Madam Speaker, the volume and verbosity of the member for Timmins—James Bay was in inverse relationship to the quality of the content of that presentation.
I will be splitting my time with the member for Banff—Airdrie.
Today I rise on an important motion that is significant to Nova Scotians and to all Canadians. As we know, after eight years of the NDP-Liberal government, Canadians are struggling to make ends meet. Earlier this week, I spoke in the House about one such example, university student Walt McDonald. Walt, like many students right across Canada, is having to choose between eating his breakfast and saving his single meal from the food bank for lunch. The Dalhousie Student Union food bank, as I informed the House, says that the food bank usage is at a record high. It says that 10 years ago, it served just snacks to students, but now students are using it for their weekly meal plan.
This is what life is like after eight years of the NDP-Liberal government. What is the government's solution? It is to raise taxes. There is not anything it has met that it does not want to tax, and there is not anything it has met that it does not want to increase the tax on. The Liberal-NDP government has supported measures to quadruple the carbon tax to 61¢ per litre.
The carbon tax hikes are coming at the worst possible time for Canadian families and for students like Walt who are struggling with the rising costs of everything due to the inflation caused by this coalition. The NDP-Liberals would argue that their cherished carbon tax is the only way to address climate change, but of course we know this is false, first, because it does nothing to improve the environment as carbon emissions continue to go up, and second, because it fails to grasp the reality of what life is like not only for Nova Scotians but for all Canadians.
Unlike the large cities that are dense in population and have ample services like public transit, rural communities like mine do not enjoy those same amenities. When a lobster fisherman wakes up before dawn to go on the water in February, there is no public transit system to take him to the local dock at four in the morning. A forestry worker who drives from Lunenburg to Northfield in 20 minutes cannot spend an extra four hours to commute via bicycle. A senior living on OAS and CPP does not have $30,000 to spare to upgrade their heating system to solar, or even $10,000. The MP for Central Nova brags about his solution for everything in our affordability crisis, which is to install a $10,000 heat pump.
These are the realities of what life is like in Nova Scotia and other rural communities across Canada. Taxing these everyday realities is not a solution and is doing nothing to combat climate change. While the Liberal approach is to punish working people for heating their homes and driving to work, Conservatives believe we should protect our environment with technology and not taxes, by developing Canada's energy sector to utilize cleaner energy like natural gas and propane. By reducing our reliance on fossil fuels like coal in favour of clean natural gas, Canada could develop its energy sector from coast to coast and finally end its import of dirty fuels from overseas dictatorships such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which are what we have to use in Nova Scotia.
These are the fuels we are forced to use in our homes and to drive our vehicles in Nova Scotia because the Liberals would rather we do that than have a pipeline to the east coast from the Prairies with some of the cleanest oil and gas on the planet. They would rather have us use electricity from burning coal imported from Columbia than extract the trillions of cubic feet of shale gas we have right in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. We actually import shale gas from the United States into Nova Scotia thanks to the efforts of the NDP-Liberal coalition.
By unleashing Canada's natural resource sector and approving good Canadian projects, global emissions would be reduced. That is because Canada has the strictest environmental regulations in the world for producing these resources. The oil extracted in Canada is the cleanest, most efficient energy in the world. On top of that, the emissions produced by shipping oil across the Atlantic Ocean from Saudi Arabia completely negate any benefit from any supposed improvement by the carbon tax.
Let us green-light Newfoundland and Labrador's planned increases in oil and gas production, which would allow us to fully replace every single barrel of oil we are importing from abroad within five years. Let us make Canada a place where nuclear and hydroelectricity are welcomed, not admonished.
The other issue the Liberals argue is that they believe this tax is revenue-neutral and that through this climate action incentive payment, as they euphemistically call it, eight out of 10 families will receive more in rebate cheques than they pay out. That is sort of typical Liberal math, where they cannot find a million people whom they have let in. They cannot add that, and on top of that, they actually believe that one can tax somebody and give them back more money than they paid out. It does not make any basic economic sense. It is completely false, as we know from the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report.
The report stated that Nova Scotians would see a net loss of $1,500 from the carbon tax despite the receipt of climate action incentive payments from the Liberals. The truth is that the Liberal carbon tax is bad for Nova Scotia. If those rebates were working, Nova Scotia Liberal MPs would not be calling on their own government to increase the size of those cheques. Obviously those cheques are not having any impact on our cost of living crisis. If they were, two weeks ago after caucus, in a unified force under the member for Kings—Hants, the MPs would not have gone out and said that they should increase those payments.
The Liberals' solution to the carbon tax problem of the cost of living is to actually increase payments to people, not get rid of the problem in the first place. It is the carbon tax that is causing it. Despite this, the Liberals from Atlantic Canada support raising the cost of living on Nova Scotian families. Since 2015, the Liberal members from Atlantic Canada have voted 23 times in Parliament for the carbon tax, the increases in the carbon tax and the budgetary measures to increase the carbon tax.
The Liberal members from Atlantic Canada have an opportunity today to show that they will actually speak up for their constituents and not for their leader, demand that the cause of the problem be removed from the cost of living, and demand that their own government remove the carbon tax. They know, because they heard it all summer, that the carbon tax is the main irritant that the government has caused to the economic well-being of Canadians.
The member who spoke previously mocked anyone drawing attention to the cost of living increases. I will do it again, since he does not seem to care about the price of anything, which is, again, why he will soon be the former member for that riding. Under the NDP-Liberal coalition government, lettuce is up 94%, onions are up 69%, cabbage is up 70%, carrots are up 74%, potatoes are up 73%, oranges are up 77% and apples are up 61%. The only thing that is up in this country, besides taxes, is the cost of everything, thanks to the NDP-Liberal government.
It is hypocritical of these members to stand up and say that we should stand out, take a different view on this and stand up for our constituents. I challenge them to, once and for all, speak for what their constituents told them this summer, which I know was not happy. They told me personally that what they heard at the door was not happy. They should stand up and support this motion and oppose the government's continued policy of increasing the cost of living on every Canadian and every Nova Scotian.
