to do.

What does my colleague think about that suggestion?

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member opposite for helping me find an audience for my speech.

I do not think that these are token measures, and adding 200,000 to 300,000 units of affordable housing or rental construction units is not a small feat. It is a significant amount, and we can couple that with the $82 billion in the national housing strategy and the housing accelerator fund dollars, which are speeding up the process for municipalities to help lead the way on building more affordable housing. I think that these things are, in total, going to help create a more comprehensive approach to solving the housing affordability issues that we have.

There is much more opportunity and additional measures to consider, and I hope to undertake those conversations and listen to the ideas of my colleagues across the way.

[Bonita Zarrillo, NDP, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Madam Speaker, the member spoke quite a bit about the Competition Act and some of the new amendments, which are welcomed, but I want to talk about what is already existing there in relation to grocery prices.

We know that Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart merged about 10 years ago, but there has not been a review of that merger, which is an opportunity that exists in the Competition Act. The Competition Bureau could certainly move forward immediately and review if that merger has been beneficial to Canadian consumers. Does the member support that initiative?

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Madam Speaker, I support the fact that the Competition Bureau's powers needed to be amended and strengthened so that it can undertake market studies and look at mergers that may not be in the best interest of Canadians or in the best interest of a competitive marketplace, which is specifically what Bill C-56 aims to do.

It is outlined in the work that we did when I was on the agriculture and agri-food committee. The Competition Bureau clearly cited in its recent report on grocery price inflation just how limited some of its powers were and how much that inhibited its ability to come to conclusions. I think these powers are a great addition.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise to speak to the Liberal government's Bill C- 56, an act to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Competition Act.

This is yet another half-baked, half-measure bill from the Prime Minister to solve an affordability crisis that he, himself, and his government have created. After eight years of inflationary taxes and out-of-control spending, Canadians have now found that they cannot afford the Liberal government. They cannot afford housing. They cannot afford fuel, and they certainly cannot afford food.

What makes this bill that much more frustrating is that the Liberals are adding more bureaucracy to try to solve a problem that they created, when there is actually a very quick measure they could enact today that would reduce costs for Canadians significantly, and that would be by eliminating the inflationary carbon tax 1 and carbon tax 2. These two carbon taxes and the inflationary aspect of them are making life unaffordable for Canadians.

Today, we saw in a report by the Financial Post that their new initiative, the Canadian sustainability standards board, is actually going to exacerbate those costs on Canadians, especially when it comes to food costs. It is going to add additional bureaucracy to every industry and every commodity, asking them to identify the impact of carbon on every link in the supply chain. This is going to add so much red tape and bureaucracy, and and an onus on every industry, manufacturing every product and growing every commodity, that it is going to make life that much more unaffordable.

The interesting thing is that the Liberals are implementing or imposing these punishing carbon taxes on, for example, agriculture, which is one of the industries that we are a leader in. We are world class in sustainability, in our emissions and in our ability to grow food with the lowest emissions in the world.

The data in painfully clear on the impact the Liberals' carbon tax 1 and 2 is having on Canadian farm families. According to the Canada food price index, a 5,000-acre farm would be paying $150,000 in carbon taxes every single year. There is not a farmer I know that could absorb those types of costs and still remain economically viable.

That is the question the Liberals always seem to forget. They talk about sustainability. I think they get a quarter every time they say it. However, they never talk about economic viability. When these new regulations and taxes are imposed on industry, agriculture or energy, it is impacting their ability to remain economically viable.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer just published a new report confirming the correlation between inflation in Canada and the suffocating carbon tax on our farmers. Diesel will go up 70¢ a litre. In many provinces, gas has already exceeded two dollars a litre.

When I was in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, in the GVA meeting with some farmers, it was $2.08 a litre for gas. It is unbelievable that the government is now expecting Canadians to absorb that and still be able to put food on the table and pay their mortgages. This year alone, the carbon tax collected from farmers, just from on-farm propane and natural gas, was $50 million.

I find it interesting that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change said in his speech on Thursday that he did not know why we were so excited, that the carbon tax does not impact farming. The statistics from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the Canada food price index and just about every commodity group in the country say otherwise.

