Mr. Speaker, I am rising in the House of Commons to talk about the $23 billion in inflationary deficits added by this bill alone. Here is yet another example of a Prime Minister who, after eight years, is not worth the cost.
When I say that he is not worth the cost, I am talking about his false advertising. Normally, in the private sector, false advertising is a criminal offence. If, for example, a business advertises a product at a certain price and does not deliver the promised product, that business may have to face criminal charges in court. Governments do it all the time. They ask for money to deliver a product to Canadians. We see the Prime Minister do that all the time.
For example, in very general terms, take his program to help the middle class. Eight years down the road, nine out of 10 middle-class young people are unable to afford a house and believe that will never change. Eight years on, the number of employed Ontarians using food banks has increased by 86%. These are middle-class people. They are suffering. They never needed to use food banks before, but eight years after the government floated the idea of helping the middle class, they need it now.
We have a Prime Minister who promised to help the media by giving them big subsidies to buy their love. How did that turn out? Media articles are now being erased from social networks.
There is also talk about a program to help kids get lunch at school. However, if we read the bill to find out what the program is about, no food is included. The money is for two federal ministers to hold consultations with provincial ministers and interest groups and write a report about a plan to create a policy to someday feed children. Here is just another example of a government that says it is going to feed kids, but then turns around and feeds bureaucracies instead.
Now let us move on to housing. While criticizing Jean Chrétien for eliminating housing bureaucracy at the federal level, the Prime Minister announced that the feds would once again fund housing by setting up major, $87‑billion programs for affordable housing. Eight years later, what has happened? Housing prices have doubled. The cost of a mortgage on an average home has more than doubled, with payments increasing from $1,400 to nearly $3,500 a month. The cost of a one-bedroom apartment has risen from an average of $900 to almost $2,000, and the down payment for the average home in this country has increased from $20,000 to more than $50,000.
The program proposes spending billions and billions of dollars on affordable homes and apartments. The result is that costs have doubled. That is exactly the opposite of what the ads said. Unfortunately, these ads sometimes appear in documents voted on in the House of Commons. For example, there are affordable housing programs that increase the price of homes, and millions or billions of dollars are provided to fund them.
In the private sector, charging money for a product and then failing to deliver that product would land a CEO in jail. The Prime Minister does that all the time, but he keeps his privileges while the population suffers.
That is why I created a monumental documentary on the housing hell that this Prime Minister has caused. The bought-and-paid-for media had a meltdown. They had a meltdown across the country, but they had a problem. They could not find a single error in any of the facts that were presented. I presented around 55 facts. The documentary introduces a new fact roughly every 20 seconds. There is not a single journalist who could find one factual error.
Let me review some of these facts. I found many of these facts in articles published by the media that attacked me for my documentary. They published those same facts. That is the problem. They published facts about the housing crisis, but failed to mention the Prime Minister who caused this housing crisis, who is in power and who has seen prices double.
Here are the facts.
First, nine out of 10 Canadians believe that they will never own a home. The journalist who wrote that is Shazia Nazir from Milton, Ontario. That is a fact. There is no denying it. Which Prime Minister created this phenomenon, which had never been seen before in our history? It is this Liberal Prime Minister.
Second, I demonstrated that it takes 66% of an average paycheque to make the monthly payments on the average single-family home. A Radio‑Canada journalist said that figure was made up, but it comes from the Royal Bank of Canada. It is published on the RBC website. Radio‑Canada could have found it, if its journalists had wanted to share the truth. It takes 66% of an average paycheque to make the average payments for an average home in Canada. The remaining 34% is needed to pay taxes, leaving nothing after that. People will not be able to buy groceries, do anything fun or go on vacation. They will have barely enough money to pay their mortgage. This is compared to 39% when I was the minister responsible for housing. Eight years ago, it took 39% of an average family's paycheque to buy an average home and pay the monthly expenses. That means the percentage of a family's monthly income needed to afford an average home has increased by half. That is after eight years under this Prime Minister, and it is a record. It has never been the case before now.
