Mr. Chair, I will be splitting my time with the member for the beautiful riding of Niagara Falls—Niagara-on-the-Lake.
The Prime Minister told Canadians he would fight for a stronger Canada. He urged voters to look past a decade of Liberal failures, insisting he would negotiate a win and fight for Canadian jobs, but since the election, “elbows up” has turned into “who cares?” No trade deals have materialized and tariffs remain in place, while jobs and investment have fled the country in record numbers. It is no wonder that so many Canadians who cast a ballot for the Liberals are now feeling voter remorse, because this government is a lemon.
The Prime Minister and his cabinet pretend they are steering in a different direction than the past 10 years under Justin Trudeau, but all they have really done is roll back the odometer and slap on some BNG, bold new graphics, because underneath the decals and fresh paint, the government is still the same worn-out rust bucket, incapable of moving this country forward at all, let alone at speeds Canadians have never seen before. Nowhere is that more evident than in the Liberal government's mishandling of the Canadian automotive industry.
The Prime Minister did not just promise a win; he promised he alone could stand up to Donald Trump and protect Canadian workers. What we have seen instead is the opposite: instability, layoffs and investment fleeing Canada. The government's failure to stand up for this critical industry has workers across the country fearing they will be out of work by Christmas, and reports today now confirm just how incompetent the Liberal government has been at protecting Canadian jobs.
More than $220 million in federal funding went to Stellantis before it announced it was shifting production to the United States, and at Algoma Steel, the Liberals approved $400 million in loans, even though they knew the company's business plan included major layoffs. They are literally subsidizing the loss of Canadian jobs. Folks who work in the auto industry, including those at Honda in my community of Alliston, know their livelihoods could be next, because if the government will not fight for workers in Brampton, Windsor, Oshawa or the Soo, it will not fight for them either.
If the Liberals' failure to stand up to the United States was not bad enough, an equally serious and entirely self-inflicted threat to the Canadian auto industry comes from their own policies. Their obsessive push for an EV mandate has created uncertainty across the sector. For years, they have warned manufacturers and consumers that gas-powered vehicles would be banned, only to delay its implementation and repeatedly review and assess it. It has been delayed again, and there is still no clarity on what comes next.
How can an industry that plans years in advance function when the Liberal government cannot provide even the most basic certainty?
Automakers are finalizing their 2028 models today, but they are still guessing at what they will be able to manufacture under this shifting mandate. This has nothing to do with Donald Trump or the United States. The uncertainty choking the Canadian auto industry is made in Ottawa by the Liberals. They boast about supporting pipelines while key ministers work behind the scenes to stop them from ever being built. They scrapped the consumer carbon tax only to impose a harsher industrial version that lands squarely on manufacturers. With their shifting EV mandate, the same pattern repeats: big rhetoric about confronting Trump and strengthening the auto sector, even as they cripple the industry with policies that undermine its ability to survive.
Auto workers deserve good, stable, paying jobs in a competitive climate that attracts investment.