This is why we have brought forward Bill C-234, which would exempt the carbon tax from natural gas and propane because they are still paying the carbon tax on those two fossil fuels, and that is because there is no alternative. They need these fuels to heat and cool their barns, dry their grain and power their irrigation equipment. This is not something the Conservatives are tossing around, these are indeed the facts.

Those who think those numbers are bad can hold my jerry can. The newest Parliamentary Budget Officer's report on the impact of the carbon tax on farming said that between this year and the year 2030, agriculture will be paying $1 billion in carbon taxes alone.

The Liberals are saying that these costs on farmers, which they do not even believe exist, while the Parliamentary Budget Officer confirms they do exist, are not impacting the price of food and not the reason we are seeing these high costs at the grocery store shelves.

I do not know anyone, other than maybe those in the Liberal-NDP coalition, who thinks that adding taxes will somehow reduce prices. However, that is exactly what they are saying. As part of this discussion, the Prime Minister has threatened the CEOs of the major grocery chains in Canada, saying that, if they do not stabilize grocery prices by Thanksgiving, there will be tax consequences. He is threatening to increase taxes on the grocery store CEOs and the major chains in Canada.

Is there an issue with competition in Canada? Yes, I would agree with that. We need to do things to improve competition in Canada, which always brings down prices. However, do the government members honestly think and truly believe that if they increase taxes on Sobeys, Loblaws, Costco and Walmart, the companies are just going to absorb those additional costs? There is no scenario where an industry just says, “The government is right; we are going to pay more taxes, and thanks very much.” Of course they are not. They are going to pass them on to the consumers, and that is going to drive up costs even more.

I want to emphasize the real-life consequences these taxes are having on those whom we are relying on to grow the food that we use to feed our families; these growers certainly play a key role in Canada's ability to help feed the world. A fruit and vegetable grower in my riding showed me their power bills for the last few months. They were paying $5,000 a month in carbon taxes alone, plus $800 of GST on top of that carbon tax; it is a tax on a tax. The grower has now decided to close their market in the winter months because they simply cannot afford to stay open. That is fresh fruit and vegetables at a nearby farmers' market and grower, which my rural constituents were able to go to without having to drive into the city. That is now going to be closed, forcing constituents to drive even further. It makes a lot of sense if climate change and reducing emissions is their goal.

A farmer in southern Alberta told me he paid $140,000 in carbon taxes last year, meaning that he could not invest that money in new equipment, which would have been more energy efficient and more fuel efficient. More frustrating for this grower is that he was hoping to have that money to put aside for his daughter, who wants to take over the family farm. She would have been the fifth generation to take over that farm. Now, instead of having that money to invest in his operation, improve efficiency, reduce emissions and help the next generation, where has that gone? It has gone to the Liberal government into general revenue. In fact, again, if reducing emissions and addressing climate change is their ultimate goal, this is doing the exact opposite.

There is another interesting thing. The Liberals want to increase taxes on the grocery CEOs; however, many of the grocery stores in Canada are actually owned by local franchisees. I went to visit the operator at one of the larger Sobeys operations in my riding, to see how things were going. His energy bill has gone up $6,000 a month as a result of the carbon tax. He is trying to absorb those costs, because he is a local business owner. However, he says that, eventually, he is going to have to pass this on to the consumers; otherwise, it is going to have an impact on what he can pay his employees or what he can contribute to local community initiatives, service clubs, sports teams, youth organizations and all those things that business owners try to help support.

The Liberals think that these costs are just magically absorbed by those farmers and small business owners, but they are not; of course, these costs are passed on to the consumer. That is why we see apples up 61%, carrots up 72%, and oranges and potatoes up 76%, just in time for Thanksgiving. The Liberals need to realize that when they increase the tax on the farmer, trucker, manufacturer and retailer, those costs are passed directly on to the consumer. Canadians are paying the price for that.

We are seeing that with millions of Canadians. Seven million Canadians went to a food bank last year. In Alberta, food bank use is up 70%. The food bank in Calgary is supporting 700 families every single day. These are numbers that I know the operators of food banks across the country have never seen before.

In conclusion, if the Liberals really cared about grocery prices and family farms, they could do something right now: They could eliminate their carbon taxes and certainly their plans to quadruple the carbon tax. That, not more red tape and bureaucracy, would make food more affordable for Canadians.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Innovation]

Madam Speaker, the member opposite and I served on the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, so he knows we have some disagreements on this.

