Madam Speaker, the school of wackonomics is open, and the Liberal-NDP Prime Minister is the dean. What will people learn in this school? They will learn that budgets balance themselves, that the economy is people and absolutely not numbers and that somehow raising taxes will put out forest fires.
The newest graduate, who just graduated with a Ph.D. in wackonomics, is none other than the out-of-touch Liberal finance minister. She learned that once Canadians are put into a cost of living crisis, they can be told to solve it by cancelling Disney+. If they cannot afford gas, groceries and home heating because the government has raised the carbon tax scam, they can buy a bike for themselves, especially those who live in rural Canada.
We have had nine years of an out-of-touch government that has been nothing short of wacko. Its wacko policies are the reason why today we are seeing two million Canadians going to a food bank in a single month, with a million more projected for this year. Now we have found out that one in four Canadians is living in poverty. Wacko, extreme, woke policies have put Canadians in this position today.
Speaking of schools, schools have students. Today, after nine years of the Liberal government, students are going through a housing hell. In fact, all Canadians are living through a housing hell. It is because the government spent $90 billion on housing, only to double housing costs. Not only did it do that, but housing starts have declined in this country according to its own housing department, the CMHC. However, the government still shovels millions of dollars in bonuses to the department that has caused this issue under one of the most incompetent housing ministers, previously the most incompetent immigration minister, in Canadian history. High interest rates are a massive barrier to home builders. This is what we are hearing from every home builder and developer and even those who want to get into homebuilding.
How did we get here? How did interest rates get so high? It is because when the Liberal-NDP government spent more than every single government before it combined, it created a cost of living and inflation crisis. In fact, 40-year highs in inflation have happened. It had a lot of wasteful spending too, and what did that do? That made the Bank of Canada raise interest rates at the most rapid rate in Canadian history.
That is why Canada, according to the IMF, is now most at risk of a mortgage default crisis. It is this high rate of interest that is stopping homebuilding. It is putting Canadians in a bind and taking more and more from their paycheques every single month. Now OSFI, which testified at the finance committee, is warning about a price shock, as mortgage renewals could see a 50% increase in price.
I can imagine when the finance minister and Prime Minister told people to borrow as much as they wanted because interest rates would stay low for a very long time. What they did not know was that the incompetent Liberal-NDP government would pour billions of dollars of fuel on the inflationary fire that it started, making interest rates go up. Now, when people renew their mortgages, they are sometimes renewing at double or triple the rate. That is not what they were promised. They were supposed a “responsible government”. What they ended up getting was a housing hell, and a high-debt, high-tax, high-spend government, which put them in this position.
Now we are seeing people with good-paying jobs, like nurses and teachers, living in their cars, and students who have to live under bridges. In some cases, 16 students are living in one small space. It is because the Liberal government doubled their rents and doubled their mortgages, and now they are in a housing hell.
We also found out that delinquencies are on the rise. It is because Canadians have to shoulder the burden of nine years of bad policy-making. It put them in that position.
I recently talked to a single mom in my community who has three kids. She said that she left an abusive relationship and moved out on her own. Of course, she is one of the people whose rent has doubled. It went up. It has doubled over the last nine years, but recently, she had a $300 increase in her rent. For a single mom with three kids, it was already hard enough to pay for gas, groceries and home heating, so what did she do? She had to move in with her abusive ex-husband because she could not afford day care and could not afford to buy food. In fact, she was already starting to skip meals. She is one of the one in four experiencing food insecurity.
When I spoke to her, she had the exact same story: It was not like this before. She came here as an immigrant and did everything right. She went to school here. She got a job. She had kids. She was married at one time. However, all she got was a government that worked against her, that raised her taxes and that made her cost of living more and more expensive.
This is not the only story. There are millions of Canadians in this kind of situation, to the point where people are asking why they moved to this country. Most of them are now thinking about leaving. Last year, more than 400,000 people left Canada. The top two reasons were the high cost of living and their credentials were not recognized, especially those who moved here as immigrants.
