Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-4 and to the growing affordability crisis gripping Canadians from coast to coast. Nowhere is it felt more sharply than in my own riding of Vernon—Lake Country—Monashee. The bill fails to meet the moment, as so many introduced by the Liberal government do. It offers slogans instead of solutions and bureaucracy instead of hope.
While Ottawa debates, Canadian families are being forced to make choices that no one in a country as rich in resources as Canada should ever have to make, choices between heating their home and feeding their children. In the Okanagan, Lumby, Nakusp and the Slocan Valley, I have spoken with parents who quietly started skipping meals so that their kids can eat. Seniors who worked their entire lives are now relying on food banks. For the first time ever, food banks in our communities are reporting record numbers of working families, people with jobs needing help just to get by.
This is not the Canada they were promised. The data is as stark as it is shameful. Food inflation in Canada is rising faster than in nearly every other G7 nation. While the United States, France and Germany have all seen food price growth start to level off, Canadian families are still paying more every single month. According to Statistics Canada, grocery prices have risen more than 20% since 2020. That is hundreds of dollars a month for the average family, yet the government continues to tax the very farmers and truckers who bring food to our table. It has tripled the carbon tax, which adds cost to every stage of the food supply chain, from the fertilizer on the farm to the fuel in the trucks and the power in the grocery store. The result is higher prices on every item in the shopping cart.
With Bill C-4, the government wants to expand bureaucracy and regulatory oversight at a time when Canadians are begging for economic relief, not more red tape.
Let us be clear about what this means for real families in my riding. In Armstrong, dozens of workers at Tolko Armstrong lumber and White Valley veneer were recently laid off. These are hard-working men and women, millwrights and forklift operators, all dedicated to a proud local industry.
Tolko's statement was clear. They are not shutting down because of a lack of markets. They are shutting down because of a lack of economical fibre and because regulatory policy has made it nearly impossible to compete. The situation is made worse by the softwood lumber tariffs still imposed by the United States, tariffs that the Liberal government has utterly failed to resolve. Those illegal tariffs have cost Canadian producers more than $8 billion in duty since 2017. This money could have gone to keeping mills open, workers employed and the community stable.
Instead, it has been siphoned away by an apparently unsolvable trade dispute that the government treats as an afterthought. To make matters worse, the folks who were laid off continue to be penalized by higher prices on the food they can no longer afford, prices that are directly attributable to Liberal actions.
Canadians deserve a government that stands up for forestry families in the North Okanagan and not one that leaves them behind. They deserve a government that protects our farmers and food producers, not one that taxes them into insolvency and treats their property like its own.
Canadians deserve a government that recognizes that affordability is not just an abstract policy. It is about whether a mother can afford milk for her kids, whether a senior can keep the heat on or whether a young couple can ever hope to buy a home.
The answer is not another bill that expands government reach. The answer is to restore economic discipline, to stop wasteful spending and to remove barriers to growth in every region of the country. It means fighting to end the softwood lumber tariffs once and for all, through strong, principled diplomacy backed by a government that actually defends Canadian workers. It means repealing the hidden industrial carbon tax that drives up prices on everything every single step of the way. In the end, the debate is not about partisanship. It is about priorities.
In Lumby, one father told me that he has been working two jobs since his forestry layoff but still cannot afford groceries and rent in the same month. This is the absurd cycle of Liberal economic policy: tax more, regulate more and make life more expensive for those who can least afford it, then add insult to injury by boasting about its handouts.
Bill C-4 was presented as a step toward making life more affordable, but, buried beneath the talking points, what we actually find is yet another expansion of government control, yet another layer of Ottawa intervention that would do nothing to lower grocery bills or pay the rent.
Instead of addressing the real drivers of inflation, which are overspending, overtaxation and over-regulation, the government keeps pretending it can spend its way out of the crisis it created by overspending in the first place. Let us remember that inflation did not just happen in Canada; it was made in Canada. It was made by a government that printed and borrowed half a trillion dollars, and then denied that it would cause inflation.
While ordinary Canadians tightened their belts, the government expanded its own. It increased the size of the public service by nearly 40% since 2015, yet federal services have never been slower. Passports, veteran benefits, EI claims and everything else takes longer and costs more, and the staff back in my riding can attest to that.
Canadians deserve better than this endless cycle of spending, taxing and gaslighting. They deserve leadership that believes in the strength of our workers, the promise of our industries and the common sense of the Canadian people. Do we believe in empowering Canadians to build, grow and thrive, or do we believe that Ottawa always knows best?
My constituents have made their answer clear. They want a government that gets out of the way, lets them work and lets them keep more of what they earn. They want affordable food, secure jobs and a future worth staying here in Canada for. Bill C-4 does not deliver that.
It is time for the government to stop managing decline and start building prosperity for the forestry workers in Lumby, for the families lining up at food banks in Vernon and for every Canadian who still believes that hard work should pay off.