Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today, and always, to address the House.
I want to start by drilling down on the concept of common sense. Members in the House, and those who follow the debates elsewhere, will know that Conservatives speak a lot about the concept of common sense. We have been highlighting the importance of restoring common sense in government decision-making.
I have observed that our critics across the way, and some of their friends online, have responded by denigrating the use of the term “common sense”. Our critics say they do not really know what we mean by common sense. The fact that the government is claiming not to understand what is meant or implied by common sense actually, I think, demonstrates the problem in substantial measure. The concept of common sense has a history and a meaning that are worth reflecting on and that used to be well understood. The fact that the government, in particular, does not know what common sense is shows how far we have gone. However, for the government's benefit, I think it is worth delving a bit into this concept and why it is important to restore common-sense decision-making in this country.
Let me say first, at a general level, that we all know ideas have practical consequences. We can see over time whether an idea works when implemented. A critical test of an idea is the practical consequences it creates in the real world. When we consider, in our policy debates, the validity of an idea, we need to ask whether that idea will work in practice, whether it produces the effects it is intended to produce and whether it contributes to or undermines human flourishing.
Most people in their regular lives hold ideas that they also practise. As they practise the ideas they profess, their lives demonstrate the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the ideas they profess and practise. I would see this happen a lot, by the way, thinking back, with friends I had in university. They would develop some idea about human behaviour, maybe through a class, a discussion or something they read, put that idea into practice, and then reap the consequences, thus becoming either an example or a cautionary tale as a result. More often than not, in my recollection, it was a cautionary tale. These were little, but profound, demonstrations of John Stuart Mill's theory on the value of experiments in living: that free people engage in experiments in living, which others can then observe, and the observation of experiments in living leads to the collective formation of norms that work and lead to greater human flourishing.
The things that most people learn and practise in order to live well-ordered, healthy, happy lives are what we have come to call common sense. There is no central repository of the information that we call common sense, but the concept still has profound meaning. It refers to the things most normal people have come to know by experience and perhaps by listening to elders in their lives who have shared from their experience. Experiments in living over time produce general insights that most people recognize as true, the things most people know by experience to be right and sensible.
If a person comes up with a new, novel theory, they might well posit that it is true, but they could not consider it common sense. New, novel theories often challenge common sense, and they are often wrong; not always, but the conservatism that we champion on this side of the House is the idea that we should at least be cautious and deferential when implementing changes in order to preserve the common-sense wisdom of the past. A lot of harm has been done through the capricious application of someone's idea of what would be a good and interesting experiment.
Let us consider one example of this in the policy space, so-called modern monetary theory. This is the theory that a government can spend as much as it wants without being constrained by revenue or worried about the consequences. Some way, somehow, modern monetary theory posits that a government can just run massive deficits in perpetuity. Needless to say, proponents of this radical theory would not consider this theory to be common sense. They would not even pretend it was common sense, because it is novel and radical. Even proponents, I think, would acknowledge it is both novel and radical.
I think we can say that, to a substantial extent, modern monetary theory has been tried in Canada by the government, which no longer believes that it ever needs to target the balancing of the budget and has more than doubled our national debt in the last nine years it has been in office.
This radical, novel theory has been tried and I think we can see now, or most people can see, that it has clearly failed. There are many other new and novel theories this government has tried that have failed as well. It tried experimenting with a carbon tax. It tried experimenting with very high levels of non-permanent immigration in the absence of a housing policy to make up for the need that was thus created. It tried experimenting with hard-drug decriminalization. This is just to name a few examples of radical, novel experiments that this government imposed on this great country.
These were experiments in policy and all of them failed. They were ideas that nine years ago might have sounded good to some people in theory, but we no longer need to simply debate these ideas as theory because we can see them in practice and we can see they have failed in practice.
They are also ideas that I think we can say violated common sense. They went against things we know and have known to be true for a long time about the kinds of policies that work and the kinds that do not. The government tried radical new ideas and these radical new ideas did not work. When Conservatives talk about restoring common sense, we mean, precisely, pushing back against these sorts of radical experiments and restoring an application of long-standing wisdom.
We would make decisions that are rooted in the common-sense experience of real people. We would replace the government's weak, weird, woke and wasteful policies with common-sense conservatism, with ideas rooted in the conclusive experience of history and the things normal people know from experience to be true.
I want to make one other observation about common sense, and that is that one of the biggest attacks we see on common sense is from privileged people who promote their luxury beliefs at the expense of everyone else. Luxury beliefs are ideas promoted by privileged people, often not actually practised by the people promoting them, that confer on the promoter a kind of social recognition and status.