What did the government decide to do? It thought it was a brilliant idea to jack up the carbon tax scam. We found out last month that again rents are at the highest rate they have ever been. On top of that, for these same people, these Canadians who are trying to get to work in their car, trying to buy nutritious meals for their kids and themselves or trying to stay warm in the winter, all of those costs went up by 23% because the government jacked up the carbon tax scam by 23%.
This should be a wake-up call for the out-of-touch government. It should be an absolute wake-up call given the poverty report that came out today. We now know that we cannot believe anything that comes out of the government's mouth. It did not tell the truth about how many people were in poverty. That was proven today. We have found out that one in four Canadians could possibly be living in poverty. That is unheard of in this country. It was never like this before. It just goes to show that everything the government has done has made life worse for everyday Canadians.
We hear the government say over and over again that life has never been better for everyone here, that they should enjoy what they have and enjoy what it gives them. However, the number of Canadians in poverty, which we heard about today, could rise. It is 30% for Canadians aged 18 to 30 and 44.5% for single-parent households, while 42% of renters cannot afford two or more household essentials. Some 21.7% of Canadians cannot cover an unexpected expense of more than $500, while 8.8% of Canadians cannot pay their bills on time. On top of this, 7.2% of Canadians cannot afford to heat or cool their homes. The truth is that working Canadians will have to foot the bill for the government's spending once again.
The government talks about tax fairness. Never have Canadians had a bigger tax burden than after nine years of the Liberal-NDP government.
Let us start with the carbon tax, a scam that it hid from Canadians recently. Did members know that it had a gag order on the PBO, which was asking to release a report, a damning report that proved the carbon tax scam committed $30 billion of economic vandalism? That means $30 billion was taken away from the economy, taken away from the paycheques of workers and taken away from investments into things like equipment and other capital investments.
It is no wonder Canada's productivity is worse than it was in 2014. In fact, there are seven straight quarters of productivity decline. What does that mean? To the average person, that means Canadians are poorer, and it is easy to tie that in with the poverty report that we see today. Despite the sunshine that the Liberal-NDP government tries to portray with its economic vandalism over the last nine years, the reality is that Canadians are poorer than they have ever been before, and it is only getting worse. The Liberals introduced tax hikes, such as the carbon tax scam, but they hid the damning report from their department. It took the PBO's courage, after Conservatives put on pressure, to release the report that proves there was $30 billion of hidden costs in the scam on Canadians.
In fact, because the Conservatives put the pressure on and forced the papers to be released, to no surprise, the day that the vote was supposed to happen, the Liberals released the report. The report proved what Canadians already know, which is that the Prime Minister and the carbon tax scam are not worth the cost. The carbon tax has raised the cost of gas, groceries and home heating. Because of the tax, costs have gone up to our farmers, to our truckers and to everyone else. That is why we are seeing the record rise in poverty in this country.
The Liberals sold the scam as something that would automatically fix the environment. They tell us that, if we pay a bit more tax, they will pour it over top of the forest fires and put them out. The reality is that emissions have gone up and the forest fires have not gone. Every claim that the government had that the carbon tax scam was to fix the environment was false. The government's own department officials admitted that they do not tie in how much of the carbon tax scam is related to so-called fixing climate change, which is what the Liberals say. It does not work like that, and that is why they are not tracking it. Even they know it is not worth the cost.
Just yesterday, the PBO admitted to our common-sense Conservatives that the cost of climate change would have no effect on the cost of the carbon tax scam to Canadians. The PBO proved it. People just have to pull up the blues from the committee yesterday, and it is clear to see that the Liberals keep jacking up the carbon tax, but it has done nothing to fix the environment. How embarrassing that is for a government whose members claim to be stalwarts of the economy and the environment, but their ranking on the climate change index fell. It fell four spots, to 62 out of 67 on the world stage, but it is on par with the embarrassing Prime Minister, who jet-sets around the world just to embarrass Canada further. We need serious leadership once again in this country.