The Bank of Canada Governor recently said that carbon pricing contributed 0.15% to inflation. That is equivalent to about 15¢ on a $100 grocery bill. The European Central Bank has estimated that climate change contributes as much as 3% to the cost of food per year globally, which is three dollars on a $100 grocery bill. This means that climate change has 20 times the influence that the carbon price has on food prices.

If the member opposite really wants to fight inflation and is serious about it, then why does his party not have a plan to fight climate change?

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Madam Speaker, the Liberals have had a carbon tax in place for many years, and yet I do not see grocery store prices going down. I do not see life becoming more affordable for farmers.

When I talk to farmers, their number one issue is not climate change. Their number one issue is Liberal government bureaucracy, red tape and carbon tax. It is the biggest stress in their lives.

Farmers in Canada do everything they possibly can to reduce their emissions. That is the thing the Liberals miss. They continue to punish Canadian farmers instead of rewarding them for what they already do. Instead of comparing them to Europe and asking Canadian farmers to get to where Europe is, they are thinking about this backward. What they should do is say they will help get Europe to where we are, with precision agriculture, zero till and 4R nutrient stewardship. Those are the things Canadian farmers are doing, and Liberals had better start recognizing that.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Madam Speaker, when debating access to housing, there is one concern that is not mentioned nearly enough: access to affordable housing, community housing and even co-operative housing—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Order. I hear conversations going on. I do not know who was speaking, but it was certainly not just the member asking the question.

The hon. member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue can start his question over.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Madam Speaker, I was saying that when debating access to housing, the thing we do not talk enough about, in my opinion, is access to affordable housing, especially community housing or even co-operative housing.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague the following question: What could the federal government do to improve access to these types of housing? Could a new law be brought in? What can we do to get more people into affordable housing?

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Madam Speaker, as a matter of fact, the first townhouse my wife and I had after we were married was in co-op housing in High River, Alberta. We certainly could not have afforded to start our family if we did not have that option.

Our leader, the hon. member for Carleton, has put forward a plan that will make housing more affordable in Canada, and that is to access 15% of federal buildings that are not being used. These could either be sold to the private sector or developed through a government program. Certainly, the plan would encourage the development of high-density, affordable housing around mass transit.

Those ideas are there, and we certainly hope to have the support of all parties in the House for the bill the leader of the Conservative Party has put forward.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Madam Speaker, I would like to follow up on the question that was just asked by my colleague from the Bloc.

We had the UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery in Canada, and he spoke specifically about the commodification of housing, where investments concentrate on private housing for wealthy individuals, but similar investments for social housing are non-existent.

The member talked about living in a co-op. Obviously, the New Democratic Party has been calling for co-ops and much more investment in social housing and below-market housing. However, we are not hearing the same thing from the Conservative Party. Would the member support significant investments not only in rental properties but also in below-market housing, in below-market rental properties?

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Madam Speaker, we have voiced our support all along. We know that there should be a variety of different options when it comes to housing. However, we cannot impose these things on municipalities, where they are not putting forward land designation and programs in place to do these things.

In fact, there is a town in my riding that has applied to many programs the Liberal government has put forward, but those municipalities that are doing things right do not qualify for those types of programs. These programs are there for the laggards. Therefore, we also need programs in place for those municipalities that have been doing it right and developing programs such as co-op housing.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am very proud to rise and speak to Bill C-56, technically an act to amend the Excise Tax Act and the Competition Act.

We need to frame the situation that Canada is in right now as a time when the chickens have really come home to roost after years of economic policies of the Conservatives and the Liberals. They told us that our cities would be better off if we let the market and global capital decide the value of our neighbourhoods and gave up the security that we had with union jobs and defined pension plans, if we turned our nation over to the Morneau Shepells of the world to decide what kinds of benefits we should have after a lifetime of working. We see the results.

When I go into stores in my region, people in their seventies, who used to be retired, are now working at places such as Tim Hortons, because they cannot afford to retire. I see the results when talking to men in my region who are 68 or 69 years old, who went back to work underground on the drills because they could not pay their housing costs. Working on the drills is hard for a young man, but 70-year-olds are going back underground because they cannot afford to pay these costs.

