Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister said he would be judged by the prices Canadians pay at the grocery store. Well, Canadians are holding him to that, and what they are seeing is shocking. Grocery prices are through the roof, food banks are overwhelmed, and more and more families are skipping meals, not because they want to but because they have to. In Cloverdale—Langley City, seniors who once relied on the food bank weekly now have to ration their visits to make room for new families in need.
Across the country, people are working full-time jobs and still cannot afford basic groceries. It has never been clearer that affordability is not just an issue but that it is a crisis. What is the government doing in response? It is making it worse with taxes on food production, with out-of-control inflationary spending and with a refusal to table a responsible budget.
Today I want to speak for the people who are being left behind and call on the government to start putting Canadians first. If we want to fix food prices, we need to start at the source: our producers, farmers right across Canada. The government will tell us that it has removed the carbon tax, but let us be honest; that is just spin. What the Liberals have removed are the visible portions of carbon tax, the part that showed up on our fuel bill, but the tax is still there, buried in the cost of producing and transporting food.
Farmers still pay the industrial carbon tax on natural gas, propane and heating, for everything from drying grain to heating barns. These are not luxuries; they are essential parts of growing and storing our food. That tax gets passed along to every Canadian family at the checkout counter. We must not forget that our competitors in the U.S. and Mexico are not paying these hidden taxes, and their production costs are already lower. Why are we punishing our farmers, putting us at a major competitive disadvantage?
In Cloverdale—Langley City, both the Cloverdale Community Kitchen and Langley Food Bank are overwhelmed. Demand is growing so fast that they have had to ask seniors to cut back their visits from weekly to every two weeks, just to make space for all the new families showing up. This is not just a local issue, though; across Canada, more than two million visits were made to food banks in a single month. That is double what we saw five years ago. One-third of the clients are children, and nearly one in five is a person who is employed but still cannot afford groceries.
This is what happens when government policy punishes the very people who produce our food. We cannot tax the farmer who grows the food and the trucker who ships the food, and then act surprised when Canadians cannot afford to eat the food. The government says it cares about affordability, but its actions are showing the exact opposite. It is time to stop making life harder for those who feed us. If we want to lower prices at the checkout, then we have to axe the industrial tax for farmers and Canadians across Canada. Let them do what farmers do best, which is to feed the country, and let Canadians finally catch a break at the grocery store.
The damage does not end at the farm gate. Once food makes it off the field, it runs headfirst into another Liberal-made problem: inflation driven by out-of-control spending. It is hard to believe, but the new Liberal government has managed to outdo even itself. The Prime Minister inherited a bloated, reckless government, and rather than tighten the belt, he made it worse. Despite his promise to spend less, his first major bill spends 8% more than Trudeau's last year in office. That is not restraint; it is a runaway train.
This is a half-a-trillion-dollar spending spree with no budget, and the consequences are very real. Experts are now warning that government borrowing is set to hit record highs, even higher than during the pandemic. That means higher interest rates, higher borrowing costs and more pressure on an already-fragile economy. While the government racks up debt, Canadians are paying the price at the checkout line. When the government spends beyond its means, it drives up inflation. That is not theory; it is a reality.
Every reckless dollar Ottawa spends makes that dollar in our wallet worth less. Just ask the single mom trying to buy fresh fruit for her kids, or the senior on a fixed income watching groceries eat through their pension. They budget before they spend, but somehow the “man with the plan” cannot do the same.
Let us not forget where those reckless dollars are going. Consultants are getting a record-breaking $26.1 billion in this plan, which works out to $1,400 per Canadian household. This is not for housing and not for food, but for consultants. To top it off, on the very same day the Prime Minister promised in his throne speech to cap operating spending at 2%, his government introduced a bill to increase spending by 8%. That was just two hours later.
Canadians are forced to make hard decisions every single day, cutting back on groceries and downsizing their lives, yet their government cannot even produce a basic budget to show how it is going to pay for it all. If we want to get food inflation under control and food prices down, it starts here. Stop the reckless spending. Put Canadians first, not consultants—
