Mr. Speaker, together, these policies represent a triple threat to affordable food prices, but that was not enough for the proudly socialist coalition. They were not happy enough with Canadians sucking up bad policies through paper straws. That is why the minister for Communist China's environment is using a pollution prevention order to ban plastic food packaging. The Liberals are not passing legislation. They are not even using regulation. They are issuing an order under the Environmental Protection Act.
The government was given extraordinary power by Parliament to protect the environment from actual danger. Past orders included requiring dentists to prevent mercury from getting into the environment when disposing of dental amalgams. They were never meant for taking recyclable food containers off store shelves. This is another obvious abuse of power.
It is the same as when the Liberals illegally banned plastic straws. They knew this sneaky policy will increase the price of food, the same way they knew imposing the carbon tax and the costly fuel regulations would hammer Atlantic Canada especially hard. They knew it and they did it anyhow. They knew their policies would make life unaffordable. They knew making energy more expensive would make food more expensive. They knew it, but they did not care about Canadians struggling with the cost of living.
Their ideological obsession has morphed into a religious obsession. The church of climate socialism believes we must repent for the sin of capitalism or else we will face a climate apocalypse. Anyone who dissents from climate socialism is branded a heretic. The Liberals need this deep faith in their own righteousness to justify to themselves that it is okay to call this an affordable groceries bill when it has nothing to do with grocery prices. As I said from the start, the contents of the bill were lifted from Conservative bills. Conservatives put forward positive policies. We look forward to seeing how they can be improved in committee.
The government could have chosen plenty of positive-sounding political titles to market the bill. Instead, the Prime Minister made the decision to gaslight Canadians. He will fly around the country dumping tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere claiming he has an affordable groceries bill that proves he is not completely out of touch. Meanwhile, the environment minister, the unrepentant vandal who once attacked the home of Ralph Klein and terrorized his wife, seeks to increase the cost of food with more plastic bans. Not only will this plastic packaging ban lead to higher prices, but it will also reduce competition. This would be like Harper introducing the drug-free prison act while Peter MacKay and Jason Kenney are going around handing out crack pipes to convicts. I can just imagine what the member for Winnipeg North would have to say about that.
Let us get the bill to committee. Even though it has been plagiarized from Conservative bills, we have to go over it with a fine-tooth comb. We know the Liberals like to copy and paste things into legislation. We know it because they did it when they tried to ban hunting rifles. That bill was riddled with the kinds of typographical errors that come from copying and pasting text between different types of documents. That Liberals are lazy and lackadaisical about legislation is not a surprise to lawful firearms owners, but after eight years, one would have thought they would be making fewer errors with experience.
The truth is that they are tired and worn out. That is why we have seen a steady march of senior Liberal staffers out of government and into senior lobbying positions. The smart ones are fleeing a sinking ship. The desperate ones are trying to bail it out. The bad ones claim the ship is not sinking. The Liberals claim the ship is flying full of affordable food. Canadians will pay a heavy price for Liberal delusions. The Prime Minister is not worth the cost.