Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for sharing his time with me today.
This is another engineered distraction on the part of the Prime Minister. He is trying to distract from his terrible record. Even though he has been in the role of Prime Minister for only a short time, he has an abysmal record and is desperately trying to change the channel for that. Let me just explain how I know this. It is an engineered distraction, because the Prime Minister has never expressed opposition to Bill 21 in Quebec.
We can look at the official submission. I have here a copy of the factum of the intervenor, the Attorney General of Canada. For anyone in the gallery or at home watching the debate, or any of the press, and trying to decide how to frame the conversation, let me read the opening line. This is the Attorney General of Canada's officially putting before the courts the position of the Government of Canada, the Liberal government, on Bill 21.
It is part I, section A, paragraph 1, line 1. I just want to stress that, because it is the opening statement, the thing that the government leads with in its court submission: “In accordance with his role as intervener, the Attorney General of Canada takes no position, on any basis whatsoever, on the constitutional validity of the provisions of the Act respecting the laicity of the State.” It takes no position on any basis whatsoever. That is the government's position.
One might be left wondering what the purpose of the engineered distraction is. It is to distract from the terrible cost of living crisis that the Liberal government started creating 10 years ago, with tax hikes on hard-working Canadians and small business owners, the massive layering of regulations on the productive parts of the Canadian economy, the barriers to investment, the barriers to getting things built and the ban on shipping Canadian energy to other countries, while foreign oil and foreign resources come into our country.
Let me just go through a few of these crises so members can properly understand why the government is so desperate to have this debate instead of a conversation about the hardships that Canadians are facing. The Prime Minister famously said that he would be judged on the prices at the grocery store. That is what he said during the election campaign. What has happened to prices at the grocery store? Food inflation continues to rise; it is now 70% above target. Food prices are 40% higher since the Liberal government took office.
The Prime Minister is making the Trudeau debt crisis even worse. Remember, Justin Trudeau racked up more debt in the short time he was in office than all the other prime ministers combined. Consider World War I, World War II and the Great Depression; Canada faced all those crises, but it took Justin Trudeau to massively rack up the debt.
Since the Prime Minister took office, federal spending is up 8.4%. Do people remember what he promised during the election campaign? He put in writing, in black and white, when he was going to voters for their vote, a written guarantee to them that he would cap the deficit at $63 billion. Spending has gone up by 8.4%.
The Prime Minister had the King of the United Kingdom come all the way from London. The King graciously accommodated that request and came to the Senate and read the throne speech. In that throne speech, there was a commitment to cap spending at 2%. Just 48 hours later, the government tabled its spending estimates and blew past that. What was the point of inviting His Majesty all the way across the ocean to come read the speech if it was not even worth the paper it was printed on? Let that go down in history as the shortest-lived Liberal promise ever: 48 hours, a new world record.
I am embarrassed on behalf of the government. I know the Liberals are not embarrassed, because one has to have shame to be embarrassed, but I am embarrassed for them that they had His Majesty come over and participate in that kind of bait and switch for Canadians.
Let us talk about the take-home pay crisis. The first people who suffer when inflation rears its ugly head are people who live paycheque to paycheque, people who have shift work, people who have to have second jobs to make ends meet. This is because when the government creates an inflation crisis, there are some winners and there are a whole lot of losers.
The winners are the people who get the new money first: the asset managers, the hedge fund operators and the big banks. They get the new money before anybody else does, so they can buy up assets before prices go up. However, the hard-working person in a hotel, the plumber, the mechanic and the people whose wages do not keep up with inflation have to start paying all the increased prices before they are able to secure any kind of pay increase. Their paycheques have to go further. They work harder and are able to buy less.
Since the Prime Minister took office, there are now 86,000 fewer Canadians who even earn a paycheque. That is because 86,000 people have lost their jobs just since the Prime Minister took office. He promised the fastest-growing economy in the G7; Canada has the fastest-shrinking economy in the G7. Unemployment in the GTA is now 9%, with 365,000 people out of work. The youth employment rate is 53.6%. This is the lowest it has been in almost three decades. This means that just about half of young people in the workforce who are looking for work do not have jobs. The youth employment rate is the lowest in almost three decades. Canadian household debt is the highest in the G7. Bankruptcies are rising at the fastest pace since 2008.
It is not just the cost of living crisis that is causing so much hardship in Canada and that the government is trying to distract from; we have a crime crisis as well. We have a Liberal government that decided to instruct judges to give bail to some of the country's worst, most violent and repeat offenders. What does that mean? It means that now, when someone is being arrested for the 14th, 15th or 20th time, when they get booked by the police, they get back out on the street, often the very same day.
I have heard from police associations that say they will arrest somebody at about 5 o'clock or 6 o'clock in the evening whom they had already arrested that morning. Those dangerous and repeat offenders have been let out by the federal government, and Canadians are sick and tired of it. However, rather than take real action like adopting the Conservative “three strikes and you're out” policy, and rather than apologize to Canadians for all the lives that have been shattered by the criminals the government set free, the Liberals are blocking and obstructing legitimate attempts to fix the bail system and to bring in tougher penalties for dangerous and repeat offenders.
This is what the Liberals are doing. They have engineered a distraction from their terrible record: their terrible record on cost of living, their terrible broken promises on fiscal responsibility and their terrible record on public safety, letting crime and chaos reign in our streets by putting the rights of dangerous offenders ahead of the rights of law-abiding Canadians.
It is shameful, but the Prime Minister is employing the same tactic as his predecessor, Justin Trudeau: dividing to distract, distracting from his terrible record, and he is proving to be just another Liberal.