Ryan Williams

[Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2, October 7th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, that is very interesting. I do not know, when you are talking to your residents at the door and telling them that inflation is higher in the U.K., how that helps the family that has to choose between rent, groceries and shelter. I do not understand how you think they understand that.

Residents are hurting and they want to hear relief for those tough things. They want to know their taxes are going to be lowered and that they are going to have more money in their back pocket at the end of the day.

We cannot spent all the money and do all the things and expect that Canadians are going to be helped every step of the way. It has been proven. The Governor of the Bank of Canada said that spending the money we have spent, having more money chasing less goods, has resulted in Canadians spending over $900 a month more than they did in 2019.

If your answer is to continue what we are doing, if you want to make it $1,800 or $2,000, our answer is to rein it in. Let us get focused—

[Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2, October 7th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand up here once again on behalf of the residents of Bay of Quinte.

Canada's Bank of Canada governor finally admitted this week that inflation is a made-in-Canada problem not just a global phenomenon. Governor Macklem, this week in a speech to the Halifax Chamber of Commerce, said, “Some of this inflation reflects global developments that we don’t control, but inflation in Canada increasingly reflects what’s happening in Canada.”

This echoes former deputy minister of finance for the Liberal Party and former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge, who stated two weeks ago that inflation was increasingly a made-in-Canada problem. This unjust inflation is hurting Canadian families, and for Canada, a G7 nation, it is embarrassing that we are seeing families affected by the lack of the essentials, the very basics the government of this country should be looking after: housing, food, paycheques and filling job shortages, which includes our military and housing for our military.

This made-in-Canada inflation problem is costing the average Canadian family with two children $11,000 a year. This inflation problem, this crisis in housing and health care and food shortages are really affecting families to the core. Food bank usage is up. In my riding, it is up 30%, which correlates to a 30% rise in grocery bills. With housing, there is a doubling of homelessness in my region, with 500,000 alone in Belleville. There are farmers who are struggling to pay their bills.

There is the government's announcement for next year, which will be a turducken of taxes during Thanksgiving, a tripling of taxes, including the carbon tax. For a lot of Canadian businesses, we will see rises in interest as we see the bank trying to combat this inflation. Should Canada not, as a G7 nation, need to look after the basics? It has been proven that more money chasing fewer goods causes inflation, a made-in-Canada problem. Should the government not have to look after the basics for its citizens?

This means Canadian families right now are choosing between food, heat, medication and after-school activities. Do we not feel the government should do the same? The government needs to choose where to put its money to be more active in investing in Canada and to ensure we are looking after the basics.

These are things like creating more hospital beds, doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners or making sure our natural resources like liquefied natural gas can go to Europe, create jobs and bring money into this country. Should we make sure that we create housing for our military and that we do not have a gap of 3,600 families waiting for housing on our military bases? Should we not ensure Canadians take home a greater paycheque?

We are stuck here in Parliament debating and, on our side, having to say no to dental care in Canada, a G7 nation, because we have spent so much money on so many things except for taking care of the basics in Canada. When we are spending money, we need to make sure we invest in Canadian basics and the necessities that are helping all families all the time. That means we are going to need to say no, just like families are saying no when it comes to their own bills. Some of them are saying no to food, housing, after-school activities or anything else Canadians need to make choices on for their families each and every day. It is absolutely disheartening.

The government's number one job is to make sure it is taking care of Canadians' basic needs and to ensure that when we are spending we invest in those things Canadians will find helpful and that will help their daily lives and looks after their families. I want to talk about those things.

For housing, there are 500 people who are homeless in the city of Belleville. It takes one step to become homeless. Sometimes it is a domestic dispute. Sometimes it is a rental cheque that was missed, or sometimes it is alcohol and addictions. It is three steps to come out of homelessness. It means we look at shelters. It is a basic need for all Canadians that they at least have a roof over their heads, which is a shelter, but second is transitional housing.

We have an incredible transitional house in Belleville, by the shelter called the Grace Inn. It is called the Shiloh House. It has six rooms and is helping the homeless transition out of shelters and into rentals. It can help with up to six units. It is not easy. It has transitional programs for mental health and addiction. It helps with employment and keeping a job, and it ensures that people are looking after themselves. I toured it a few weeks go, and it was inspiring to talk to individuals who were getting themselves into transitional housing and will eventually find a rental and a home for themselves.

