Mr. Speaker, it is great to be back in the House of the common people. This will be my first speech in the current Parliament, so let me begin with thank yous.
I thank my brilliant and beautiful wife, Anaida, a fierce fighter and a problem-solver. She is our very own MacGyver; she can solve any problem. She is an entrepreneur, the love of my life, the greatest adviser I have ever had, someone who inspires me to keep on going through all hardship, and most of all, a courageous and strong mother who is always there for our kids, Cruz and Valentina, fighting every day and in every way to make sure our little Valentina has all of the opportunities every other child enjoys.
I also want to thank tío Pablo and tía Maria, who are there to help us and take care of our children so that we can do this work. We are very grateful to them.
I also want to thank our children, Valentina and Cruz. I am sorry that their father is often away. He is often in a hotel, a plane or an important meeting far from home. I know that my son Cruz says that he is mad at daddy, because daddy works too much. I want Valentina and Cruz to know we are working for an important cause: the country in which they will live for the rest of their lives. Our country is worth the sacrifices and effort we make each day.
I want to thank the great people of Battle River—Crowfoot. Some people said it must have been a burden to go straight into a by-election campaign right after a national election. I say it was a blessing to spend time with such amazing, extraordinary people. These are the people who feed, power and protect our country. They welcomed me with open arms, even though they knew I was a city boy from Calgary and that Calgary is a long way from consort, coronation or even Camrose. They brought this city boy in and gave him some good rural education. They schooled me in much wisdom, whether it was at the bronc matches, the rodeos, the farmers markets or the other gatherings. They taught me and reinstilled in me the great values of hard work, of family, of community, of self-reliance, of strength and of patriotism. To them, I will always be grateful.
Most of all, I will be grateful to the great Damien Kurek, a wonderful patriot who put his country before himself. He is a father and, of course most of all, a farm boy. He brought me to the farm and taught me a few lessons. He even brought me into his new seeder at the beginning of the season. I got inside and asked question after question. Eventually, I could see he was getting impatient with me. He told me, “You know, this machine depreciates at a rate of $400 an hour, so in the time you've been asking these questions, it has cost me 100 bucks.” I am not a farmer, but Damien told me that if I were, I would be outstanding in my field. Oh, come on. I get at least one dad joke, maybe a laugh. It is a tough crowd around here.
These are the people who feed, power and protect our country. Farmers and the ranchers feed our nation. These are not just any farmers. Many of them are century farmers, meaning their families have been there for over 100 years. They survived through boom and bust, through depression and drought, on some of the toughest farmland in the entire world. In fact, when many of the early pioneers arrived in the special areas of eastern Alberta, they were told not to bother, as there was not enough rain or soil to farm there. They said they would do it anyway.
Five or six generations later, those same family names are engraved on signs that we can see up and down the highways and byways of this incredible community. Through all the hardship, it has been because of their dedication to their families, by passing on to the next generation what they inherited from the previous, that these incredible families continue to make the dry, thin soils of the region blossom and bloom, and take food from their farms to feed families across the country. The great ranchers who put their herds onto the great grasslands of eastern Alberta are second to none in the world, and I pledge to forever be their most loyal customer.
It is not just that. These are the people who power our country. There are oil workers of all different trades. I will give just one example. The 600 people of Hardisty, Alberta, live in a town where there is a tank farm that moves over $90 billion of petroleum products. This $90 billion is more than the GDP of about 50 of the world's countries, if anyone can imagine. It is 600 people who move this oil through roughly a half-dozen pipelines, an amount that grows every single day.
Finally, we have those who protect our country. They are the soldiers at CFB Wainwright, who are willing to lay their lives down for their country, and the prison guards in Drumheller, who keep the most dangerous people away from our children and communities, taking risks every day with their lives that none of us would be prepared to take. It is because of these soldiers and prison guards that we can live in a safe country, and it is a privilege to represent them.
It is for them and all Canadians that Conservatives are here fighting today. Our purpose is to restore the Canadian promise, to make this a country where hard work is rewarded, where food and homes are affordable, where streets are safe, where borders are solid and where we are all united under a single Canadian flag, Canadians first, regardless of our origins.
The people of Battle River—Crowfoot are a microcosm of the suffering that has unfolded over the last 10 years of Liberal government. Let us start with their paycheques and take-home pay. In Battle River—Crowfoot, energy workers are under attack. They have seen Canada's biggest industry under a direct assault by a federal government that sought to “keep it in the ground”, an objective imposed by previous prime minister Justin Trudeau on the advice of the current Prime Minister. He wrote that 50% of Canada's oil would have to stay in the ground and testified against building a pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta, to the Pacific to allow us to go around the Americans and reach 2.5 billion customers overseas.
