Ted Falk

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for his speech on the carbon tax.

I would like to ask him, as he is a new member of the House, how he feels about running on the idea and platform of a carbon tax, only to come to the House and find out the carbon tax has been axed, as in the Conservative platform. Is that something he can now defend to his constituents?

[Public Services and Procurement, June 10th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, money does not grow on trees, but it sure seems to grow in the coffers of Liberal government insiders and contractors. Today we learned through the Auditor General's blistering report that 31 service procurement contracts had been awarded to GC Strategies, for $92 million. The ministers did not enforce security. The ministers did not monitor contracts, and they did not follow proper procurement policies. Guess what. These same Trudeau ministers are in today's cabinet.

Who is running that circus over there, and when will the Canadian taxpayers get their money back?

[Business of Supply, June 9th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right. The House was very clear last week. We were unanimous as opposition parties in saying that the government needed to present a budget. The behaviour and the actions of the current government and the current Prime Minister are absolutely a discredit to the House of Commons. They are operating in a way that is contrary to the will of Parliament. Parliament sent a clear message and gave the Prime Minister and the Liberal government an opportunity to work collaboratively with all the opposition party members in the House. They chose not to. They chose to take their own path of poor communication and a poor display of cohesiveness in the House.

The Americans see the way things are going, and I do not think that is going to bode well for the Prime Minister and his negotiations. What he needs to demonstrate is that he, at the very least, respects the will of Parliament and the wishes of opposition parties when they form a majority decision.

[Business of Supply, June 9th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, we used to hear in the House that sunshine was the best medicine. We do not hear that anymore, do we? No, what we are hearing now is, “I have a plan. Trust me.” There is no plan. The plan should be the budget. If we had a budget, we would know what we were doing.

When it comes to trade negotiations with the United States, we are kept in the dark instead of collaborating. The team Canada approach is what we heard so much about during the campaign. There is no team Canada. There is only “elbows up”, now get those elbows down and get back to work.

[Business of Supply, June 9th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, that must be one of the first questions the member has asked in the House, so I welcome him to the House.

The member talked about criticizing. Our role, as opposition members, is to hold the government to account and to criticize the things that we see as being bad for Canada and bad for Canadians. We have offered concrete solutions. What we are offering today is a concrete solution of presenting a budget so that the House can analyze and scrutinize the government's plans to tell it where we think it needs to change course or improve its plans, or perhaps, as we did with the ways and means motion, give it the nod of approval and say keep going. I doubt it, but that may happen.

[Business of Supply, June 9th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, members will remember that, during the campaign, the Prime Minister promised that he had a plan ready to go, that “a plan beats no plan”. I ask this: Where is the plan?

By the way, I also want to split my time.

I have read arguments in some media against providing that plan, and none of them are compelling or convincing. What is interesting is that, in my reading, I discovered that the three longest times between budgets were during World War II, during COVID and in 2001. Do members know what I found out? All three of those periods were under Liberal governments.

As I explained at the beginning of my speech, a budget is a plan. It is a direction. It is a path forward that reveals and expresses what is important. As we heard from the National Post's assessment, right now, it appears that there is no intention of ever balancing the budget.

Let us ask that question: Why does rising government debt matter? According to Jay Goldberg in the Winnipeg Sun, “[multiple] studies have shown that an increasing debt-to-GDP ratio puts upward pressure on long-term interest rates, raising borrowing costs for [individuals, families and] governments”, all leading to an increased tax burden for families and the middle class, and creating “barriers to economic growth.”

The truth is that Liberal deficit spending also leads to higher prices at the grocery store. A recent Parliamentary Budget Officer report says the cost of servicing public debt, while currently sitting at $49.1 billion for 2025-26, will rise to just under $70 billion in the 2029-30 fiscal year. That means that, just to carry increased debt, we would be paying $70 billion in interest on our debt alone. Members can imagine what we could be doing with $70 billion, but it is going to go to paying the interest on today's spending.

We may recall that the Prime Minister said that we would judge him by the price Canadians pay at the grocery store. That being the case, let us look at some of those price increases for just this year to date. Beef is up 34%. Oranges are up 26%. Apples are up 18%. White rice is up 14%. Sweet potatoes are up 12%. Beef rib cuts are up almost 12%. Coffee is up 9%. Infant formula is up 9%. Meatless burgers, although I do not know who would eat those, are up 6%. Chicken breasts are up 6%. Pork rib cuts are up 6%. Pork shoulders are up 5%. Eggs are up 3.6%.

I find it very interesting that our supply management food processors have had the least increase. What is concerning is that the most significant increases are in the meat category, the protein that we all so desperately need, with 4% to 34% increases right across the board. Canadians are going to pay almost $17,000 on food this year alone, an increase of $800 from last year, all while two million Canadians visit the food bank each and every month.

How can Canadians afford this? Statistics Canada, in its latest report, looked at the annual income in Canada. The latest information shows that the median household income in our country in 2025 will be $68,400. If we take 30% off of that in taxes, that leaves us with $47,000. In other words, over one-third of a family's after-tax income will go to food alone. We heard in the House today that the cost of living in Ontario averages 52% of household income. That leaves a whopping 13% of a family's income for everything else, including transportation, clothing, entertainment and miscellaneous.

