Madam Speaker, I am glad I caught your eye, and I am glad you also caught the fact that I had mistakenly put my phone a little bit too close to the microphones. It is now far away.
I want to start by thanking the residents and constituents of my riding for again allowing me the opportunity to represent them in the House. We are now several years into this particular Parliament, but we all know that it is a great honour to be sent here to represent them. We speak on their behalf. We do not just speak for ourselves.
In preparation for speaking today, I did go through the many emails and phone notes I have written to myself from calls with constituents, people who have told me about the misery they are suffering through with the NDP-Liberal government's policies and Bill C-69 specifically, which is basically an encapsulation of many years of policy-making by the government that has led to the doubling of mortgage down payments and the doubling of rent.
I speak as a renter. My rent has gone up significantly, and I do not fault my landlord. He has no choice, because interest rates have much more than doubled. When an interest rate goes from 25 basis points or 50 basis points to 4.75%, that is a multifold increase. That is not a doubling; it is not a 4.5% increase. We are talking about a manyfold increase, like an 800% increase in some cases, on the interest people are paying on the total amount of their loan. I do not fault them.
We have seen the price of homes double since the Liberal government took over. We have seen the price of many goods go up significantly. It is the number one issue in my riding, the cost of living. It hits people in the grocery stores when they see it. It hits them at the pump when they go to refill their trucks or vehicles that they use to get their families around my riding. My riding is one of the bigger ones in Canada. Thankfully, the electoral boundaries commission is drastically shrinking it, by 40%. That will make it much easier for me to get back to everybody on time, those who make phone calls and send emails and those few who still send letters.
I often get asked the question, “What would Conservatives do?” I have taken the time to summarize a few things that, for me, are the highlights of what Conservatives would do. We have our main points that we make, and all parties do this. I often hear the NDP-Liberals accuse Conservatives throughout Canada of sloganeering. We are just making it simple for people to understand. There are vast amounts of information online, on YouTube, on social media. I trust Canadians to go through those things. If they are interested and curious about what Conservatives are proposing, there is an entire docuseries that, for example, the member for Carleton, the leader of His Majesty's opposition, has made, “Debtonation.” I highly recommend it. Those who are interested should go check it out.
I will start with “pay as you go”. It is a very simple idea. It has been time-tested. It has worked. In the U.S. Congress, between 1998 and 2002, when it was introduced, it basically said that for every new dollar of government spending, the current government had to find a dollar of cuts in current government programs or propose one dollar of new taxation to cover this cost. In the span of those four years, they were able to balance the budget of the United States government. That is a government that runs trillion-dollar deficits at this point.
Our national debt is in the trillions, but we do not run trillion-dollar deficits yet. I do not want to suggest anything. I am sure the Liberal government, if given half the opportunity, would reach that level. After all, as I remember it, there was a certain Prime Minister who promised to run small deficits, less than $10 billion for three years, and that never happened. The Prime Minister has run multi-billion dollar deficits ever since he was elected to office, and it has never stopped. In fact, none of the budgets that the Liberals have tabled since then have shown a balanced budget.
“Pay as you go” is a proposal from the Conservatives to adopt that would ensure that we could fix the federal budget. Fixing the federal budget would lead to lower interest rates. Lower interest rates would lead to lower housing costs and lower rents and, at the very minimum, stop this massive inflationary increase in the costs of everything.
It would make it easier for small businesses, like those of fishermen, giving them an opportunity to actually be able to afford new equipment. It would give them an opportunity to plan for their retirement and have the certainty that the equipment, goods, boats and everything else they use to run their business would have the same value at the end of the day, so they could retire with dignity.
The second thing is the building homes not bureaucracy act, which this House voted on. I find it interesting that one of the NDP members who spoke was trying to give a hard time to one of our members, the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster, saying that we had not proposed anything on housing. We proposed legislation on housing, legislation that they voted against, in fact. The NDP members voted with their coalition partners in the Liberal Party.
There is a proposal, the building homes not bureaucracy act. It went very specifically to the heart of what is going on in our country, which is that we have people at the very local level, in the planning departments of different cities, who are making it more difficult to increase density and, as is is in my community, to build more greenfield housing of single-family detached housing and low-rises. Calgary has generally done a really good job of building housing that is necessary, but so has the city of Edmonton.
As Calgarians, we do not often praise the city of Edmonton, but I used to live in Edmonton, and if I look at its housing costs over the last nine years, it probably has the smallest increases of any major metropolitan region. That is because, locally, they have decided to prioritize pricing and make sure that pricing stays low and affordable, so people can afford the homes that they want to live in, and there are different types of housing for different people to make sure they have the choices they need at different stages in their lives.
However, the building homes not bureaucracy act had provisions in it to ensure that we divested ourselves from federal government properties that are no longer necessary, to ensure that we can pass them over to developers to encourage them to build more housing and more development around TUCs, and also to cut CMHC's bonuses. This is the housing agency that is supposed to ensure we build sufficient amounts of housing. I have long been a critic of the CMHC. It does not matter which CEO has been there. It has completely failed in its mandate, so at minimum we should be cutting these bonuses, the performance base or whatever euphemism we want to use for the bonuses and the extra pay they are giving themselves when they are failing. We should not reward failure.
The government needs to cancel the carbon tax. It is very simple: Axe the tax. The carbon tax is adding on to the misery of all Canadians. We can see it in our grocery stores with the prices, but if we tax the farmer who makes the food, and we tax the shipper who takes the food to the producer who adds second-level value, and then they take it to the grocery store, all of those costs are being passed on through the entire system, and we have higher costs at the end of the day. That is simply how math works, and axing the tax is the solution.
What would we do to replace the tax? We are Conservatives. Generally, we do not like taxes. We would not replace it with any other tax. There are a lot of technological changes that we could do. There are a lot of things that we could do on the grid side in Canada to make sure we have a national grid, or something closer to a national grid, where there would be a better flow of electrical power between the provinces. We can do that through encouragement. We do not need to mandate things.
I watched the Minister of Environment mandate things, such as forcing Calgary Co-op, the grocery store of my choice, with 400,000 members in Calgary, almost a third of the city, to abandon its completely compostable bags. They are completely compostable in the city-owned compostable system, and the government is saying that they have single-use plastic in them. It is a compostable bag. Not even the ink is made of plastic. It is also compostable, but an insistence that Ottawa knows best is why we see so much division in this country and so few Liberal provincial governments left. There are so few of them left in existence.
I know many members wait for this, but I always have a Yiddish proverb. I have a great love for that language, and when a wise man and a fool are debating or arguing, there are two fools debating. That is what I feel while watching the Liberal cabinet when it has these disagreements about whose fault it is that there is a massive increase in mortgages and massive increase in housing prices and rentals. They seem to always point their fingers at somebody else. It is never their fault when things go wrong. It is always someone else's. It is as if they've not been in power for nine years.
The government members often, during question period especially, say that they will find the person who is responsible for this. They love labelling small business owners as too rich, with too much for their retirements, while the Liberals basically have golden-plated defined benefit plans that are afforded to them by the taxpayer. They should stop accusing those who create richness in our country and who contribute to the hiring in all of our communities. It is often that the government members are always looking for someone else to blame. It is the cabinet. It is just that person. I have not found a wise man among them yet, but I have found those fools who continuously blame Canadians for every single one of their mistakes.
As such, of course, I am going to be voting against Bill C-69. I have moved several amendments to it as well. It is also a matter of confidence, so I will also remind my constituents back home that on these types of matters, I have zero confidence in the NDP-Liberal government and this coalition, and we must vote this legislation down.
We have to have a carbon tax election, so let us axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
