Madam Speaker, that is very good advice. I was paving the pathway to this bill on how this carbon tax is negatively impacting investment in Canada.
The Liberals today had an opportunity to reduce the cost of living for Canadians from coast to coast to coast and failed to do that. They were joined by the Bloc. The Bloc members had an opportunity to speak for Quebeckers to make sure their cost of living was also being reduced and they failed to do that.
The members for Winnipeg North, Winnipeg South, Winnipeg South Centre, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, who are Liberal members, could have reduced the cost of home heating for their constituents, but voted against this motion to expand the carbon tax pause to all Canadians. It is very disappointing that their constituents cannot even count on them to represent them adequately here in the House.
Let me now dive headlong into my speech and carry on with that.
We have seen before where the current government subjects a bill to being discussed, even this critical one here, and this is something we should have seen long ago. It requires legislation of course on the whole issue of Invest in Canada, but this legislation presented by the government lands so far from what is needed, so far from the reality of the problem that it seeks to address, that it is really difficult to see a common-sense solution here. This is the kind of stuff we continually get from the Liberals. We see this on their approach to the environment, immigration, the economy, guns, drugs and the list goes on.
There is a common series of steps the Liberals go through when they encounter these various problems. First, they deny there is a problem. Once that stops working for them, then they start to blame the Conservatives. Then they start blaming Canadians. Finally, when they run of out people to blame, once the PM's wizards and the PMO finally recognize that something needs to be done before even the CBC starts dumping on them, then they put something like this forward. However, it takes all of those things to happen before the Liberal government takes steps to address real issues. When they do finally present something, it is unremarkable, as members will see later in my speech.
For years, the Communist dictatorship of Beijing has been taking advantage of Canadians, of our weak acquisition laws, Canadian industry and our proprietary technology. Why is that? Part of it seems to be the bizarre fascination that the Prime Minister has with China. We all remember his comment about admiring Beijing's basic dictatorship, though at the time few thought he was naive enough to believe that and throw open the doors to Beijing, but it turns out that he actually has that fascination.
When the former environment minister visited China in 2018, she too gushed over China's leadership on climate change and its ability to “scale like no other country”. In her address to Boston's Northeastern University this past May, the Deputy Prime Minister “said the fundamental question of our time is: 'Does capitalist democracy still work?'” I think it would be better if the minister were here working for Canadians, but that is what she said.
She stated:
That is the question being posed around kitchen tables, in my country and this one, as parents wonder if our children can count on capitalist democracy’s essential promise of a future more prosperous than our present.
These comments, of course, raise the spectre of what she considers a viable alternative. That would be China's basic dictatorship perhaps. To read between the lines, her thought process seems to be that Canada's current economic woes are not the result of her government's incompetent management, but rather the fault of capitalism and democracy.
As one journalist recently noted, if we are talking about what passes for capitalism and democracy in Justin Trudeau's Canada, not unlike those of China, where capitalism has come to be characterized by close—