Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to stand and give my perspective on why I personally, and a number of my colleagues, voted against the budget. The Prime Minister advised Justin Trudeau and his ongoing Liberal government to construct and keep the roadblocks and red tape that have decimated Canada's ability to compete for investment. As an example, Nutrien's recent announcement is a huge blow to Saskatchewan's export of the best potash in the world. My Prince Albert colleague summed it up: “Nutrien didn't pick the U.S. because they wanted to. They picked the U.S. because Canada made it too slow...too expensive...and too unpredictable to build here. The U.S. made it easy. That's the whole story.”
Canada's west coast has structural bottlenecks. Vancouver's north shore depends on one rail bridge, a major choke point. Longview already has ready rail, a redeveloped berth and immediate expansion capacity. Nutrien ran 30 criteria. It compared rail rates, freight costs, construction costs and regulatory risk. Longview, Washington, outperformed every Canadian port.
Canada's permitting system kills projects. B.C. port approval takes 5 years to 10 years with open-ended requirements. ln the U.S., the process runs on fixed timelines and is measured in months. Transportation now costs more than mining. Industry analysis shows shipping is the largest cost in potash.
Nutrien built where logistics are cheaper and faster, and that is not in Canada. Labour, carbon policy and regulation all push investment south. The U.S. offers predictable labour, lower build costs and no $170 per tonne industrial carbon tax. Investors follow certainty, and Canada does not offer it under the current government. Governments reacted after the decision; Ottawa and B.C. said they were disappointed after Nutrien picked Longview, while Saskatchewan reminded everyone that this is the second potash terminal lost since 2016, because B.C.'s system is too slow and the government has not been acting.
The bottom line is that Nutrien did not abandon Canada. Liberal policies pushed the investment out, and the U.S. simply opened the door. If we cannot even secure a port for the resources we dominate globally, what else are we going to lose?
Bill C-5 gives full exception to these regulations for nation-building projects only, so the Prime Minister has no excuse for not getting a pipeline built from Alberta to the B.C. northwest coast, even while these same laws still cause other potential private investment and nation-building opportunities to remain out of reach as U.S. tariffs continue to cause job losses. Algoma Steel is an example, with 1,000 workers this week. However, the PM has made it clear he will not do his job to squelch the option of a veto, and thus signals failure to potential proponents wanting to build a pipeline.
The Prime Minister also continued to green-light immigration, compounding the shortage in affordable homes, access to health care, and jobs for immigrants who came to Canada the right way to work hard to become productive citizens, and especially for young Canadians who are told they will never have the opportunity to own their own home or save for their own future.
A minimal tax cut for 20 million Canadians does not begin to offset the impact of inflation on the higher cost of essentials, let alone the interest payments on our debt. Canadian families will be out $5,000 in the trade-off this year. This minuscule tax cut gives the government a misleading talking point that only puts a pinky band-aid on a huge wound, the wound of the loss of purchasing power and the burden of more hidden taxes the government tells Canadians to believe are only in their heads, such as the industrial carbon tax, the 17¢ per litre fuel standard tax, the $1-billion food packaging tax and the inflation tax created by too much imaginary money with too few goods to buy.
The budget fails to cut taxes on work, homebuilding, investment and energy, by not reducing personal income tax for low-income workers, not incentivizing investment in Canada by reducing the capital gains tax and not cutting homebuilding taxes, such as permits and GST, on all new home builds. lt fails to stop the inflation tax by unlocking more resource development and revenue. The government should be cutting wasteful spending on bureaucracy, consultants, corporate welfare, foreign aid and false refugee claimants.
Programs that fall short for the people who were assured assistance are temporary, piecemeal handouts from a government that should be unleashing our economy and restoring affordability rather than growing the number of Canadians who cannot afford basic essentials. It is choosing to give these supports, as it calls them, which are simply stopgaps that do not provide long term independence and prosperity for Canadians.
Over and over again the government says it is investing in Canadians, when what it is doing is creating the issues that are making their lives very difficult and then providing interim emergency supports that do not bring the wealth to this country that Canadians need and want in order to be self-sufficient. The Liberal government has created the very crisis circumstances that it is falsely claiming it is fixing.
The Canadian Dental Association had its Days on the Hill this past week and exposed some issues with the Canadian dental care program that are causing confusion and disappointment for patients and doctors, including misleading deadlines. One lady, an elderly senior, got dentures. They were supposed to be 100% covered. She renewed the program at the beginning of the month and still had 30 days to make a claim, but because she renewed when it said to, the amount she was reimbursed was only $40. What happens then?
The government made unexpected adjustments to the awards and is denying certain claims without transparency. Dentists are carrying outstanding billings for the people who cannot afford to pay up front what they thought they would have covered. There are nine million Canadians enrolled in the program, and they are finding out the hard way that there are issues with it.
The federal government should get out of the way of investment and ensure, and this is really important, that Canadian workers build national infrastructure projects directly, without Brookfield and other players' getting subsidies from our tax dollars to hire Canadians in our own country. Talk about fleecing Canadian taxpayers.
Duff Conacher from Democracy Watch warned that our Prime Minister could personally profit from massive federal infrastructure spending tied to his substantial investments, including but not limited to Brookfield. This is something that causes me to look at the government and say that there is no way it should have the privilege to bring forward any budgets in the future that cause this kind of self-sufficiency for people who are making money at the expense of Canadians.
We know that there are 1,900 Brookfield assets that the Prime Minister did not submit to his ethics screen. There are many, but here are at least three major Liberal projects in Canada's 2025 budget involving Brookfield. The Build Canada Homes initiative ties $36 billion to Brookfield for modular housing. This is housing that the PM foreshadowed on April 8, 2025, over seven months ago, as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, saying, “Prefabricated and modular housing are the [way of the] future.”
A 19-year-old first-time voter shared with me that he and his friends were excited to vote for the leader of the official opposition to become the next prime minister. Later, texting with his friends, he told me that they were changing their minds. I asked him to ask them why. They said that during the election campaign, the Prime Minister told young Canadians to their face that the Liberals would build homes they can afford.
I told him to explain to his friends that this is called an open-ended sentence, which lets them finish the thought with what they think it is defining. I asked him to ask them whether what they heard was that the government will build homes they can afford to rent, or homes they can afford to buy. Eyes grew wide, and brows furrowed. They thought he was going to fix things so they could afford to buy a home. Who is going to have the investment in their homes? Will it be young Canadians or Brookfield and the Prime Minister?
Brookfield has many interests and contracts in Liberal nation-building projects, generating billions in stock profit. This arrangement is about conflict of interest, especially given the PM's significant financial holdings in Brookfield. Canadians deserve to know all the details of how the Prime Minister is using his office to put Brookfield and personal profits ahead of Canadians' trust. The premise of this budget is to limit Canadians' options for their futures, while he and his friends continue to profit while bleeding our country dry.
