Madam Speaker, I want to tell members about a man I will call David. David owns a little coffee shop on a main street that could be in almost any town in Canada. It is not fancy. There are a dozen small tables, a chalkboard menu behind the counter and a bell above the door that has probably rung a million times. He turns on the lights, ties on his apron and starts getting ready for the morning rush. He has been doing this for 20 years now, and he knows his customers well. He knows who wants an extra shot of espresso and which construction crew will go through that door just after six.
David loves his business, but lately he has begun to dread opening the envelopes that arrive in the mail. The price of everything he buys has gone up under the Liberal government. The coffee beans cost more. The milk costs more. The cardboard cups cost more, and so does his insurance, his electricity and his rent. David cannot simply pass every increase along to his customer because he knows they are struggling too. He sees it in his customer who used to order breakfast and now just gets coffee, or the young mom who used to stop in three mornings a week and now comes once, so David absorbs what he can.
Then there is the espresso machine. It has been sitting behind the counter for nearly 15 years. Every morning, David listens to it wheeze and rattle and hopes it makes it through another day. A new one would make the shop more efficient, use less power and let him serve customers faster. Maybe he could even expand his business a little. However, by the time David has paid his employees, his landlord, his suppliers and the government, the money he thought he might put toward a new machine is gone, so he calls the repairman again, replaces another part and tells himself, “Maybe next year.”
Do members remember that young mom David used to see three mornings a week? Let us follow her home. She and her husband live only a few streets away. They are not poor. They both work. They have a modest house, two kids and two incomes, and 10 years ago they thought they were doing pretty well. They were the kind of family we used to call comfortably middle class, but lately, comfortable is not the word they would use. Their family car is 15 years old now. There is a warning light on the dashboard. The mechanic has told them that there is another big repair bill coming, and they know they really should replace it. Ten years ago, they probably would have. Today, they look at the price of a new car, look at the payment and decide the old car will have to last another winter.
Let us now leave the family's kitchen, and come with me to a very different room. Imagine a glass boardroom high above a city. Around the table are not mom and dad wondering whether the roof can survive another winter. There are executives, accountants, lawyers and investment advisers deciding where a multinational corporation should put its next billion dollars. Now Ottawa has put something new on that boardroom table: the mega deduction, a major new tax break designed to convince companies with capital, like, let us say, Brookfield, to invest here.
Put those three rooms side by side. At the kitchen table, mom and dad have already gone through the bills twice. They need a new car and the roof needs work, but none of these qualify for this new Liberal mega deduction. What Ottawa offers them is Bill C-38, a few pennies per litre when they fill their gas tank.
A few streets away, David may be able to use the mega deduction if he buys that new espresso machine, but first he has to find the money to buy it. After paying his employees, his suppliers, his rent and his taxes, there is not enough left. Let us face it. A deduction on something someone cannot afford is not too much help. His tax break is much the same as the family's: a few pennies of relief when he gases up.
Then there is the third room, where the numbers have a lot more zeros. Here is a corporation headquartered in New York with the capital to make enormous investments and a team of accountants who can calculate exactly how much a new tax deduction changes the return. Lucky for them, their former board member is now the Prime Minister of Canada. For that room, Ottawa is proposing a massive tax advantage, and this is where I think something has gone badly wrong.
Do not get me wrong. Lower taxes have always been a Conservative principle. I want businesses investing in Canada, expanding here and creating good jobs, but lower taxes should not be a privilege reserved for the people with enough money and the right high-powered friends to be able to take advantage of them. If lower taxes help a multinational invest and grow, why would we not want that same breathing room for David? Why would we not want it for the families sitting around the kitchen table? They have spent years watching more of their paycheques disappear into taxes, while the cost of housing, food and fuel has climbed. Small businesses have faced the same rising costs, along with layer after layer of taxes, paperwork and government rules.
Now, after making it harder and harder for them to get ahead, governments arrive with a few pennies of temporary relief on their gas and expect them to be grateful. Canadians deserve better than that. David does not need Ottawa to run his coffee shop or a government program to tell him that a new espresso machine would make his business more productive. He already knows that. He needs enough money left at the end of the month to buy it. That family does not need Ottawa deciding where its money would be most productive either. Mom and dad already know exactly where their next $100 needs to go. That is their decision because it is their money.
Yes, let us give them the fuel tax relief in Bill C-38, but let us not call a few months of relief a solution. Conservatives have been pushing for relief at the pumps for a long time, years in fact, so we are glad the Liberals have finally discovered that lower taxes can actually help people. However, this is what happens when a Liberal government tries to borrow a Conservative idea without understanding the principle behind it. Canadians do not need a temporary break from high prices. They need policies that actually bring prices down. Gas prices have skyrocketed, and while Canada sits on some of the largest energy resources in the world, years of taxes, regulations and barriers to developing those resources have left us more vulnerable when global energy prices rise. This is a trap the Liberals created themselves.
Relief means lower taxes, affordable energy and developing the resources Canadians already own. Let us stop piling costs onto the people who produce, work, hire and raise families in this country. Let us stop piling costs onto the people who are working to raise their families in this country. Let us stop treating small business like an endless source of tax revenue and paperwork. Let us stop taking from Canadians only to decide in Ottawa which multinational will get it back. Instead, let us remove the barriers that have been squeezing the middle class and small business, and then give Canadians room to do what they have always done.
Here is what Ottawa seems to be missing: We would not have to wait 10 years for some foreign company's investment to trickle down to the rest of us. Small and medium-sized businesses employ nearly two-thirds of Canada's private sector workers. If thousands of businesses like David's had a little more room to breathe, the effect would begin on main street across this country almost immediately. David does not need 10 years to decide what to do with another few thousand dollars left in his business. He already knows. He fixes the machine, buys equipment, gives an employee another shift or finally hires a person he has needed for months.
Maybe mom starts stopping at David's coffee shop three mornings a week again. Her five dollars goes into David's till. David pays his employee. His employee buys lunch down the street. A roofer gets the family's business. The mechanic gets paid. People begin making plans again instead of putting them off for another year. Nobody in Ottawa had to decide where those dollars should go. Ordinary Canadians did that themselves.
That is what prosperity looks like: Canadians keeping more of what they earn, making their own choices, building their businesses, looking after their families and creating a better life for the people they love. That is what a real Conservative government would fight for.