A 57-year-old grandmother had to live in her van because of the housing crisis caused by this Prime Minister. Refugees have to live in the streets because the shelters are full. After eight years of this Prime Minister, there is no more room. Eight years ago, the average price of a house in Canada was $454,000. Now, it is about $700,000. With the higher interest rates, monthly payments are even worse.
The Liberals and their bought-and-paid-for media are trying to blame a global phenomenon, but that is not going to fly. Other countries are not experiencing the same crisis as we are here, in Canada.
All the international data show that prices in Canada have gone up much faster than in nearly every other country. Housing costs in Canada have outpaced wage growth faster than in all but one OECD country. On affordability, Canada ranks next to last out of almost 40 industrialized countries for the period from 2015 to 2023. Interestingly, the Prime Minister has been in power that entire time.
According to UBS Bank, Toronto has the worst housing bubble in the world. This is not a phenomenon observed in all of the world's biggest cities; it is just in Toronto. Moreover, Vancouver ranks sixth. According to UBS, these two markets were reasonably priced 10 years ago. That is another fact that the Prime Minister's bought-and-paid-for media tried to contradict, but they failed.
Houses near the border on the Canadian side can be three times more expensive than those on the U.S. side. How does that make sense if it is an international phenomenon? In general, prices in the United States are 25% to 40% lower than in Canada, even though the U.S. population is eight times the Canadian population and their land mass is smaller. After eight years of this Prime Minister, people can buy a Swedish castle for less than it costs to buy a two-bedroom house in Kitchener.
Of all the G7 countries, ours is the largest by landmass. A Radio-Canada reporter who was trying to save the Prime Minister's reputation said that that argument was ridiculous because people cannot live in Canada's far north, for example. He was suggesting that the only land available in Canada is in the far north. That is what is ridiculous. There is plenty of land around our big cities. If those claims are true, then why is the U.S. able to provide housing at a much lower cost, even though its population is concentrated in New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and other large cities?
Even if the population is concentrated in big cities, houses are a lot less expensive in the U.S. than they are in Canada after eight years of this Prime Minister. Those who say it is irrelevant to talk about the amount of land that we have to provide Canadians with property are forgetting that the reality is that supply and demand always determine the price. Prices should be very low in Canada because there is land available around cities, in southern Canada, western Canada, eastern Canada and even northern Canada, land on which we could be building housing, if we could cut through all the red tape put in place by governments at all levels.
The fact is, since this Prime Minister came to power, there are fewer houses per capita than before. Of all the G7 countries, Canada has the fewest houses per capita, even though it has the largest landmass available for housing. I find it very interesting that there were more houses per capita eight years ago, when there were no bureaucratic programs to make properties more affordable. Do my colleagues not find that interesting?
According to the Prime Minister, $87 billion was spent on building affordable homes. However, eight years later, there are fewer houses per capita. It is unbelievable. It is like being in a restaurant, ordering something that tastes terrible, getting the wrong order and terrible service, and then being told it is going to cost $500. Then we turn around and say it was a great meal because it cost so much. That is the Prime Minister's argument. His programs are expensive, so they must be good.
He just attacked us for voting against the money allocated for programs because he believes that money equals results, even if that spending results in the opposite of what the programs promise. He criticizes me for not having spent enough on housing. I delivered affordable homes and apartments when I was minister at a lower cost to taxpayers. That is good, common sense: lower costs for taxpayers and lower costs for those buying or renting homes. That is what it means to know the value of money. The Prime Minister does not understand that because he has never had to work in his life. He inherited his wealth and kept his wealth in a tax-sheltered trust fund. I understand why it is hard for him to grasp the value of money.
I will give an example. In 1972, 232,000 housing units were built in Canada. In 2022, 219,000 homes were built in Canada. In 1972, there were 22 million Canadians. Last year, there were 39 million. The Canadian population has practically doubled, but fewer houses are being built after eight years of this Prime Minister and after $87 billion of government spending to build more. This government spends more to build less at a higher price. That is its approach.
