Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House this evening to speak to the motion before the House today. It is a pleasure and a privilege every day to represent the people of West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country. I am grateful to be in the House, to work on matters and to do the business of the nation. This is why it is a little unfortunate that, for the second time this week, we are basically debating the same motion. There are many issues we could be discussing today and parts of the business of government that we could be looking into. I think it is unfortunate that we are again debating a motion from the Conservative Party to stop our work as parliamentarians.
Today, I want to comment on the motion before us and the common slogans we hear from the Conservatives. I want to set the record straight about what their slogans really mean. I am going to go through them one by one.
When Conservatives say that we should axe the tax, they are really talking about axing the facts. I want to get into this because we have seen a disproportionate amount of time of the House spent talking about the carbon tax, and the Conservatives consistently misrepresent what this is. It is a measure that is going to contribute 40% of Canada's emissions reductions. It is also an affordability measure because 80% of Canadians get more money back with the rebate than they end up paying into it. This is particularly so for low-to-modest income Canadians, who get a disproportionate amount when we consider the costs and benefits. However, the Conservatives do not like these facts or the fact that 300 economists have confirmed this, because they like to use alternative facts.
What is worse is that Conservatives also plan on proposing to get rid of the industrial carbon pricing system, which would let the biggest polluters off for free. There are, of course, other ways to reduce emissions, which cost more and take many more years to roll out. However, that is actually what they want. What do they say will happen in place? They say that we will have technology, not taxes. However, the only technology they talk about has not been proven to work right now or is not going to be available for many years. We can think of such things as wide-scale applications of carbon capture and small modular reactors for nuclear. We do not hear them talk about renewable energy or anything that is able to reduce emissions in the short term. We can look at what their cousins in Alberta have done, when they did everything they could to cancel a renewable energy industry that was the envy of the country. In the process, they chased away billions of dollars of investment. Their real plan is to distract by talking about the carbon tax, to delay more action and to dismiss the idea that we need to take real action to safeguard our climate and our future.
This should not be surprising; it is the modus operandi of Conservatives. When they were last in power, they did quite a bit of work to axe the facts by doing such things as ending the long-form census and reducing funding for Stats Canada. Without any notice, through an omnibus legislation, they gutted the Fisheries Act and the Environmental Assessment Act. They also muzzled scientists so that they could not speak to the public about any of the science that they were doing, especially on climate change. We also know that they did their best to declare that environmental NGOs were violent criminal groups so that they could use the RCMP to monitor them and weaponize the CRA to go after their charitable status. This was done because they want to be able to base government decisions on slogans and ideology rather than on science and evidence. We know this is real because Conservatives do not believe that climate change is real or that immediate action is required to address it.
They also say that they plan to build homes, but what they are actually proposing is to block homes. When the Conservatives were last in power, housing construction was as low as 150,000 units in a year, a number that we nearly doubled in 2022. When the Leader of the Opposition was in charge of the housing file, a measly six affordable units were built across the country. Throughout this time, 800,000 affordable units were lost because he does not believe in things like cooperative housing, which he refers to as Soviet-style housing. At this time, they completely abdicated all responsibility for getting housing built and downloaded it to the provinces and municipalities. We are still paying the price for that today.
To give some perspective, in my riding alone in the last five years, during which I have had the pleasure of serving as representative, the government has supported over 1,000 below-market units that have been constructed. We have been steadily working with municipalities to support them to speed up the permitting process, and we see provinces like British Columbia that are doing that work as well.
What is the leader of the official opposition's strategy to build the homes? He wants to raise taxes on apartments and cut funding for programs that are getting housing built. Rather than work with municipalities, he and his B.C. Conservative brethren plan to scrap policies that are getting gentle density going in cities and restrict infrastructure funding. I do not understand the magical thinking that if we get rid of gentle density, we will get more housing, but maybe the Conservatives' plan is to do more things like paving over the greenbelt.
Trying to bully municipalities into getting housing built under these restrictions, by saying they would restrict infrastructure funding, does not actually mean that much, considering the amount of funding the Conservatives provided for infrastructure, which, among other things, was 13 times less than the amount of funding for transit we have provided.
The other thing the Conservatives like to talk about is fixing the budget, but their history has really been about gutting the budget. The Conservatives like to think of themselves as good stewards of the public finances, but the reality is that their last two administrations in office completely exploded the budget. The Conservatives racked up more debt than all previous prime ministers combined. The only balanced budget that the Harper government ran was a few months after it won office in 2006, when it inherited surpluses. It desperately and unsuccessfully tried to balance the budget in 2015 by selling off GM stock for a song.
Let us talk about what the Conservatives plan to do with the budget. They cut services before. They cut military spending to a record low, and they provided huge giveaways to some of the most wealthy people in the country. The hope of the Conservative ideology of trickle-down economics, or trumped-up economics, is that by cutting services and cutting taxes, they would massively grow the economy. However, again the facts just do not bear that out. That is probably why they want some alternative facts to the reality that in the last year of when the Conservatives were in office, GDP dropped almost 14%.
What are the Conservatives planning to do now? They are planning to cut child care programs, end the dental care program that is already providing dental insurance for 750,000 Canadians, end programs that are getting housing built right across the country and end programs that are positioning Canada's economy to thrive in a low-carbon future.
The last part of the Conservatives' plan is that they say they are going to stop the crime. However, I would more appropriately refer to the plan as ditching the charter. They want to make us think that we are experiencing some massive crime wave, that crime is at an all-time high, but in fact when we look at the data, we see that the crime rate is actually lower than it was in many years when the Conservatives were in office.
The Conservatives believe that if they fearmonger, people will not pay attention to the facts. What did the Conservatives do in the past? They said that by taking tough-on-crime measures, by passing legislation that involved very long mandatory minimum sentences, they were able to keep people safe. In practice, there was just an overincarceration of people in many minority groups in Canada, and the courts threw the legislation out for being incompatible with the charter.
On top of that, the Conservatives gutted funding for the RCMP, the CBSA and crime prevention programs, and they disbanded the Integrated Proceeds of Crime Section, which was tackling money laundering. These things, all together, put us in a very difficult position, and crimes like money laundering have flourished since then. One thing that all Canadians should be very concerned about is that the leader of the official opposition is openly saying that he plans to sidestep the charter and invoke the notwithstanding clause.
When we look at what the Conservatives actually intend to do compared to what they are saying, we see what their hidden agenda is. Their plan for project 2025 is not one that Canadians want. Canadians want an economy that works for everyone, where the least fortunate people are supported, and that we can build for a prosperous future and tackle the challenges we have today. That is why I will be voting against the motion.