Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on behalf of the right-all-along people of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke.
I would like to begin by congratulating my Liberal colleagues on their resilience. To be able to eat such a huge slice of humble pie and not choke on their own hypocrisy is impressive.
Nearly half the omnibus budget bill is just repealing Trudeau-era policies. For my colleagues across the aisle to have to admit to being wrong about so much without showing a single sign of humility really speaks to the resilience of Liberal arrogance. They admit they were wrong about the consumer carbon tax, the boat tax, the digital services tax, the capital gains tax and more, yet they still swagger into this chamber with the absolute confidence that this time they are right and know what is best for Canada's economy.
Based on the 600-page budget implementation bill, what the Prime Minister thinks best are massive piles of corporate welfare. Here is one example, from page iii of the budget bill: “providing a refundable investment tax credit to qualifying corporations and trusts for investments in certain clean electricity property”.
If any Canadians watching are wondering who the biggest investor in clean electricity is, I will give them a hint: It starts with “Brook” and ends with “field”. Last year, the clean electricity tax credit cost the treasury $22 million. This year, the tax credit will cost $1.5 billion; next year, it will cost $3.8 billion. By 2028, the government projects that it will cost $7.2 billion. That is 328 times what it cost last year for just one tax credit that will mostly flow to one company: Brookfield.
There is more. The budget is giving the Canada Infrastructure Bank $15 billion more. Maybe it is just a coincidence that the Clerk of the Privy Council was the former head of the Infrastructure Bank, but the Liberals are increasing its funding despite its failure to achieve its goal of using public money to attract private investment. We know the bank failed, because the government keeps telling us that it failed. Every Liberal budget has acknowledged the lack of private investment and the damage it is doing to our productivity.
The Infrastructure Bank failed so spectacularly that the Liberals created the Canada Growth Fund, with the identical mandate of using public money to attract private investment. In an act of corporate synergy that would make McKinsey & Company proud, the Brookfield government is leveraging the Canada Growth Fund to catalyze the clean electricity tax fund. In plain, human language, the Liberals are giving companies such as Brookfield cash handouts from the Growth Fund and then allowing the companies to get tax credits for spending the handouts. Companies such as Brookfield will get a shiny new asset to put on their balance sheet and a little spending money on the side. Canadians get a bigger tax bill and higher electricity prices.
I do not need a crystal ball to tell members that this is going to fail to increase economic productivity. It will not leverage, catalyze or spur any private investment; it will destroy private investment. If there were a real business case, it would not need subsidies. This means that any investment it attracts comes at the expense of real opportunities for growth. That is not just a fact; it is a basic physical reality. The Brookfield government can try to ignore reality, but eventually reality will hit it like a freight train.
Unfortunately for anyone who owns property between Quebec City and Toronto, the government plans to hit them with a high-speed train. Justin Trudeau launched the largest expropriation of private property in Canadian history with his gun grab. Now, even that legacy is not safe. Buried in the budget bill is the biggest land grab in a century. Canadians might be shocked to learn that when the bill passes, the high-speed rail line from Quebec City to Toronto will be automatically approved.
The Liberals do not know where the rail line will be built, but it is already approved. If anyone's home is in the way, they will expropriate it. They just need to delete sections 8 through 12 of the Expropriation Act to get it done. In fact, they are so confident in pre-approving the rail line without knowing the actual route that the government is amending the Canada Transportation Act to remove the ability of the government to amend the approval.
I want to remind Canadians that half the bill is the government repealing decisions made by the Liberal government. Now the Liberals want to tie their hands to prevent any future government from correcting this mistake. There is a big difference between cutting red tape and throwing all the tape out the window. If any of this sounds out of character for the tape-happy Liberal Party, we should not worry; they return to form on the next page of the legislation.
Again, with the bill, the entire high-speed rail line would be approved automatically and without an actual route. Then the bill states that the entire rail line would be exempt from the dreaded unconstitutional Impact Assessment Act. However, each segment of the rail line would be subject to the Impact Assessment Act. We can see where this would go, because we have seen it all before. Once the Liberals determined the route, they would begin expropriating the land; then they would find a turtle or a frog on the land. The activists and proud socialists would demand that the Liberals adjust the segment of the line. If it is a Liberal riding, the line would move; if it is a Conservative riding, they would plow through. In the end, the government would have to take some other people's land and those whose land was needlessly expropriated would just have to watch from the sidelines.
For a while now, I have wondered how the government was going to hit the ridiculous target of restoring 30% of Canada's developed lands to nature by 2030. One way would be to cut a straight line through the most developed and expensive lands in Canada, claiming it is for high-speed rail, then killing the entire project by blaming some turtles that are trying to win the Darwin prize.
I said earlier that I do not need a crystal ball; that is because I have a history book. We have seen this all before. In 1972, Pierre Trudeau expropriated farmland in Pickering to build an airport. By 1975, the airport plan was on hold. The government kept the land and, in January of this year, announced that there would be no airport, but the lands would go to Parks Canada to be included in the Rouge National Urban Park. The current bill would make the Pickering land grab look like a picnic.
The budget would give the unnamed rail corporation the power to issue stop work orders on any land it thinks it may need for the rail line. Once the government puts someone's property on the “maybe” list, it would have the first right of refusal for any sale. The rail corporation would have the right to issue stop work orders on any activity on the land, and the corporation would have the right to go onto their property at any time to ensure the work has stopped. In a normal expropriation, people receive a notice of intent, and then they have the option to object and a public hearing is held. Now they would receive the notice and still be able to object, but there would be no hearing. The final decision would be made by the minister behind closed doors.
Some Canadians listening to all this will think it has the makings of a second Pacific railway scandal. That would be delicious irony to fall on the party that gleefully tossed Sir John A. Macdonald down the memory hole, but erasing history has its consequences. If one of those consequences is the Liberals' sleepwalking into another sponsorship-sized scandal, then I am sure Sir John A. is smiling down on us. While I would relish the Liberals' paying a steep price for their arrogance, we also know from history what would happen: They would just walk off into the sunset of a corner office in a fancy law firm or a boardroom. It would be Canadians forced to pay the higher taxes to the bondholders. It would be Canadians forced off their lands during a housing crisis. It would be Canadians who lose the farm their family owned for generations.
When Liberals promise us a generational change, we should hide our wallets and lock our doors. The budget would cut benefits to veterans and students. It would lay off frontline workers. There would be all that plus billions of dollars in new debt for the biggest corporate welfare spending spree in history.
The Mackenzie King government ran up deficits to fight the Nazis. The Harper government ran up deficits to fight the global financial crisis. The Trudeau government ran up deficits to fight a global pandemic. The Brookfield government is running up deficits to reward its wealthy backers. Canadians cannot afford this takeover of their democracy. We need an affordable Conservative government now.