The PBO also said that Canadians pay more into the tax than what they get back. The claim that eight out of 10 Canadians get more back in rebates than what they pay into it is false, and the PBO proved that, over and over again. Carbon tax scam 1, which the PBO did costing and an analysis on, proves that a majority of Canadians, six out of 10 households, are worse off because of this scam compared to what they get back in rebates.
There is another part to this whole thing. It is called carbon tax scam 2, the clean fuel regulations. That has zero rebate, and it affects every single Canadian in every province. The PBO, yesterday, admitted to me that, if a majority of Canadian households are worse off with carbon tax scam 1, which has the phony rebates, then when we factor in carbon tax scam 2, which has no rebates, overall, a majority of households are still worse off. Therefore, the Liberals' claim that it leaves Canadians better off is false, and the claim keeps being proven wrong over and over again.
On top of all of that, the Liberals introduced a job-killing capital gains tax hike, which is a direct attack on hard-working farmers, fishermen, physicians, tradespeople, home builders and, of course, small business owners. Today, the finance committee heard from a plumber who talked about how his small business is his retirement savings. He did not put money into RRSPs, and he does not have a pension because he put all of his time, effort and money into his business. He admits that he is not rich. He is not one of the ultrarich that the government keeps talking about. He did everything right. He worked as hard as he could to leave something for his kids, his grandkids and their kids. However, on par with the Liberal-NDP government, hard work is punished in this country.
I know many people who live in Calgary Forest Lawn who left their home countries and took a big risk to come here. They took the risk because they wanted to go to a country where they were promised that, if they worked hard, they could make something of themselves and leave something for their kids. After nine years of the Liberal-NDP government's failed economic policies, the Canadian dream they were promised is broken. It is gone. That is why nine out of 10 young people say they have lost the dream of home ownership. That is why two million Canadians are going to food banks in a single month, and people with good jobs are living in their cars or tents.
They have a government that will not stop attacking their success. In fact, it vilifies success. The greedy government will do anything to fill its coffers. The only people it really cares about are rich Liberal insiders, like those with the $22 billion in consultant fees that it paid. Not all Canadians are well connected like that. They wish they were, but the government is doing everything it can to work against hard-working Canadians.
We heard from a farmer today who only wanted to work hard, make food for Canadians and leave his farm to his four daughters. However, once again, this job-killing capital gains tax hike would ensure that less will go to his kids and their kids and more will go to the greedy government.
As I mentioned before, Canada is in a productivity crisis. GDP per person has gone down. That is the definition of how successful people are in this country. It has gone down, and it continues to go down. The government drove away $460 billion of investment that went to the U.S. It made sure that U.S. workers get paid better than Canadians. That means Canadian workers get 58¢ of investment for every dollar of investment that goes to an American worker. The government's high-tax, high-spend ideology has driven away investment and workers from this country. What did that do? That made talent leave as well and, with that, made Canadians poorer.
I will tell Canadians that hope is on the horizon. It was not like this before the Liberal-NDP government, and it will not be like that after it is gone. After the next carbon tax election, when the member for Carleton would become the prime minister of this country, Canadians would get what they deserve and what they have been promised by this common-sense Conservative government. We would axe the tax. We would take the tax off for good for everybody and bring down the cost of gas, groceries and home heating. We would build the homes by incentivizing municipalities to build. We would fix the budget and bring in a dollar-for-dollar law. Indeed, we would make sure that income taxes are lower, simpler and fairer for all Canadians and not punish hard work as we have seen being done under the government.
We would also stop the crime. We have seen drugs, disorder and chaos increase all across the country. We would put an end to that. We would once again bring home the Canadian dream of working hard and being able to accomplish great things. We would bring it home.