The Prime Minister promised that he would be different after his protege, whom he advised, drove hundreds of billions of dollars out of our country, but in fact he has been worse on matters of energy. There have been many photo ops and meetings, papers have been shuffled and new offices have been created, but all of that has created a show that has amounted to nothing. In reality, he is blocking 38 projects that are currently sitting before federal regulators. He has kept in place the industrial carbon tax, the energy cap, the new carbon tax under a different name and the fuel standard, and he has created a new bureaucracy that will further slow down progress on these projects.
In the six months the Prime Minister has been in power, a net $50 billion of investment has fled our country due to his high taxes and increased regulation and red tape. In fact, just this week, 96 energy CEOs wrote that nothing he has done will reverse the damage the Liberals have exacted on our energy industry. The only way forward is to remove these terrible laws.
The irony of his approach is this. He admits that his laws block energy production, but instead of getting rid of those laws, he passes another law to go around the bad law. He admits his bureaucracies block energy production, but instead of getting rid of those bureaucracies, he creates a new bureaucracy to get around the old bureaucracies. It seems that he confuses the problem with the solution. Why not just accept that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line? If there is an obstacle, get rid of the obstacle. Put simply, he should get out of the way.
That is one example of how he blocks people from earning paycheques, and if they should be lucky enough to earn any paycheque at all, he takes a big bite out of it. Liberal taxes now represent a higher cost than food, clothing and shelter combined for Canadians, meaning that government is the single-biggest cost in their lives, a cost that has risen dramatically in the 10 years of Liberal government. What is left of people's take-home pay gets eaten up by Liberal inflation, which occurs when governments create cash faster than the economy creates the goods that cash buys.
The Prime Minister is a notorious inflationist. He has a terrible record on the subject. Of course, when he was the governor of the Bank of England, he had the second-highest inflation rate in all of the G7, and only worse than what the Liberal government provided here in Canada. He caused the housing crisis there by printing cash, and of course, the British media said that he was the unreliable boyfriend of central banking, constantly changing his mind and engaging in decisions that drove up costs and drove down growth. Here he is repeating the same mistakes in Canada that he made over there, the same mistakes he advised Justin Trudeau to make. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
We as Conservatives want to slash the bureaucracy, the consultants, the foreign aid, the corporate welfare and the handouts to phony refugees to bring down costs so that government will no longer print money and we can preserve the purchasing power of our dollar. Our purpose is to have stronger take-home pay, which means we have to unlock paycheques by repealing Liberal antidevelopment laws to make this the fastest place on earth to get a building permit and by unlocking the free enterprise system with an open-for-business policy.
We ask the government to accept our positive solutions. We ask it to adopt the Canadian sovereignty act, which would make our economy strong, self-reliant and stand on its own two feet. Let us cut income taxes so that hard work once again pays off and people bring home more of each dollar they earn. Let us preserve purchasing power by ending the money-printing and allowing our dollar to go further. These are among the positive solutions that we ask the Liberal government to get out of the way of and support.
Increasingly, people feel endangered in their own communities. I saw this in rural Alberta, where people did not even lock their doors 10 years ago. Now they worry about burglars breaking in and about thieves siphoning fuel and stealing copper wire on their properties. In big cities, people are terrorized by story after story of increasing crime. The Liberals love to say that it is just sensationalism and that all the brainy experts will tell us crime is down. I am sorry, but that does not work either. Violent crime is up 55%, gun crime is up 130%, extortion is up 330%, homicides are up 29%, hate crimes are up 258%, sexual assault is up 76%, auto theft is up 25% and overdoses are up 152% under the catch-and-release Liberal justice system. All of this happened as a direct result of Liberal laws that turn criminals loose on our streets so they can reoffend with no consequences.
We warned of this when these bills were first passed, but the Liberals went ahead anyway. Every single member of the current Liberal caucus who was here before the last election voted for all of these laws and voted to keep them in place, including the new Liberal justice minister, whose very appointment is a signal that the Prime Minister is not serious about reversing the damage his party has done. The fact that he would name Justin Trudeau's worst minister to be in charge of crime shows that he is happy to continue with the disastrous criminal justice policies that got us into this mess.
This minister was in charge of immigration when population growth went up 300%. He single-handedly destroyed our immigration system, overcrowding housing, our job market and our health care system. The Liberals then moved him over to housing, where he delivered the most expensive housing costs in Canada's history and in all of the G7. As a punishment for all of this failure, the new Prime Minister has now appointed him to be in charge of crime. We can imagine the results we will get.
What have they done together ever since?