Canadians need more than elbows up. We need to get our elbows down and get to work. The Prime Minister said that he would collect $20 billion from the United States through tariffs, yet tariffs are, in effect, at zero for products coming from the United States. Only weeks ago, we were assured that there would be no more tariffs supplied to Canada, yet here we are. We are now facing a doubling of tariffs on steel and aluminum. With Canada being the world's fourth largest aluminum producer and top aluminum exporter, this is concerning.

In Canada, we produce approximately 3.3 million tonnes of aluminum every year, and all the projections say that production will increase. Demand is expected to increase by as much as 40% in the next five years. Aluminum mining supports 9,500 direct jobs and 20,000 indirect jobs. When we translate those numbers into the impact on working Canadians, in Canada, we are talking about 30,000-plus jobs that are going to be affected by these tariffs.

A 50% tariff was very alarming as the United States was Canada's largest export destination for a aluminum products, which accounted for 92% of total aluminum exports. From what we see, plans continue all around us. For example, I wonder which countries Canada may be talking to regarding the purchase of our raw materials. How are those conversations going?

When the President of the United States returned from a recent trip to the Middle East, he announced, upon his return, hundreds of billions of dollars in trade. According to the presidential announcements, the EGA plans to build a $4-billion plant in Oklahoma next year. That smelter will have the capacity to produce as much as 600,000 tonnes a year of primarily aluminum. This will almost double the production of aluminum in the United States. We cannot be led by these promises without seeing the plan forward.

I remember very recently we kept hearing our friends on the other side recite that we needed to take their word for it, as they repeatedly claimed that the carbon tax was not causing inflation. Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Budget Officer explained that the total cumulative effect of the carbon tax, even after the rebates, meant that most families were paying more. All the while, we kept saying, when we tax the farmer who grows the food, the trucker who transports it, the store that sells it and the family who buys it, prices will inevitably go up.

Then, as soon as the Liberal government finally heeded the Conservative plea to remove the carbon tax, Statistics Canada announced that the decrease in inflation was directly related to the removal of the carbon tax. The very next month, inflation went down from 2.3% to 1.7% in one month.

To wrap it up, the Liberals need to take a lesson from our common-sense advice. I invite them to consider the wisdom of our opposition motion. Canadians are depending on a plan that shows them the way forward.

[Business of Supply, June 9th, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, I want to start off by congratulating you on being selected as the Deputy Speaker for this Parliament. We wish you all the best. It is good grooming for the next session.

I rise today to speak about the Conservative opposition day motion regarding food inflation and the lack of a Liberal budget. As a businessman, I have always seen budgets as opportunities to provide a clear path forward, one that even shows priorities and what matters most to a company or organization. A budget builds consensus or direction and keeps us all on the same path. In fact, I have heard it said that a budget is a blueprint for freedom, and I would concur. A budget is like a map. It helps us prepare for the future so we can assess how much is coming in and how much is going out. However, a budget is more than just numbers. It is about making wise choices. A good budget takes care of the needs and saves a little for the wants. Let us break that down a bit here.

The Prime Minister, who went across the country claiming he was “the man with the plan”, is not providing the blueprint for his plan. Here we are, about to spend a half a trillion dollars with no budget. Look at what happened right after the throne speech. We were told that our new government would cap operating spending at 2% annually. Then, not even two hours later, a bill was introduced that boosted overall spending by 8%. That is 8% more than the Trudeau government spent in the last year of office, yet we were told the current government would spend less.

The Prime Minister is spending more not on investments but, oddly, on consultants. I remember reading about a senior policy adviser with the Treasury Board who said that when hiring consultants, it was hard to tell if the contract was successful or not. He added that he knew of numerous cases where consultants were hired to check the work of other consultants. In other words, we paid money to consultants to check the work of consultants. What an incompetent government. Here we are, with spending on consultants up to a record $26.1 billion. That is more than a 36% increase in one year. To help us better understand how much that means for the average Canadian citizen, it is roughly $1,400 spent on consultants for every single household in Canada.

As the National Post said, the Liberal government is spending more than the previous Justin Trudeau government did, with no plan on ever getting back to a balanced budget.

We need a budget. That is why Parliament voted for the Conservative amendment to the throne speech calling for a budget this spring. That is also why Conservatives are giving the Prime Minister another opportunity to produce a budget. Canadians need to see a plan that outlines how he will pay for all this spending. Members will remember how, throughout the campaign, we heard Mr. Carney promising that he had a plan ready to go, a plan—

[Wildfires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, June 3rd, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, I want to refer to the speech by my colleague, the member for Parkland. He talked about the importance of doing proper forest management and how that could greatly reduce the impact of forest fires.

I have been a member of the Standing Committee on Natural Resources for the last several years. We studied forest fires during the pine beetle forest study that was conducted. We listened to many indigenous leaders who said that they had a practice of forest management that was not being practised anymore and that if we would do that, with controlled burns and proper management of the deadfall in forests, we would not be facing these out-of-control fires in many regions.

Indigenous people have knowledge they can share with us, and the natural resource people need to listen to it and do proper forest management. Of course, the government also has to pay for that to happen.

[Wildfires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, June 3rd, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Repentigny asked an interesting question. If he had been listening to my speech a little more carefully, he would have realized that all but four of the fires that were started in my province were started by human activity. Out of 25 wildfires, all but four were started by human activity. Let us keep in perspective how these fires are started and address the real concern here.

[Wildfires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, June 3rd, 2025]

Mr. Speaker, that is a loaded question. One thing I do strongly believe is that when the government makes a commitment to train firefighters and buy water bombers, as the Trudeau government did, it should keep that commitment.