Mr. Speaker, allow me to quote Robin, a widowed mother who wrote to me on Canada Day. She said that people talk about affordability in numbers but that she measures it differently. She measures it by the moments her kids ask, “Mom, can I have a three-dollar snack?”, and she says, “No, it's rent week.”
I also heard from Jennifer LaFramboise, a mother of four, who said that she owns a home and is working three jobs, one full-time and two part-time, trying to make ends meet. There are days when she has to invent new meals for her family to eat because she has four dollars left in her bank account until her next paycheque. She gets food only on apps such as Flashfood now, because that is all she can afford: discounted meals. She lives less than pay to pay, because her pay is never enough to meet anything on her bills.
Mike, a firefighter, business owner and father of three who lives in metro Vancouver, said that he and his wife work full-time. His wife is an educational assistant in the public school system, supporting teachers and children with diverse needs every day. Mike serves his community as a firefighter while also operating a small landscaping business. Between them, they are effectively working the equivalent of three jobs while raising three kids.
Mike said that, despite all their efforts, it was only recently that they managed to purchase their first home, a modest 1,200-square-foot townhouse that cost $879,000. He says that they are doing everything society asks of them: They work hard, pay their taxes and raise their children. They contribute to their community. However, they are barely keeping their heads above water. Mike says that he is burning the candle at both ends and is running out of candle.
Another single mother says that she has worked hard her entire life. She does not receive child support, and she does not expect handouts. She wants hard work to mean something again.
The Prime Minister tells Robin, Jennifer, Mike and the single mother that “Affordability is the best it has been in over a decade.” He said those words in March on the floor of the House of Commons. On behalf of them and all the hard-working Canadians who are scraping and scratching to survive in this terrible inflationary economy, let me say that the Prime Minister is out of touch and Canadians are out of money. If he thinks these are just selective anecdotes, I have hundreds, probably thousands, more in my correspondence. All the members of the Conservative caucus could share stories just like these ones.
These are the people we bump into on Main Street. They are the people who show up at food banks. They are the people who are still courageously and heroically volunteering for local charities while they can barely afford to feed themselves. These are the people we will not meet on the summit floor, nor will we see them at a salon in Davos nor on the Prime Minister's private jet, where he spends thousands of other people's tax dollars on meals. No, these are the people on the ground, and they are the people for whom we as Conservatives will fight every day and every way on the floor of the House of Commons.
If the Prime Minister does not like stories, then let us go with some statistics. Rising prices at the grocery store have doubled food insecurity from 5.1% in 2017 to 10.5% last year, according to the Agri-Food Analytics Lab. A Royal Bank study found that more than half of parents with adult children aged 18 to 40 provide financial support, contributing, on average, $6,100 a year. Nearly one in five elderly people is forced to give $10,000 to support their adult children. According to the Telus mental health index, cost of living is the top financial stressor for two-thirds of workers.
The federal government's largest national count found that homelessness was 59% higher in 2022, with unsheltered homelessness up 89%. Consumer insolvencies in the second quarter of this year, the most recently reported one, were 37,523. That is the number of people who are selling everything so they do not have to declare bankruptcy. In fact, insolvencies are now at their highest level since the great global recession. The Prime Minister dares tell these people who are losing their homes and everything they worked so hard to acquire that they have never had it so good, and that affordability is the best it has been in a decade.
These are the stories the government would love to silence, that it would like to gaslight out of existence by telling us affordability is great. These are the stories we do not hear from the mainstream media, which would have covered it all up in order to protect the Liberal government.
We will not be silenced. We as Conservatives will be telling these stories on the floor of the House of Commons and offering real solutions to save Canadians money on gas, groceries, rent and mortgage payments. That includes tackling the inflationary taxes and deficits of the Prime Minister, which have worsened under his leadership. In fact, the deficit has doubled since he took office. The Liberals inherited a large deficit from themselves, and they managed to double it in a very short period of time.
We are relieved to see that our efforts to fight gas taxes have led to a temporary pause on part of those taxes. The Liberals we know would not have cut one penny off the gas tax for one minute had it not been for the relentless fighting and advocacy of the Conservatives on this side of the House, and we will keep fighting. We are only getting started.
The reality is that there are three taxes on gas. There is the excise tax, which we have forced the government to pause. There is the GST, which the government continues to collect and from which it continues to profit on higher gas prices because it is a percentage-based tax. Then, of course, there is the fuel standard tax. The Prime Minister said on the floor of the House of Commons yesterday that this tax adds zero to gas prices. His own Environment Canada website says that it is seven cents per litre right now and that within three and a half years it will be 17¢ per litre, the same rate as the previous Liberal consumer carbon tax. The only difference is that this carbon tax does not have a rebate, which makes it even worse.
Our message is to get rid of the fuel standard tax and the industrial carbon tax forever, and to get rid of the other gas taxes until at least Canada Day. This would save Canadians 25¢ a litre, 20 bucks a fill-up, and about $1,000 total, money that real people who are fighting every day just to raise their families could definitely use in order to build their lives.
The Prime Minister said yesterday as well that the industrial carbon tax has zero impact on food prices. I am not surprised that he is confused on this, because he famously said that Canadians do not use steel anymore. Let me tell the House that not only do Canadians use steel, but farmers use steel. Their equipment is made out of steel. When we tax the steel that goes into farm equipment and then tax the fertilizer that goes on the crops, which the Prime Minister has done, we tax all the food that comes from those crops.
That is why, while there are some global factors, the reality is that Canada has had the worst food price inflation for most of the Prime Minister's tenure in office, worse than the U.S., worse than the U.K., and worse than Italy, Japan, Germany and France. It is worse because his policies are worse. By reversing all of these taxes, we could bring down the cost of food and everything else.
Furthermore, do members know what else lowers the price when we purchase something? It is having a stronger dollar. We have a weak dollar right now because of the decade-long policy of the Liberal government to try to keep our most valuable export, oil and gas, in the ground. The Prime Minister was the global champion of net zero, saying that we needed to keep half of oil and gas in the ground. He promised that he would reverse himself on these policies, but since the last election, what have we seen? Yesterday he introduced a bill that he promised is going to speed up projects. That is what he promised 18 months ago. He introduced a bill called the Building Canada Act. What did it do? In 18 months, it has not approved a single, solitary project across this country.
We do not need another announcement. We do not need another press conference or summit. We need a real bill that would scrap all the antidevelopment laws, approve the 500 projects that are waiting for permits, and unlock and unblock our resources so we can bring them to the surface and bring strength to our dollar and purchasing power to the Canadian people so the hard-working people whose stories I told at the beginning will be rewarded, and so the promise of Canada will mean they can have a beautiful house, food on the table, a safe street and a mortgage they can pay down.