However, it is not as simple as just throwing money at the situation and thinking it is going to fix our homelessness situation. The very basis of people having shelter and being able to find themselves in a home takes three steps. That means we have to work harder. We cannot just throw money at it. We have to ensure we are working with Canadians, municipalities and provinces to move people out.

The third step is affordable housing as a whole. This country is short 1.8 million homes compared to the average of our G7 friends. We know that affects supply. When we look at the average affordable rental housing unit and affordable rent, it has to be about $700 or $800.

I am a hotelier. I have built hotels in the past. I can tell members that the travesty in our housing right now is that we are not seeing affordability when it comes to building homes. The average affordable housing unit that I have seen in Canada is well over $280,000 a unit. In 2015 I built a hotel, the TownePlace Suites Marriott, for $135,000 a door. That included a pool, and there was a kitchen in each room. It had almost everything it could have.

However, affordable housing is so expensive now that it costs $265,000 just to build the unit. There is no way, when developers build affordable housing units for $265,000 a unit, that they can charge rents of $700 or $800. Even if they get 50% or all the funding from CMHC, they still have to charge $1,200- to $1,500-plus for that rent. We have to find innovative ways that Canada can build affordable rental units so that our citizens can afford an affordable market rent.

Housing is a huge issue. It is top of mind. I am very passionate about it. It is something that we need to invest in and spend more time on. Of course, housing and shelter should come before dental care. Let us fix housing and make sure that is a priority.

With respect to food for our families, the average family spends more money in taxes than it does for food, shelter and housing in Canada, a G7 nation. When we look at the fact that we have people lined up for our food banks and what we need to feed those people through our farmers, our farmers are the most important part of that mechanism. They should be invested in and looked after. Instead, what we are hearing this week is that they are paying $45,000 on average in carbon tax per year, but getting back only $862 as a rebate. These are the farmers on whom we depend to grow our food.

By the way, by 2030, the world will need 1.5 times the food we have now. We will need 50% more food. Who grows that food, has the animals and has the farmland? Who fishes? It is our farmers and our farming industry. They need to be invested in. They have good technologies that will help them use the soil to produce double the yields and help them save on labour, because good luck to them finding labourers and employees right now, with one million jobs open in this country. We need to invest in farmers and to make sure that is there.

My last point is with respect to labour shortages. We are one million jobs short in this country, which is costing $30 billion in spiking inflation, because if we cannot get someone to truck our food, make our food and be there to serve our food, then inflation goes up because we have less. There is more money chasing fewer goods, and it is a made-in-Canada problem. We need to invest in Canadians. Unfortunately, we have to make the hard decisions to make sure we look after the basics. That means saying no to some things.

Looking at our future, we need doctors and labourers. We need to help our farmers. We need to make sure we get shelter and housing for our families. That is what we should be focusing on, and that is what Canadians need to be focused on with respect to the current government. That is what we are going to do on this side of the House.

[Cost of Living Relief Act, No. 2, October 7th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands for her speech. I really liked the phrase “bed-to-bureaucrat ratio”. However, I think the debt-to-bureaucrat ratio is important. Both the current Governor of the Bank of Canada Tiff Macklem and the former governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge stated this week that inflation in Canada is a made-in-Canada problem. It is the fact that we have more money chasing a lack of goods. At the same time, as I said before, since 2015, the government has hired 61,000 federal employees and has really bloated itself. We are looking obviously at motions. We want to help everyone, but like the member so eloquently stated, we have to do the basics: health care and housing.

Do you agree that we have a debt-to-bureaucrat problem also in government and that we need to address that to solve inflation as much as anything else?

[Copyright Act, October 6th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to contribute to the debate on Bill C-294, and I want to thank my colleague for Cypress Hills—Grasslands for bringing it forward.

Interoperability is a lot more fun to say in English than it is in French. However, the bill seeks to amend the Copyright Act, specifically regarding technological protection measures, more commonly known as digital locks, and the interoperability exemption to those locks.

New provisions would be in effect such that, and this was brought from the Library of Parliament to be studied in committee, if a person has lawfully acquired an agriculture machine, for instance, and if this machine contains a copy of a computer program and this copy monitors and/or controls the functioning of that machine, then that person will be deemed to have a licence or use of that copy.

What does that mean? It means that in the agriculture sector when we have technological advances, such as new software that comes about to make farmers' lives easier or the advancement of AI and a lot of other technological advances that need to use software, when someone buys that equipment, they would be able to use that equipment with other systems that work with it. I can tell members that it is a lot more complicated than a lot of us can understand, but to make a long story short, it would help farmers save money in order to grow more crops, which is really important.