What is the highest cost of building a home today in Vancouver, for example? Is it lumber, the workers' wages, the land? No, it is not even the construction company's profits. It is government fees and red tape. Yes, the red tape is local. It comes mainly from local governments, but it is funded by the federal government.
The Prime Minister boasts about the fact that he is sending bigger cheques to municipal politicians to build a bigger bureaucracy to prevent construction in the name of affordable housing. In Nova Scotia, after completely failing to provide a decent quality of life for people in Halifax, after 30 homeless encampments cropped up around the city, the housing minister came along with money from the housing accelerator fund and gave millions of dollars to his friend, the Liberal mayor of Halifax. He said that it would speed up housing construction.
We later learned what that money will be used for. It is going to be used to hire more public servants, the same public servants who are preventing construction in Halifax. There is going to be more red tape thanks to the money the federal government is sending. The Prime Minister has learned absolutely nothing. That is why we need to make a common-sense change that will build houses, not bureaucracy. That is our approach.
Some people have criticized my monumental documentary. According to them, nothing can be built because there is not enough land in places where people want to live.
The Squamish people have proven otherwise. In Vancouver, the Squamish are building 6,000 apartments on a 10-acre property. On 10 acres, they are building an unbelievable 6,000 apartments. That means they are building 600 apartments per acre. These are outstanding results. This would have never happened if they had been forced to listen to the bureaucrats in downtown Vancouver. On their traditional land, a traditional reserve of their people, they did not need permits from local bureaucrats. That enabled them to build housing.
This proves that if we could cut out the bureaucracy, we could build more large apartments downtown and more houses in the suburbs at the same time. That is exactly the opposite of what the Prime Minister is doing right now.
I have heard other excuses from staunch defenders of the Prime Minister, who set up a huge fund to financially support the media and buy their loyalty. They say it is not the Prime Minister's fault that the cost of housing has doubled, because it was COVID-19 that drove up housing prices.
A Journal de Montréal columnist I admire said that COVID-19 has become a scapegoat. COVID-19 should have lowered housing prices, because there was less immigration during COVID-19. The immigration system was practically shut down for nine or 10 months, and it slowed down for another nine or 10 months after that. The figures show that there was less immigration, fewer jobs and lower wages.
All these factors would normally reduce demand in the real estate market. I am not the only one saying this. In spring 2020, the federal government's housing agency predicted that housing prices would drop by 32% because of COVID-19. They were wrong, but it is understandable why they predicted that prices would fall. When the country loses jobs and wages and closes its doors to immigration, the results are lower prices and less demand. However, prices have gone up. Why did prices rise in the two years following COVID-19? Because the central bank printed $600 billion. Money was created out of thin air.
The media said that that was not true and had nothing to do with it, but my documentary includes a Bank of Canada graph that shows the number of houses bought by investors doubled. It started in the spring of 2020, right when the Bank of Canada started printing money and buying bonds from banks and financial institutions, which flooded the financial system. All that money was loaned to investors that have relationships with the bankers. They are the ones who helped double the amount invested. Prices jumped by 50% after that massive injection of newly printed money. It was not COVID‑19. It was the sense that people had money that caused a sudden spike in housing prices.
In fact, the Liberals and their supporters in the bought-off media will say that all that government spending was necessary because of COVID-19. Is that really true?
There was a $100-billion deficit before the first case of COVID-19. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, 40% of new spending during the COVID-19 pandemic had nothing to do with COVID-19. The pandemic has been over for a year or two, but the deficits continue. The government can no longer blame COVID-19 and say that COVID-19 ate its homework, when the deficits were there before COVID-19, the deficits during COVID-19 were not related to the pandemic, and the deficits after COVID-19, in some cases, are increasing. Although COVID-19 is disappearing in the rear-view mirror, deficits continue to increase. We cannot accept the Prime Minister's excuse that the dog ate his homework. Printing money to spend recklessly was an irresponsible decision, and I warned against it. That is continuing to this day and it is driving up interest rates.
