Mr. Speaker, in late medieval Europe, the church sold something called indulgences. Indulgences were cash donations that would allegedly result in a person's temporal sin being removed or mitigated if they contributed money to the church. It was a highly innovative business plan that succeeded wildly until it backfired into 200 years of Reformation.
The Liberals have rediscovered a remarkable new form of indulgences, and they call it standing up for Canadians. First, they demand cash and tell us it will help save the planet. Second, they make it a tax so people have no choice. Then, when Conservatives try to stop them, they call us regressive for supposedly not wanting to save the planet. Finally, they bow to reality and common sense, adopt half of the Conservative ideas and expect kudos because no longer doing what they did in the first place is such a great idea that they expect thanks from Canadians.
They did it first with the carbon tax. First, they taxed energy. Then, when Canadians complained that making energy more expensive was making everything else more expensive, they told them it would clean the air. When Canadians finally got angry enough, the Liberals stopped collecting part of the tax and held a press conference to announce that they had rescued Canadians from the problem they created in the first place. Now they are doing it with the excise tax, the tax they installed over 50 years ago that they have only now discovered is not really necessary after all, until next year, that is, and then apparently the Liberals need half of it back.
This doublespeak and magical thinking has become a hallmark of the last decade of Liberal government. Instead of looking toward the good of Canadians, it looks toward the health of the government coffers, already shrunk to nothing under the weight of its wild and irresponsible spending.
Should we not instead be asking how this tax benefits the people of this country, rather than how it helps the Liberal government and Brookfield? Is the federal fuel excise tax a good tax or a bad tax for Canadians? Is it helping us or hurting our small and large businesses and our productivity as a nation? Is it helping our families? Do our jobs feel safer because of the excise tax? Are our streets cleaner? Are we more secure as a nation? Are those not the kinds of questions we should be asking about the excise tax?
Ottawa's message now seems to be that the tax is necessary until it is not. Removing it is irresponsible until the Liberals do it, and once they do it, we need to applaud them for protecting us from it. It is a little like setting somebody's pants on fire, handing them a bucket of water and expecting a thank-you note.
There are only so many things to say about this bill. I am going to vote for it not because it is a wonderful bill but because it is the best we are going to get from this gang. I am going to talk about something else instead.
The Prime Minister spoke to the European Parliament and got a standing ovation. The president of the European Union says she wants Canada to become the EU's first-ever associate member. There is even a line going around about how it would be lovely if Canada became the 28th state of the European Union instead of the 51st state of the United States. Those are lovely words, and they pair well with the Prime Minister's tendency to swan about in European sitting rooms, sipping wine and eating caviar, or whatever else it is that drives the bills to Canadian taxpayers into the stratosphere.
I have no doubt that the EU would love to get its hands on Canadian natural resources, but let us look at the reality. In 2008, the European economy and the American economy were roughly the same size. Today the American economy is roughly 50% larger. In 18 years, one of them grew like a teenager and the other one grew like a lump of coal. Mario Draghi, former head of the European Central Bank, a man of the same political convictions as the Liberals, wrote a report for the EU. His findings were that in the last 50 years, Europe had not created a single company from scratch worth more than 100 billion euros, not one. In the same 50 years, the Americans created six companies worth more than $1 trillion.
Europe's response to the Draghi report was, naturally, to hold a summit about the Draghi report. As for red tape, members have probably heard about the bendy cucumber regulation. Europe even had rules on how curved a cucumber could be. It repealed them in 2009, and to this day, that is the fastest decision the EU has ever made. It tried to ban refillable olive oil bowls in restaurants. It even gave us the cookie banner, that little thing that comes up asking us to accept all or not. It is the single greatest destruction of human productivity since Solitaire came pre-installed on Windows.
Here is my favourite: our free trade deal with Europe, or CETA, which we started negotiating in 2009 and signed in 2016. Now it is 2026, and it is still only provisionally in force because member states have not ratified all of it. The French Senate actually voted it down two years ago. It has been 17 years. My daughter went from kindergarten to a university degree in the time it took Europe to decide whether it likes Canadian beef.
Now we are told that the EU is going to be our new security partner too. This was clearly done without anyone thinking to ask the Canadian Armed Forces. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Europe announced strategic autonomy: no more dependence on America. Then, and this number comes straight from the European Defence Agency, nearly 80% of what the European government bought for its militaries came from outside the EU, and about 60% came from the United States. Almost 100% of the discourse the EU spends on strategic subjects is spent pleading with the U.S. to send more of it. Apparently, strategic autonomy is when someone declares independence from a country and then sends their credit card to the folks they just declared independence from.
Europe has 27 armies, one currency and no phone number. Henry Kissinger reportedly asked 50 years ago, “Who do I call if I want to talk to Europe?” It has since answered him: Call a switchboard, press “4” for defence, and be placed in a queue that is currently working on the 60-year-old question of Cyprus.
As well, there is a hot war in Europe, the biggest since World War II. It threatens to spread into a third general European war that will almost certainly become a conflagration on a scale we have never seen before. We should help the west in every way we can, but the Liberals want to make us political and economic partners with the combatants too. Again, that will be good for Europe and wonderful for Brookfield, but is it good for Canadians?
Here is Canada's situation in plain numbers. About three-quarters of everything we export goes to the United States. The EU, with a CETA deal we spent 17 years on, takes under 10%. Roughly $3.5 billion in goods crosses the American border every day. If we replaced the U.S. with the EU, we would need to sell Europe eight times more than we currently do, and we would have to do it by sailing past the one country that is actually next door.
The Americans are now the world's largest oil producer and largest natural gas exporter. Europe pays two to three times the American price for industrial electricity, and having shut its nuclear plants, it is now heating itself by burning press releases about hydrogen. One does not leave a booming neighbour for an anxious war-torn continent because the neighbour is going to be rude for the next two years. I will take a rude customer who buys 75% of my product over a polite one who buys 8% and needs a subcommittee to even approve the invoice.
Here is the part the Prime Minister's speech writers skip. Donald Trump leaves office on January 20, 2029. That is a hard date. It is a constitutional date less than two and a half years from tonight.
Therefore, Canada has two good options. Option one is to negotiate with Trump now. He likes deals. It is the one thing everyone agrees he likes, and we have leverage. He needs our potash, our oil, our uranium, our electricity and the aluminum in every beer can from Buffalo to Bakersfield. Option two is to hold our ground, protect our industries, not give away anything permanent and wait 28 months. That is it. That is less time than it took Europe to schedule a second reading of our trade deal.
Either way, the worst option is option three, which is to rebuild our entire economy around a partner engaged in a war and whose greatest strategic achievement of the decade is creating a unified phone charger, which, I will grant, is a real achievement. I have one, and it is excellent, but it is not a foreign policy.
My message to the Prime Minister, delivered with all the affection of a rural Conservative to a central banker, is this. The Europeans gave him a standing ovation. He can enjoy it. He can frame it. They are very good at applauding. They have had 70 years of practice in applauding historic steps by others. When the applause stops, our biggest customer is still just a walk across the border, still growing, still the largest economy on earth and in 28 months, under new management.
Mr. Carney, if you want to move to Europe, enjoy the wine and caviar, but please do not take us with you because the rest of us cannot afford it. Fix the—