Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House again to keep the pressure on our common-sense Conservative plan. Sadly, yesterday, the Liberals rejected fairness for all Canadians in our Conservative motion to take the tax off so Canadians could keep the heat on. I am honoured to be sharing my time today with the hon. member for Carleton, the Leader of the Opposition.
There is one party in the House of Commons that is fighting every single day to lower taxes for all Canadians. After eight years of the NDP-Liberal government, Canadians are hurting badly in every part of this country, whether it is housing, where housing costs have doubled, whether it is inflation that is hitting the pocketbooks of every family in Canada, or whether it is food inflation that is still stubbornly way too high, with an average family in this country paying $1,000 more this year on their grocery bills than they did just last year alone.
After eight years, it is time to stop taxing every part of this country and instead provide some much-needed relief. Heating a home in this country, our cold Canada that we live in, is not a luxury. It is a necessity. Again, the problem we hear over and over again in every single part of this country is that Canadians are struggling to pay the bills. They are having to choose between heating and eating. It is heartbreaking, and we continue to see an NDP-Liberal coalition vote, time and time again, to make matters worse.
What we have here now, and why I think this debate has exploded in the last couple of weeks, is Conservatives talking about axing the tax entirely, not just on home heating but the carbon tax entirely. It is not an environmental plan. It is a tax plan.
Breaking news this morning, the independent environment commissioner and the Office of the Auditor General, and the work that they do on the audits, confirmed once again that the carbon tax is a tax plan, not an environmental plan. The government is not even going to meet the very targets it is claiming a carbon tax would solve. It is failing by every measure possible.
What has really amplified this conversation and provided an opportunity for our Conservative motion that was sadly defeated yesterday and the one from the NDP today is the Prime Minister's desperation. He made a desperate, last-minute, panicked announcement a floor above here. He scrambled on a Thursday afternoon when his itinerary was updated and grabbed all of his Atlantic caucus members, because they were in full revolt as a caucus. They were hearing what the Leader of the Opposition was doing in Nova Scotia, in a long-time Liberal riding, where an electric rally of 1,000-plus people in the riding of Kings—Hants was about to get under way.
Atlantic Canadian MPs panicked and basically forced the Prime Minister to carve out a deal for 3% of Canadians. What the Prime Minister announced has backfired. The NDP and Liberal MPs and their costly coalition know it. What the Prime Minister is doing is what he does best, and that is not leading, it is dividing. He is pitting one region against the other. He is only carving out certain exemptions for certain types of home heating that impact certain parts of the country. If the Prime Minister was not divisive enough in that announcement and in how hasty it was, it was the Liberal rural economic development minister from Newfoundland who came out and said that if other regions wanted to get the benefit and get some sort of pause from the pain of the carbon tax, they should have voted in more Liberals.