Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Tobique—Mactaquac.
Early in the morning at Heppell's potato farm in Surrey, before most of us are awake, the work is already under way. The ground is damp, the equipment is running, trucks are being loaded, and rows of potatoes that will end up on dinner tables across this country are being pulled from the soil by people who have done this their whole lives. This is a fifth-generation family farm, the same land and the same work ethic passed down year after year.
Farming is never easy. There are weather, pests and timing, and they live with that. What is new is the pile-on from the government. Every piece of equipment runs on fuel that is more expensive because of federal taxes. Fertilizers cost more, packaging costs more, and transport costs more. There is a threat that their land leased from the government, some of the best farmland in the Fraser Valley, will be paved over in the next few years. None of this is optional, and these threats to the farm all come from the Liberal government.
Tyler Heppell told me something simple: “We don’t control prices. We just watch our costs climb and hope we can keep going.” When people who grow our food are worried about whether they can keep farming, that should worry us. We often hear from the government that there are no taxes on groceries. I would like to demonstrate the reality of those taxes and inflationary policies that are forcing food prices to skyrocket in Canada.
Let us take the example of something as ordinary as a single pound of potatoes from the Heppell family farm. That potato starts in the ground. To plant it, the farmer needs diesel to run his equipment. That diesel now carries a fuel standard tax. Before the potato is even grown, policy has already added cost. Then comes the fertilizer. Fertilizer production is energy intensive, which means it carries the industrial carbon tax. That cost does not stay at the factory. It is built into the price that farmers pay. Again, farmers have no choice. They cannot grow potatoes without fertilizer. Harvest time comes, and the equipment runs again. There is more fuel and more tax. The potatoes are dug up, washed, sorted and stored. Storage requires electricity. Processing facilities face higher energy costs, compliance costs and reporting requirements, all of which are government-imposed and all of which are passed along.
Then the potato needs to be packaged. This is where red tape turns into inflation. New federal packaging and labelling requirements mean redesigning packaging, reprinting materials, changing suppliers, updating compliance systems and, in some cases, slowing production lines. Maurizio Zinetti, owner of Zinetti Foods in my riding, told me plainly that none of these packaging changes makes food safer or cheaper. It just makes it more expensive. Every box, label and adjustment adds a few more cents. When packaging millions of units, those cents add up fast.
Then the potato is loaded onto a truck. The trucker pays higher fuel costs because of the fuel standard tax. Those costs are not absorbed; they are charged forward. Finally, the grocery store receives the pound of potatoes. The store did not cause the inflation, the farmer did not cause it, and the trucker did not cause it, but all of them have been handed higher costs, and there is only one place those costs can go. They go to the price tag. That is how inflation works. It is not through greed or climate change but through a steady accumulation of policy choices that make every step of production more expensive. When government taxes the production of food at every stage, it should not surprise us when food becomes unaffordable. By the time that pound of potatoes reaches a Canadian kitchen, families feel it. Prices are up. When people ask why, the Liberal answer is always the same: climate change.
Let us keep following the potato and see if that excuse holds up. Our potato was grown on the Heppell family farm in B.C. Imagine another potato grown just south of the border in Idaho: same crop, same season, same sun, same rain, same droughts, same heat waves. Climate change does not stop at the 49th parallel. Both farmers deal with the same climate risks. Both wake up early and hope the crop makes it through, but as those two potatoes move toward markets, something different starts to happen. The Canadian potato picks up costs that have nothing to do with soil or sky. It carries higher costs because of federal carbon taxes. It carries higher fertilizer costs because of industrial carbon taxes. It carries added compliance costs from packaging and labelling. It carries transportation costs inflated by a fuel standard tax on top of everything else.
The Idaho potato does not carry those same policy costs, and when both potatoes finally arrive at the grocery store side by side, the Canadian one is more expensive, not because the farmer is greedy, not because the climate was worse, but because our government added more costs to it along the way. That is why food inflation in Canada is now twice as high as it was when the Prime Minister took office. That is why it is twice as high as in the U.S. That is why we now lead the G7 in food inflation.
If climate change were the main cause, our numbers would move together, but they do not. Climate change is global. The inflation is local. The Prime Minister said that he wanted to be judged by the price of groceries. Canadians have done exactly that. They judge him every time they put something back on the shelf, every time they choose beans over beef, every time they are forced to line up at a food bank to feed their family. This is not a mystery. It is the result of choices made here, added step by step, potato by potato.
Let us follow that same pound of potatoes one last step. By the time it reaches the grocery store, it costs more, not because of the farmer or the climate but because of all the costs added along the way. Canadians see the higher price and they feel it immediately. The government's response is not to remove those costs; instead, it sends out a cheque. The Liberals call it help, they call it relief, but what they are really doing is this. After making that potato more expensive to produce, transport and sell, they are borrowing money to give a small portion of that back.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer looked at this plan and told us it will cost billions of dollars over the next few years. That money is not coming from savings or from growth; it is borrowed. Let us think about what that means. We add costs to the potato on the way up, the price rises, and then we borrow money to soften the blow. That borrowed money adds to inflation, and inflation makes the potato even more expensive. It is a loop.
A family might get a cheque today that might help for a month, but it does not make fuel cheaper for the farmer. It does not make fertilizer cheaper. It does not remove the packaging rules and transport taxes. All of those costs are still waiting for the next harvest. The potato goes through the same process again, only this time the dollar buys a little less because more money has been pumped into the system with nothing done to fix the cause. That is not a food affordability plan. That is borrowing to cover up the consequences of bad policy. Real relief would be stopping the cost increases at the beginning of the potato's journey, not mailing out cheques at the end and pretending the problem is solved.
We have followed a simple pound of potatoes all the way from the field to the family table. We saw how costs were added step by step, fuel taxes, fertilizer taxes, packaging rules and transport costs, until that potato cost far more than it should. We saw how the government blamed the climate, even though the same climate exists beyond our borders. We saw how its final answer was to borrow billions to send out cheques, which only makes the potato more expensive.
Our Conservative motion offers a different path. Instead of adding costs to the potato at every stage, we say that we should remove the hidden taxes that drive up the cost of producing and delivering food. We should stop treating farmers and truckers as problems to be managed and start treating them as partners who feed the country. We should stop trying to buy Canadians off with gimmicks and tricks that will only end up costing us more. Canadians do not want a cheque that disappears in a month; they want food they can afford every week. If we want fewer people lining up at the food banks, we have to stop making food more expensive in the first place. That starts here with this motion. This is common sense. It is time to let Canadians keep more of their own money, one potato at a time.
