Madam Speaker, we are in a cost of living crisis in Canada, and we have heard one of the driving factors for that crisis is the contribution to inflation of things like the carbon tax. It is a tax on everything.
That is not the only area where the government is ignoring the serious situation Canadians find themselves in. One can take a look at the lack of prudence the government is approaching the taxpayer dollar with. Canadians work extremely hard, and when they have to remit that hard-earned money to the federal government, they expect that it is for the purpose of furthering the national interest and for basic services only the federal government can provide.
When one looks a little closer and scratches just beneath the surface, one will see an absence of care or concern for where that tax dollar comes from. It comes from the pocket of a Canadian who, like the average Canadian family, is paying more than $1,000 in increases in their grocery bill this year. That price would be higher for Canadian families if many Canadians were not skipping meals to help drive down their grocery costs.
The government has not found a tax dollar it is not prepared to waste. Now, it is not using the increase in tax revenue it is getting from inflation to do things like reduce wait times for passports, although we have seen people camping outside for them. It is not doing it to improve services at our airports when we have seen people stranded and delayed in just unprecedented wait times and disruptions to our airline industry. We are not seeing it with improvements to the interdiction of firearms at our borders and to end gun smuggling from the United States, although we have seen the scourge of gun violence being perpetrated with smuggled firearms across Canada.
The government is also spending wild sums of money on projects with no care or concern for where that dollar comes from, like the $54 million it spent on arrive scam. That app was supposed to cost many orders of magnitude less than it did, and it did not even work right. It arbitrarily detained Canadians in the thousands. We recently learned that the Prime Minister was charging $6,000 per night for his hotel room in London, and he did not just stay a single night.
Meanwhile, Canadians are struggling to keep the heat on, feed themselves and put enough gas in the tank of their truck to get to work or their minivan to get to a doctor's appointment or an after-school activity for their children.
The government needs to approach the serious issue of the affordability crisis we are facing in Canada, and it needs to hold up the mirror and ask itself: What is it doing to make life more affordable for Canadians? Where is it going to find the savings? When is it going to stop raising taxes?