Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak to the motion the Conservatives have put forward. I want to speak to the content of the motion for a few minutes, and then I would like to talk a bit about some of the comments I heard from the Leader of the Opposition today, when he was speaking an hour or so ago.
I think it is important to reflect on something my colleague for Whitby basically said. Conservatives seem to have devised this plan and what we see in this motion on the back of a napkin. There was not a lot of thought put into it, in terms of actually trying to use data to determine what the best result would be, in line with what that additional income would be, with respect to the gas tax.
What the Prime Minister proposed today was something that is data driven, something that does actually look at the data. Rather than trying to predict what the price of gas and oil is going to be by the end of the year, which the Conservatives are trying to do, our approach is to say, “Let us take this on an incremental basis. Let us do this for four months, and then we can assess where we are at that point.” That is, I think, the data driven, realistic, pragmatic approach that should be taken.
I must admit that I got a bit of a kick out of it when I was sitting here today listening to the debate and Conservatives got up to say, “Well, you just stole our idea. That was our idea.” I would like to think we come here with ideas and try to put them forward to make the lives of Canadians better. Quite frankly, as far as I am concerned, if the Conservatives want to say this was their idea, they can have all the credit for it. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that we make the lives of Canadians better. If they can agree that this is going to do that, perhaps not as much as they would have liked or as much as they would have thought it should, I guess I should say, then that is an issue to discuss.
As the parliamentary secretary who spoke before me said, the government has done a lot to make life more affordable for Canadians, with a suite of different things that have been brought in throughout the weeks and months leading up to today. To name some of them, we introduced the Canada groceries and essentials benefit, and we cut taxes for 22 million Canadians pretty much on day one after this government was elected. We eliminated the GST for first-time homebuyers to help people who are renting and just about to purchase a house to get into the affordability of home ownership. We cancelled the federal consumer carbon tax, as was discussed. We made the national school food program permanent, introduced automatic federal benefits, and lowered costs and strengthened competition in essential services. We expanded and entrenched the Canada child benefit and lowered the costs of child care and kid essentials, including $10-a-day child care and interest-free student loans. We introduced the Canada dental plan, pharmacare, the $500 Canada housing benefit top-up for low-income renters, tax-free first home savings accounts and the Canada disability benefit. The list goes on and on.
Yes, these things have one thing in common. The commonality is that they are intended to make the lives of Canadians more affordable, to increase affordability. They also, unfortunately, have something else in common. The other thing that these things have in common is that the Conservatives voted against all of them. It becomes very difficult to accept the word of Conservatives when they come in here trying to suggest they are here to make the lives of Canadians better, when everything I just read off, they voted against.
I am in opposition to today's Conservative motion because I think the plan that the government laid out this morning is a much better approach to this.
I also want to touch on something that the Leader of the Opposition said this morning. I will be honest with you, Mr. Speaker; I would not have brought this up had he not said it in the House. He actually said it both in English and in French. I want to pre-empt my colleagues across the way from trying to call a point of order and saying I am not speaking to something that is going on. I assure you that I will be speaking to exactly what I heard the Leader of the Opposition say this morning in this debate.
He started off his speech by saying that the Prime Minister had cobbled together a majority, that there were “backroom deals”. He said politicians had “betrayed” their constituents. This was all in the discussion about members who are crossing the floor to this side. I would remind the Leader of the Opposition that there actually was a bill, Bill C-306, and that bill would have banned floor crossing. The Leader of the Opposition voted against it. He could have voted his conscience. As a matter of fact, the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman and the member for Airdrie—Cochrane did vote in favour of it. It was not a whipped vote on that side of the House back in the day. The Leader of the Opposition had the ability to vote to ban floor crossing. He did not do that.