Here are a few examples: rich and privileged people pushing calls to defund the police while themselves relying on private security or living in gated communities; politicians denouncing choice in education while finding workarounds for their own families; and leaders pushing for higher taxes on small businesses while ensuring they will never have to pay those higher taxes themselves. These are examples of luxury beliefs where the proponents of these radical ideas have the power and the privilege to protect themselves from the impacts of the weird experiments. They are running an experiment, but they are stepping out of the lab, so they are not affected. A normal person living in the real world cannot afford to ignore common sense for long, because a lack of common sense will catch up with them. It will have consequences for their life that they and others notice and that will lead to a course correction.
Well-functioning democracies, by protecting the voice of the common people in decision-making, maximize the chance that collective decisions will be informed by common sense. The common people are often most in touch with common sense, because the common people have to live with the consequences of collective decisions. However, a small, privileged elite can often continue, even for a long time, to hold, promote and govern on the basis of a narrow set of luxury beliefs that defy common sense, while protecting themselves from the impact of those decisions.
This fundamentally defines the record and practice of the current government: making decisions based on luxury beliefs that its members can insulate themselves from and that in reality have devastating impacts on the lives of everyday Canadians.
The Prime Minister is generally insulated from the impacts of his carbon tax. He will not even share information about the amount of greenhouse gases his own activities produce. We have sought that information before and have not received it. He has a taxpayer-funded home and has never struggled to afford a home because of inherited wealth. He has the privilege to protect himself from inflation and he does not have to live in communities devastated by his own dangerous drug decriminalization policies.
The Prime Minister persists in his own luxury beliefs because he does not see or experience those real-world consequences. Today, many Canadians, who once voted for him, can see the failure of his luxury beliefs and see the urgency of our call in response to these radical experiments. Our call is for a return to common sense, to axe the tax, to build the homes, to fix the budget and to stop the crime, to reverse these radical policies and replace them with clear common-sense priorities.
Conservatives' priorities notably correspond to these specific areas of NDP-Liberal failed experiments. They brought in a carbon tax, which was an experimental idea. It was the theory that if we increase the cost of everything, this will lead to less consumption in areas that produce carbon emissions. This failed because, as history has shown us, technological change leads to changes in behaviour. It was not through taxes on horses that we saw the transition to the automobile. It was through the invention of the automobile.
I remember seeing a post online of someone showing a picture of a street before the invention of the car and after the invention of the car, and it showed how quickly things can change. The point is that things changed because new alternatives become available that allow people to adapt. We would not have seen that change through a tax on horses. It just would have made taking a horse and buggy more expensive.
The carbon tax was a theory. It was tried. It has not worked. The government has not reached its targets at all. There are other countries that have pursued other policies that I think have been more effective than the actions of the government. The Conservatives' response is to reject the Liberals' radical experimentation and restore common sense in this area with our proposal to axe the tax.
When it comes to another area of experimentation, the Liberals brought in changes around housing and immigration. They were experimental changes. They radically increased non-permanent immigration to this country. They did not have any plans around home construction. In fact, fewer homes are being built today than were built in this country in the 1970s, despite the growth in population.
This experiment of not having enough homes to meet the needs of the population was a radical experiment. Individual members of the government are insulated from the impacts of the experiment, but it was an experiment that failed. In response to that, we want to champion a return to common sense, the common-sense proposal to build the homes.
Then, as I already talked about, the Liberals experimented with modern monetary theory. They wanted to try something new. They tried dramatically increasing spending and did not worry about, at any point, balancing the budget. It was a radical, novel idea. I think many people would say it would be nice if that was true. It would be nice if we could spend infinitely without needing to worry about where the money came from, but that is just not how the world works.
Disraeli famously said that the facts of life are conservative. What goes up must come down. There is a basic reality the experimentation defied. The Liberals acted on fiscal policy, and continue to act on fiscal policy, in defiance of basic common sense. The wisdom that people naturally gather over time by living normal lives, is that they realize that they cannot spend money they do not have, and if they spend money they do not have, eventually it is going to catch up to them. That is common sense.
The government tried to defy common sense. It did not work. In response to that failure, the Conservatives have a proposal to fix the budget. It is to institute a dollar-for-dollar rule, which restores common sense. If we are going to spend a dollar on something, that dollar has to come from somewhere. We cannot spend money we do not have, and if we have that money, it had to come from somewhere. It is simply asking government to discipline itself to that common-sense reality.
That is our plan to fix the budget: axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and finally stop the crime. We have seen radical experiments from the Liberals on crime. When they took office, they made substantial changes to the bail system. We can see, if we look at the data on violent crime in this country, how violent crime was going down under Stephen Harper, and it started to go up when the Prime Minister took office. It is because the Liberals made specific policy changes—
