Madam Speaker, let us follow the line here. The leader of the Conservative Party has dictated to his caucus that they have to say whatever he says. By the way, according to Conservative MPs, they are being watched; if they do not say the right thing, they are in trouble. If they say the right things and they repeat the slogans, they get the gold stars. I am not saying that; Conservative MPs are.
When we talk about the GST, the decision has been made. This gets to the flip-flop. We now have the leader of the Conservative Party telling Conservative members of Parliament that the law is they have to say no to their constituents about giving them a holiday on GST products. I find that shameful. At the end of the day, every Conservative is going to stand up and vote no to giving that GST break on numerous commodities to their constituents.
They will come up with all sorts of lame excuses as to why they say no. However, before they think about those lame excuses, I will remind them of what Erin O'Toole, the former leader of the Conservative Party, said. He said, “We will remove GST for the month of December on purchases from retail stores to provide immediate relief for cost of living.” This is what the then leader of the Conservative Party said. Interestingly, the current leader of the Conservative Party not only liked the idea but also retweeted Erin O'Toole's tweet. For Conservatives who say they are not on social media, I trust they read their election platform book. If we look on page 51, it talks about a “GST holiday”.
On the one hand, the Conservatives are saying it is a bad idea today. On the other, not that long ago, they were telling Canadians that this is what they would do if they were in government. I want members to tell me something: How do we define hypocrisy? One only needs to take a look at this policy or the policy on the price of pollution. The price of pollution was also made reference to earlier today; we had 300-plus Conservative candidates going around to Canadians, just as they did on the GST break. They said that, in December, they were going to give Canadians a GST tax break; by the way, they also supported a price on pollution, which is a carbon tax. The Conservatives supported it.
The election came, and we got the Conservatives doing a couple of somersaults or flip-flops on the ideas. Now, all of them say no to the GST break we are trying to provide, which they supported in the last election platform, with their former leader tweeting on the issue. We see that every day. They are going to say no to that; at the same time, they no longer support what they told Canadians in regard to the price on pollution.
To add insult to injury, instead of giving that tax break to constituents, they are also going to be cutting the carbon rebates, taking more money out of the pockets of Canadians. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has made it very clear that 80% of Canadians have a net gain when it comes to the carbon rebate versus the carbon tax. However, the leader of the Conservative Party has dictated to his minions that they have to say what he is saying; if they do not, they are in trouble.
We can ask the member for Abbotsford what happened to him when he went offside after the leader of the Conservative Party said he was going to fire the Governor of the Bank of Canada. Where is he nowadays? What role did he play prior to that statement? Conservatives know that if they are not in step with the leader of the Conservative Party, they do not have a place within that Conservative caucus. At the very least, they will be sitting way in the back. There are examples of that.