Also important, when we talk about industry in Canada, is that it would create competition. When we create competition, we ensure that not only are we looking after farmers and entrepreneurs, but we allow people to have a choice. When people have a choice, they can then make decisions that save them money and that are best for their businesses.

Of course, we are talking about farmers in a very rural part of this nation, and we have talked all week about farmers, who are so very important. They are number one in this nation. We plant 89 million acres of crops, but the U.S. is about 10 times that and plants about 890 million acres. However, we have land that can be used for farming and we have technological advances that can make it into a greater reality. Fifty-three per cent of all of our land in Canada is used for farming, and as we have developments in DNA sequencing and genomics, we are able to grow corn farther north almost every year. We are finding advancements in protein clusters. We are finding better ways to grow our food and to be more sustainable, and the world is going to need that.

By 2030, the world will need 50% more food, which means we have to produce 1.5 times the amount of food we grow now. Therefore, when we look at farming when it comes to Canada, it is tremendously important, and the bill before us would help out. At the end of the day, the bill would allow farmers to be more competitive, to find more technological advances and to make sure that when we develop the future of farming we have all the tools in place so that farmers can make the best choices and save money.

Farmers are so important. They grow the best food in the world here in Canada. We are the breadbasket of the world with a lot of our wheat as well as our protein clusters with our fisheries, farms and animals. At the end of the day, we need farmers to not just survive but to thrive. The bill, of course, would handle only one part of that. However, there will be more advances in the future. I will talk about a few them, and I think it is important to talk about what the advances are right now.

When farmers are looking to keep birds and pests away from their crops, they are now using laser scarecrows. We have Bee Vectoring, a new Canadian technology that uses software and bees to help keep pests away from plants. We have Harvest Quality Vision, which uses drones in the air and sensors in the soil to detect nitrogen, so that we can see the best weather and at what point we have to put certain nutrients into the soil.

Farmers will also be able to use technology to save on labour, because they cannot find labour anywhere right now. Finding someone to pick crops or work in the field has been increasingly hard. We are going to need technology because of some of our labour shortages. If we do not have labour, we cannot grow crops and we cannot pick our food. We are talking about an industry that is so important that we will need 1.5 times of it in the next eight years. We will need technology to solve some of those problems.

On crop and soil monitoring and management, as a colleague mentioned earlier, we have zero tillage happening right now. This means we can plant seeds and harvest crops without touching the soil, which saves the soil. We used to have to do fallowing. This is a new technology that is really amazing for our farmers.

There are a lot of other different things being developed. This week, Loblaws, which I know is a dirty word in the House today, launched its first automated vehicles. There is GPS-controlled and automated farm equipment that will be able to manage literally thousands of acres for farmers and do the work that is needed. I do not know if members have seen the movie Interstellar. It had equipment operated by GPS. Let us hope we have a better future than what was in that movie.

We need to make sure this is a good bill, and I think it does the bare minimum, which is to ensure that we look at how technology is used on our farms and at how we can support our farmers with control.

There is a lot of other help we could give our farmers, and we have talked about it this week. They have a triple threat happening right now. Farmers have increased interest rates, which are really hurting them. There are increased costs when it comes to fertilizer tariffs, which no one else in the world has. Somehow Canada is the only one to have these tariffs on fertilizer, which are going to affect farmers' costs by up to 35%. Third, we have a triple increase to the carbon tax. I will not say it three times, as that has been done enough today, but these are real hardships for farmers.

We talk about farmers in Canada, but how many farms do we have? I talked about 89 million acres. There are 189,000 farms in Canada and that is not including hobby farms. I have a lot of hobby farms in my riding.

Just a few weeks ago, an ostrich farm opened in my riding. Ostriches look kind of neat and they are delicious. They are also great for the kids. When we were there, they fed them. What is really neat, from an environmental standpoint, is that ostriches use one-fiftieth of the land that cattle do, they let off one one-hundredth of the waste and their tenderloins taste just like beef. It is unbelievable. I am going to bring more people to see them this week. They are trying to scale and grow. They are already using technology as well. They are using technology for feeding and breeding them. It is quite a new industry. Those are the hobby farms outside of the other farms.

