Mr. Speaker, I will start off where I ended just before question period, just to say that one tax cut on one product does not undo an affordability crisis 11 years in the making.
Let us just be clear about where Canadians actually stand today. Nearly one in four families cannot afford the housing they live in. One in 10 people in Toronto relies on a food bank. Gas still sits over $1.80 a litre in Toronto today, and over $2.06 a litre in Vancouver, the highest gas price in the country. Inflation sits at 3%, the top edge of what the Bank of Canada considers tolerable, and we lost 42,000 jobs in August alone before the latest round of tariffs even hit.
Behind every one of those numbers is somebody like Hamid, a constituent who wrote me this month. Despite doing everything right, searching for work, trying to keep up, he told me that he is now in debt and struggling to afford basic necessities, including a pair of glasses that he needs to see clearly.
We are in Canada. That is not a policy footnote. That is not just some random example. These are real people with real stories. That is the real cost of 11 years of decisions made in this building. That is the story that the government needs to hear, because the promise of this country has always been simple: If a person works hard and follows the rules, the country works for them too. Right now, for too many Canadians, it simply is not working.
If the government is serious about affordability and not just borrowing language along with our policies, here is how the Liberals could finish the job they started today.
Go further on gas. Do not just cut the excise tax, but scrap the clean fuel standard and the GST on fuel too. That is another 15¢ a litre for every fill-up, and 15¢ a litre on every fill-up for a guy like Hamid means something. In fact, it means something for a lot of Canadians right across the country who are struggling. Do not stop at March. Hold it for a full year or longer if Canadians are not seeing the benefit by then. That is roughly $1,000 back in the pockets of every average family, not a few hundred, but $1,000, and that is a meaningful difference.
Scrap the GST on new homes. That alone can save a family $65,000 on a new build. It is the difference between renting forever and actually owning a place they can call their own for their families, to have kids and for their kids to have.
Get the spending under control. We have said this before. The government has doubled the deficit it inherited. In fact, it was the front members on the Liberals' bench who added to that deficit. They have actually inherited something they have done themselves. We have identified $150 billion in savings, which is roughly $10,000 for a Canadian family. That is the cost of three and a half average Canadian mortgage payments. That is real relief for real families everywhere across the country.
The Liberals can find this savings by cutting consultants. They can find it by cutting corporate welfare, boondoggles like the Alto rail project or a gravel pit launch pad that went nowhere. That money can go back to Canadians, or at minimum it could stop being borrowed against their children's future. None of this is complicated.
A tank of gas should not cost a day's wages. A home should not cost a lifetime savings for a down payment. Everyone in this place knows that this is not an ideological position. This is how this country is supposed to work. This is the deal that this country has on offer for every single Canadian, no matter where they came from and how they got there.
I will close with this. It is day two after three months of silence from the other side, and we have already passed something real, or we are about to. Imagine what could have been done for Canadians if this House had sat all summer, instead of shielding the government from questions it did not want to answer. Imagine if it was not all summits and MOUs, and it was real relief for real people who are undoubtedly scratching their heads today and wondering if this year is going to be any different than last year or the year before.
What is before us today is a step. It is a small one in the right direction, and we think it should go further. We will keep saying this every single day. We will keep saying it for the millions of Canadians who have entrusted us with the responsibility to fight for a more affordable future in this country, to fight to save them money, to fight for every single Canadian no matter where they live, where they came from and how they got here. We will support the bill and we will push until the government actually finishes the work that we started for it.