It just goes to show, once again, that every time this Prime Minister stands up in the House of Commons and says he has no other choice, he is spending money on all kinds of slogans. However, when we look at the results behind those slogans, it is the exact opposite of what has been promised. It is false advertising. That is why we often vote against spending that, according to the slogans, sounds great, but in reality does exactly the opposite of what the slogans promise. That is why we need a common-sense government. That is what I can offer as Canada's future prime minister.
A few months ago, the Bloc Québécois asked me what common sense actually is. I admire their humility in admitting that they have no idea what common sense is. I was able to help them by defining common sense. It struck them as a strange idea, because they live in a utopia. They are here in the House of Commons to make life more miserable, arguing that Canada should be split up into pieces. Again, to help the Bloc Québécois, commons sense actually means many things.
First, we need to bring back lower prices. How do we do that? We do that by axing the carbon tax that is increasing the price of everything. I know that the government wants to quadruple the carbon tax on farmers who produce food, on fuel and on all our industries. I know that the Bloc Québécois wants to radically increase the carbon tax. I know that there is a second carbon tax under the name fuel regulations. However, the Bloc Québécois is not satisfied. It wants to radically increase it. Only the Conservative Party will axe the tax on carbon to reduce the price of energy for all Canadians.
We will rely on technology to fight climate change. I know that the Bloc Québécois is against technology. For example, it is against the nuclear energy that France uses to produce electricity without any greenhouse gas emissions. The Bloc Québécois is against that. It is so ideologically radical. It is against nuclear energy and other sources of energy that do not produce carbon emissions. We will use these technologies instead of taxing F-150s in Saguenay or in Trois‑Rivières, where workers and farmers need their truck for work. These are good people. They work hard, and we are the only party for the vast regions of Quebec. That is all. That is the truth.
Another common-sense solution is to control spending. I find the Bloc Québécois funny. It always wants the federal government to do more. It is strange. The Bloc says that it wants to get rid of the federal government, but at the same time, it is always voting to increase the federal government's costs at Quebeckers' expense. The Bloc voted for all the spending increases that the Liberal government proposed. It voted against the financial discipline that we are proposing.
The common-sense idea I am proposing is a dollar-for-dollar law, which says that if we spend a dollar on one thing, then we need to save a dollar somewhere else. A law like that existed during the Clinton administration in the 1990s. It enabled the Democratic president to balance the budget and eliminate $400 billion in debt. That resulted in an enormous increase in jobs and wages, an increase in the stock market and plenty of other things. However, just after the law expired, the U.S. plunged back into a deficit and they are still in that situation today. That shows that politicians need a legal limit to control their spending. We are going to do things the same way that single mothers, small businesses and families do them. Every time a Canadian with common sense increases their spending in one area, they find a way to decrease it in another so that they can pay the bills, instead of just continuing to add expenses to their credit card. That is how we are going to impose discipline.
We will also eliminate waste. The Canada Infrastructure Bank costs $35 billion and has not delivered one single infrastructure project. We will get rid of ArriveCAN. We will get rid of the Asian Infrastructure Bank, which sends our money to China to build pipelines. We are building pipelines in China and banning them here in Canada. That makes no sense. We are not here to build the ancient Chinese empire. We are here to build a good quality of life for Canadians here at home. That is common sense.
We will tell municipalities that, if they want infrastructure money, they have to approve more housing construction. The reason we do not have enough homes is that there is too much bureaucracy getting in the way of construction. Canada is the second-slowest OECD country when it comes to granting construction permits. How will we get municipalities to speed up the permitting process? We will say that the amount of infrastructure money they are going to get is tied to the number of houses built. It will be based on results. I will tell every municipality to allow 15% more construction. If they do more, they will get bonuses. If they do less, they will lose money. Those bureaucrats will be paid like realtors. Realtors get paid according to how much they sell. The federal government will pay municipal bureaucrats according to how much construction they allow. We will demand that every public transit station be surrounded by apartments. The money will flow once those apartments are built and occupied by people.