Another great type of farm in my region is dairy. We have quite a few dairy farms. One of them is Lee Nurse, which is doing robotic milking. All the milking is done by computers. When we talk about interoperability and dairy farms, it is about how they are going to be able to service, upgrade and manage those systems as the technology is advanced, which is really amazing. When it is time to milk, the cows all line up together. I guess they go because there is a cookie with protein that attracts them. With the computer, the robot milks the cows and away they go. It is unbelievable. They have about 180 head of Holstein, and at the end of the day they are doing something really amazing. Of course, this bill would help them, which is really great.

It is natural for other companies in the marketplace to try to innovate with new products and develop new marketable items that would make life easier. We want to make sure there is control and that we have given copyright protection to farmers so they can better our lives, grow the food we need and make sure we grow the farming community and economy here in Canada. More competition means more progress. Let us help our farmers, at least in this way.

[Business of Supply, October 6th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, we do agree with much of the bill. The big thing is competition, and that looks at how companies are acting and what choice is there for consumers.

The member talked about people being gouged and what they cannot afford. Our farmers provide food, and if we are looking at the competition, we see there are 189,000 farms in Canada. They are paying, on average, $45,000 each in carbon tax, and they are only getting back $862. We are talking about that end of the industry.

Of course, we are also going to look at competition for our grocery stores. We are going to look at farmers' markets and the other ways that people get nutritious, healthy food. That seems to be about gouging. They are not finding relief at a time when farmers cannot choose other sources. We want them to use hydrogen and want them to use better fossil fuels or no carbon, but when it comes to that idea, they do not have a choice.

Why is the member not pushing for relief for farmers to get better, nutritious food for Canadian families that need it right now?

[Business of Supply, September 29th, 2022]

Madam Speaker, if we talk about what companies need right now, it is jobs. We are short 1.03 million jobs in this country, and we have a government right now that is looking to increase taxes on the workers who are trying to work and who are not getting by. Inflation is caused by more money chasing fewer goods, and one of the ways to produce more goods is to have more workers.

Companies are looking for employees who make the food and truck the food across our nation. To ensure that we produce more of the innovation we need for Canada, they need workers. If companies had more workers, it would mean more payroll taxes, which would go to the government. It does not make any sense that we are taxing Canadians more to produce more money when we just need more workers.

What is the government doing to create more workers for Canadian companies?

[Taxation, September 26th, 2022]

Mr. Speaker, Canada is number one. Unfortunately, it is number one in the world for a lack of affordable housing, a shortage of acute care beds and the priciest cellphone bills, and now we are number one in taxes to farmers, planned tax increases to paycheques and a triple increase to the carbon tax, all when Canadians pay more for taxes than for food, shelter and clothing combined.

When the Prime Minister said that Canada is back, Canada did not know that meant it was at the back of the line. Conservatives understand that number one is the front of the line, not the back. Why does the government not understand this?

[Questions on the Order Paper, September 20th, 2022]

With regard to the Canada Border Services Agency and the current backlog of 295,133 Nexus applications: (a) what is the government's projected timeframe for clearing the backlog; (b) what is the government's projection for what the backlog will be as of (i) October 1, 2022, (ii) January 1, 2023, (iii) April 1, 2023, (iv) July 1, 2023; (c) when will the Canadian enrollment centres open for applicant interviews, broken down by each location; and (d) what is the government's explanation for why the United States was able to open Nexus enrolment centres for applicant interviews in April 2022, yet the Canadian centres remain closed?

[Questions on the Order Paper, June 22nd, 2022]

With regard to memorandums, briefing notes, or other documents prepared by or for Employment and Social Development Canada, since January 1, 2016: (a) what are the details of all briefing notes or memorandums prepared on Canada’s labour force participation rate, including, for each, the (i) date, (ii) sender, (iii) recipient, (iv) title, (v) subject matter, (vi) summary of the content, (vii) file number, (viii) type of document; and (b) what are the details of all briefing notes or memorandums prepared on Canada’s productivity rate, including, for each, the (i) date, (ii) sender, (iii) recipient, (iv) title, (v) subject matter, (vi) summary of the content, (vii) file number, (viii) type of document?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, June 20th, 2022]

With regard to housing on Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) bases: (a) what are the current numbers on the waiting list for military housing, broken down by CAF base; (b) for each base in (a), what is the breakdown of the waiting list by (i) priority 1, (ii) priority 2 (iii) priority 3; and (c) since January 1, 2016, what is the total number of new military housing units built on CAF bases, broken down by (i) year, (ii) base, (iii) type of housing?