Mr. Speaker, I am rising in the House today to speak out against President-elect Trump's threat of imposing tariffs on Canada, to propose a real action plan to respond to that threat and to put Canada first.
We have a president south of the border who has made it clear he wants to put American workers and American security first. That is his right, but he and everyone else should know that when I am prime minister, we will have a head of government who puts Canada's workers and Canada's security first. That includes maintaining the most successful trade relationship the world has ever seen.
This is the world's longest-ever defended border. Two billion dollars of goods go across that border every day. Just to put that into perspective, more goods go between Canada and the U.S. in a few days than between the U.S. and Japan in an entire month. The Canada-U.S. border is 5,525 miles long if we include Alaska. It has 120 border crossings that facilitate 350,000 daily crossings; that is in addition to the merchandise that goes each way. The sheer volume of this relationship requires intricate planning and precision to get these goods moving back and forth. An automobile will cross the border seven times before it is completed and sent off to market.
By the way, the Americans should understand that we are pretty important to them too. The reality is that Canada purchases more goods from the United States than does the entire European Union, despite Canada's population being one-fifteenth that of Europe. Canada is the top export destination for 31 U.S. states. The two countries have a thoroughly interconnected manufacturing supply chain and we are completely reliant on each other for energy. Energy infrastructure between our two countries is so interconnected that we have 35 major electrical transmission lines and 70 oil and gas pipelines across the border. Canada provides 40% of U.S. crude imports, making it America's largest foreign energy supplier. This is something that President Trump should care about if he intends to keep his promise to cut gas prices in half; he is going to need our oil and our energy in order to do that. We are going to need continued access to the American economy if we are to succeed. We trade twice as much with the United States as we do with the rest of the world combined.
Some people dream of simply replacing the United States with other countries. These are dreams that have been talked about since the first Trudeau, who promised that we would do business with many other countries elsewhere in the world. That never happened. In fact, the weight of the American economy has increased. The share of global GDP controlled by the United States is increasing. All of the predictions that China would overtake the United States have not come true. The gap between China and the United States is widening because China has decided to return to socialist, centralized, government-planned policies. That has slowed growth in China, while American capitalism has continued to generate wealth.
That is the reality. Even if some oppose it for ideological reasons, no economic force in the world is more powerful than American capitalism. That is the reality. However, this capitalism does not work without international trade, especially with allied countries like Canada, and Canada is the United States' best ally in the world. That is why we need to protect this relationship. We need a plan for our economy and our security.
Let us be honest. We enter this crisis in a state of weakness. We have a weakened economy, a weakened military and, most of all, a weakened Prime Minister. That weakness may have been one of the reasons President Trump believed that he could make these threats and trample all over the Prime Minister again.
The sad reality is our GDP per capita is smaller than it was 10 years ago, even while the American economy per capita has grown by 18%. Our per capita GDP fell more than any other G7 country since the year before COVID. We are one of the only countries that has not recovered its economy since before COVID happened. In reality, our housing costs, our national debt and food bank use have all doubled in the last four years, all of this before the threat of these tariffs.
Before the threat of these tariffs, food prices had increased 37% faster in Canada than in the United States of America. Before the threat of these tariffs, our national debt had grown by over 100% in a decade. Before the threat of these tariffs, half a trillion dollars U.S. more in Canadian investment went south than came back. That is Canadian investment dollars building American mines, factories and pipelines paying American, not Canadian, wages.
On top of that, the threats that we heard last night should have come as no surprise, yet, for some reason, they did surprise the Prime Minister and the finance minister. It was only 20 days ago that the finance minister said Canada will be fine, there is nothing to worry about. They should have seen this coming a mile away. President Trump had been saying he would do this. He was elected three weeks ago. We would think the Prime Minister would have been furiously planning and preparing, meeting with the premiers and talking about a counter-plan during that time.
Now we learn that since the threat happened, he has come up with exactly one response. He is going to hold a Zoom call tomorrow. The media is absolutely captivated by this development that there is going to be a Zoom call between 11 or 12 politicians and that this is somehow going to solve the problem. We need a real plan and real action that will defend our economy and our security and, most of all, put Canada first.
We need a real Canada first plan for the economy and security.
First, the debate is over. There can be no tax increases. The tax increases the Prime Minister proposed on work, investment and energy were irresponsible and destructive all along, but now they are economic suicide.
Let us think about the impact that a 61¢-a-litre carbon tax would have when the tax is zero south of the border. President Trump has made it clear that he wants our jobs and businesses. We can only imagine his economic development teams calling trucking companies, factories and forestry enterprises telling them they are facing a 61¢-a-litre carbon tax north of the border, but that if they drive 50 kilometres south, there is no carbon tax. By the way, business and personal taxes are already much lower in the U.S. and will drop further. There will be a powerful sucking sound of jobs, businesses and money leaving our country to enrich the United States.
This is like a tariff imposed by our own government on our own economy. Compounded with a rail tariff from the United States of America, this would cripple our economy. Therefore, we are calling for the Prime Minister to announce today that he will cancel all tax increases on energy, on work and on businesses. Let us give our people a fighting chance to save their jobs.