Another man I knew said he had to go back underground at 70 because he could not pay for his wife's medicine. We have a government that has talked about pharmacare since my hair was dark and long before that, and yet it still has not delivered. Of course, the Conservatives do not believe in pharmacare, just as they do not believe in the public programs that we and our parents built up over generations, which have been stripped away steadily under the belief in the free market, that we had free market in labour so that people were on precarious gig work. That was Bill Morneau. Members will remember when he told a young generation to get used to it; this would be their new normal. Of course, COVID blew all that away. Young people are saying that this is not going to be their normal, and they have started walking away from these jobs.

We see the situation where people cannot afford to buy their groceries because of the relentless price gouging of the likes of Galen Weston. We will never hear the Conservatives stand up to a CEO. For example, the other day, they were telling us that the price of potatoes in Calgary had gone up 70% because of the carbon tax. Calgary does not get its potatoes from P.E.I. It gets them from Idaho, which does not pay a carbon tax. In Idaho, the reason the price of potatoes went up is because of the climate crisis that is ongoing in the west. This is something the Conservatives will never admit, even in a year where we have lost 14 million hectares of forest lands and where over 200,000 people were forced to be evacuated in Canada, with billions in costs. That is what we get from the Conservatives.

The Liberals talk about it, but emissions continue to go up. The Liberals say they are going to sit down and meet with the CEOs of the grocery chains; hopefully, they will do something. Nobody believes them. We need stronger commitments. I do not know how many announcements and reannouncements I have heard in eight years from the Liberals about their commitment to housing, yet I still do not see those houses being built.

We need to take this issue seriously because of the price gouging that has gone on, the market exploitation and the turning of our cities over to Airbnb, which allowed young people and working-class people to be forced out of the cities they love. In my region, the housing and homelessness issue is at a crisis level. We never saw Doug Ford offer to build any houses in Timmins. He was willing to sell off the greenbelt, but we could use those houses.

This is the situation we are in, so people are frustrated. They deserve a straight vision. They deserve a commitment. How would that commitment look? Certainly, in terms of housing, we know that the market-driven solutions have driven us into this crisis. We know that what worked before, until the 1990s, when Paul Martin walked away on it, was the federal investment with the provinces and municipalities to build housing. The best solution is co-operative public housing that has mixed-income housing. That is what we need.

I need to be able to go back to my communities with a commitment that these houses are going to be built. There is not a quicker driver to build an economy than housing. We could do that today if there was will in this House to do that.

We need to get serious with the CEOs. We have talked about a windfall tax, but we need to actually make them deliver, or we have to start talking about issues like price controls. We know that people are being gouged, and we are in a situation where we cannot allow the oligopoly of grocery chains, because there is no competition, to call the shots, as they are doing. We need to limit their ability to continue to spread their powers as we see Shoppers Drug Mart moving more and more into health care. We simply cannot trust them. We need to protect the public health care system.

These are all the issues that are coming toward us at this time. I mentioned it quickly, but I want to actually really focus on how we are also in the middle of a climate catastrophe. We need to talk about the climate catastrophe. We have the leader of the Conservative Party, the member who lives in Stornoway, a 19-room mansion with his own personal chef, who would make burning fossil fuel free.

We are at an absolute crisis on our planet. We are also at a time when the International Energy Agency said, as of last week, that the end of big oil is imminent because of the incredible investments that have been made all around the world, but not in Canada, on clean energy. There is no place in the world that has more potential for clean energy right now than in the province of Alberta, yet Danielle Smith shut down $33 billion of clean energy projects and rented a truck to drive around Ottawa, telling us that the power is going out in Alberta.

Most premiers spend money to attract investment or to say their province is an energy superpower. Is that not what Alberta said? They said they were a province that could build energy projects and get them off the ground. Instead, she is paying for the gas to go around saying they cannot keep the power on in Alberta. That is the Conservative vision. They are wedded to big oil, an industry that has made billions in the last few years while we got gouged at the pumps.

We will never hear the Conservatives talk about the price gouging that we know is happening. When we go home on a Friday in northern Ontario, we know the price goes up right across the board on those long weekends at the same time; everybody knows it is price gouging, but the Conservatives say they will get rid of the carbon tax and make it free to burn.

I can ask anyone if they think big oil is not going to, if that tax came up, just hoover that up and put it into the profits of people like Rich Kruger.