We are going to sell off 6,000 federal government buildings and thousands of acres of federal land to build new homes. We are going to ask the federal agency that approves financing for apartments do so in two months instead of two years, or else we will fire their executives. It is easy. If you work in a senior position in my government and you do not keep your commitments, you will be fired. That is life. That is the real world. That is how life works for a carpenter or a mechanic. That is also how it will work for executives in my government. Eventually, this will speed up construction, after eight years of delays and people finding they can no longer buy houses.
Common sense also means putting real repeat offenders in prison instead of allowing them to commit the same acts of violence against Canadians over and over again.
We understand that some young people make mistakes. I get that, and we are going to rehabilitate them. However, we are not going to let people commit 40, 50 or 60 crimes over and over, each one more violent than the last, by releasing them, like the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals want to do. We want these criminals to go to prison. We do not want to let them out on bail or stay at home. We are going to offer treatment to people who are addicted to drugs, and we are going to stop targeting hunters and sport shooters.
The Bloc Québécois tried to help the Liberals ban hunting rifles. When the Liberals published 300 pages of hunting rifles that they wanted to ban, the Bloc member was there. It is on the video. They can deny it if they want, but there is video evidence. He was there and even said that it was his dream to see 300 pages of hunting rifles banned. Then all of a sudden, the Bloc members realized that there were hunters in the regions in Quebec.
That was quite a realization for the Bloc members, who spend most of their time with the lefties in Plateau-Mont-Royal, so it never occurred to them that there were hunters in Quebec. Like the Prime Minister, the Bloc Québécois had to back down because of Conservative pressure. The Bloc had to apologize and say that they would not try to ban hunting rifles after all, after hearing the Conservatives' strong arguments. Now that is common sense.
We know that this radical coalition will once again try to ban our hunters. People in the regions of Quebec will have to depend on the Conservative Party to protect their traditions, which have existed in Canada for thousands of years among indigenous peoples. I want to thank first nations for defending their right to hunt and opposing the Prime Minister's plan to ban their hunting rifles.
We are the only party that believes we should instead invest money in tightening the border against illegal guns. At the same time, we will put the real criminals in jail, while respecting hunters and sport shooters. That is common sense. Common sense is such a strange concept to our Bloc Québécois friends.
Common sense also means protecting our freedom. The Conservative Party is still the only party that voted against the censorship law. The Bloc Québécois voted to give Canada's federal bureaucrats in Ottawa the power to prevent Quebeckers from watching certain things online. Imagine a supposed sovereignist from Quebec saying that an official from a woke agency in Ottawa should be able to control what Quebeckers see and say on the Internet. We will never agree to that. The Conservative Party is the only party that will defend freedom of expression. Accordingly, we will scrap Bill C-11.
We cannot have freedom of expression without national freedom. That is why the Conservative Party is going to rebuild our army. This Prime Minister has wasted so much money by bungling procurement and delaying the F-35 aircraft replacement, for example. We are going to wipe out incompetence and waste and invest in helping our soldiers and rebuilding our army. We will stop giving money to dictatorships, terrorists and international bureaucracies and bring that money back here to Canada to rebuild our armed forces. We will defend our freedom by defending our military.
In conclusion, I know that, for most Canadians, things are miserable in Canada right now. Everything is broken. Do not take it from me. That is coming from two-thirds of Canadians polled. We have a Prime Minister who always wants to promote negativity. He is always negative. He tries to divide people.
I am here with a positive message, a common-sense message that gives hope to Canadians across the country. Yes, the future will be better than the eight years we have just gone through. Yes, we can have a country where people are free to earn big paycheques to buy food, fuel and affordable homes in safe communities. That is the goal of the Conservative Party. That is the goal of bringing home common sense.
Now in English.