Second, Canadian energy is not the enemy. Our energy sector is our number one net export, yet the Prime Minister has made it explicit that he wants to phase out that sector. He has blocked two pipelines. He blocked the Teck Frontier mine and has prevented us from building even a single, solitary LNG liquefaction plant, which by the way would have allowed us to ship our natural gas to countries other than the United States. Right now, because the Prime Minister has blocked LNG liquefaction on both coasts, we are stuck giving every single cubic foot of LNG we export to the Americans, on their terms, so they can liquefy it, upgrade it and turn it into a profit, something to which presumably the 25% tariff would apply.
We need to end this madness. First of all, we must announce, here and now, the cancellation of the production cut for the Canadian oil and gas sector.
We need to announce today that we are going to fast-track the approval of LNG liquefaction plants for export overseas, not just to the United States, in order to displace coal, reduce global emissions, and sidestep the U.S.'s monopoly control over our natural gas.
If we approve LNG liquefaction plants, we can take advantage of the shipping distances to both Asia and Europe, which are half as long compared to those of the Americans. We should go around the Americans and send out our gas to displace dirty dictator energy, reduce coal-fire burning and use our clean Canadian hydro to liquefy it. We can send it off to Europe to break the European dependence on Putin and turn dollars for dictators into paycheques for the people in this country.
We have to rebuild our military. The link between defence and the economy is now clear. Our allies, especially the Americans, expect us to be able to defend the continent alongside them and to confront the real threats to our security.
Looking at the state of our military, it is severely weakened after nine years of the Prime Minister. In 2023, Canada spent more money on consultants and professional services than we did on our army, navy and air force combined. The army spent $34 million on new sleeping bags that are not even suitable for Canadian winters. Half of military vehicles are not fit to deploy. We have run out of ammunition, 155-millimetre artillery shells, with no plans to reload. The Prime Minister spends millions on Liberal-linked green companies, but he is not able to provide the necessary shells and ammo to fire on a potential future enemy. The Liberal government has now announced that it will cut a further billion dollars from the budget.
Canadian troops in Latvia had to buy their own helmets, rain gear and vests. Canadian troops in Poland are not being reimbursed for their meals. DND is hiking rents on soldiers, even as it struggles to retain and recruit members. The military is short 16,500 servicemen and servicewomen, but only recruited a total of 4,000 in all of last year.
Weird, woke and wasteful obsessions undermine our military and drive down recruitment. The reason the Canadian military cannot recruit is that young men and women do not want anything to do with the divisive identity politics that are being imposed on the forces by the Liberal government. However, rather than fixing this problem, the minister in question is more worried about banning a navy marching song that is not politically correct.
The woke political agenda is dividing us and distracting us from our work. Young men and women want nothing to do with the woke agenda. They want to fight for our country. They want to be proud of the Canadian flag.
We are going to get rid of the woke political agenda and recruit proud young Canadians to support our armed forces.
We will have a warrior culture, not a woke culture.
We know this is all going to cost money, and that will be difficult because we will inherit a dumpster fire of a budget. We know that Canadian families are the most indebted in the G7. The national debt has doubled in size, and the Prime Minister's spending is still out of control. He has added more debt than the 22 prior prime ministers combined and keeps piling it on. By the way, his big priority now is to take GST off potato chips. Imagine that being the economic priority in the environment we are in today.
The Conservatives have a real plan, a plan that we will build out between now and the next election. It is a common-sense plan that will cut back on foreign aid to dictators, terrorists and global bureaucracies. It will eliminate useless back office bureaucracies and procurement boondoggles, and redirect the billions in savings to rebuilding our forces.
This is how we will do it. We will expand our presence in the north to keep Beijing and the Russians out. We will secure the continent against attacks and threats with the world's best cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and optical and drone technology. We will expand the reserves and make sure they are trained for both the military and civilian economy so they are ready to be called on, God forbid, in the event of war. We will get more bang for our buck, as we proved we could do under the previous Conservative government.
Yes, we had a lean, mean fighting machine. Yes, we were efficient. However, under the previous Conservative government, with that efficient spending, we were able to buy five Globemasters, a massive strategic aircraft; 17 Hercules aircraft; Chinook helicopters; and Leopard 2 tanks, and we refurbished our refuelling vessels. The list goes on. By the way, we were able to help our American friends destroy ISIS and al Qaeda. At that time, they had no concerns about us carrying our weight because we were punching above our weight, which protected our security and our economy.
Then there is the border. We need to resecure our border as part of this plan. CBS reported:
...the Department of Justice charged Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani citizen living in Canada, with plotting to conduct an ISIS inspired attack on a New York Jewish Center.... Khan was arrested in Ormstown in Quebec, Canada, just 12 miles from the U.S....
This is on top of another ISIS fighter who came into Canada and got citizenship after allegedly being videotaped cutting up a human body on a crucifix in the Middle East.
We have to screen people coming into our country. We have to identify threats and interrupt them before they harm us or our allies. There are 4.9 million permits and visas for people in Canada today who are not citizens or permanent residents that will run out in December of next year. Many of them are great people, but when their permits run out and they are not renewed, they must leave.
We need a plan from the government on how it is going to get these millions of people to go back to their home countries and not be tempted by a stronger U.S. economy to cross into the U.S., thus threatening the security of the border and turning the Americans against us. We must also crack down on drugs, scan shipping containers and get our people into treatment and recovery to bring them home drug-free, not to please Donald Trump but to prevent more tragic deaths of our people.
All of this is to say that we need to put our country and our people first. In the words of Laurier, the great motto must be “Canada first, Canada last, Canada always”.