We are at a time when Canadians are looking to Parliament to actually deliver. In the last election I went door to door talking to people about their concerns. I heard, again and again, that people could not afford to get their teeth fixed. People said they do not trust politicians anymore. They asked how they could get their kids' teeth fixed. I said that if they elected us, we would go back and get a national dental care plan. We are going to get that plan. The Conservatives announced they would spend all summer going around to try to stop that budget implementation, but we are going to get dental care for seniors and children this year.

The other commitment we made, and I am putting the Liberals on notice, is that we made that commitment to pharmacare. We have two more years in this Parliament. If we do not see pharmacare, it is going to be pretty hard to go back and say that we hung out with the son of PIerre Elliott for two or three years. People ask why we are hanging out with that guy. We are hanging out here on this side to get something done. That is pharmacare and dental care.

If we go back to the Canadian people and say we did that, it shows them how Parliament can work and that we can work across party lines. We intend to make sure we can go back to the Canadian people who said that in a time of crisis, New Democrats were there on the issues that mattered to people.

We will stand up and fight for people who cannot afford to pay CEBA back, when the government only gives them an extra 18 days. We will fight for small businesses. We will fight for a cleaner climate. We will fight for the indigenous communities that continue to be ignored. We will fight for pharmacare, and we will fight for dental care. That is why we were elected and that is why we are here today.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I note that my colleague brought up a really interesting point, which is that Conservatives talk about the carbon tax quite a bit, but they seem to stop short when it comes to trying to explain the rising costs otherwise.

There is a very good graph that was recently posted that shows exactly where the price of fuel has increased. Over the last year, the price of fuel has increased, as a result of the carbon tax, by 2¢ per litre. The price of fuel has increased by wholesale margins, in other words, profits, by 18¢ per litre.

Can the member for Timmins—James Bay provide some insight as to why the Conservatives are so hung up on talking about the increase of 2¢ per litre as it relates to the carbon tax and not the 18¢ per litre as it relates to the profits received by these oil companies?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, the Conservative leader announced he was going to spend all summer during the hottest summer in history, as Canada was burning, promoting burning fossil fuels for free. It was so bad he got choked out of a number of the communities that were facing this. Even as their own communities were burning, like when Kelowna was on fire, what did we have? We had the member for Kelowna—Lake Country bragging about fossil fuel burning being free.

The connection between burning fossil fuels and the climate crisis was proven a long time ago, despite the amount of money Exxon spent trying to suppress that. The Conservatives have no plan. Only recently, they said they have something called technology. They do not really know what it is because they are against battery plant investments, solar and geothermal, but they are into burning the planet.

[Warren Steinley, Conservative, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Madam Speaker, I heard the member talk about palling around and burning fossil fuels.

In 2020, the member took a trip to Washington on sponsored travel, when most Canadians could not travel. In 2022, the member took a trip to Germany and burned fossil fuels worth $10,489. He talked about palling around with Pierre Elliott Trudeau. On this trip to Germany, he palled around with a group that actually did a joint press conference with Hezbollah, which is now a terrorist organization.

Can he explain to his constituents why he is palling around with Hezbollah terrorists?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, that was pretty bizarre, but I am not surprised. When I was in Berlin, I was actually meeting with the chancellor about clean energy. We met with the chancellor, unlike the four Conservatives—

[An hon. member]

Oh, oh!

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

The member had an opportunity to ask a question. If he has other questions, wishes to raise a point of order or table a document, I would ask him to wait until it is the appropriate time.

The hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Madam Speaker, it was quite the honour to meet with the German chancellor and talk about hydrogen. It was a real honour to meet with representatives of the German Bundestag on whether Canada can supply clean energy.

That is rather different than the four Conservatives who got flown over to London, apparently by my cousin, Dan McTeague. The one bottle was $1,791 for champagne and he wants to talk about affordability. I am sure the member gets really high and happy when he gets a little bottle of Spumante Bambino, but they were spending $1,791 for a single bottle of champagne.

Who paid for that trip? Why were they there? People knew why we were there. We were meeting with the German government because we stand up for Canada. They were over there boozing it up for whatever reason. Let us know who paid for that trip.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

We have a point of order. The hon. member for Regina—Lewvan.