Parliamentary Speeches

Mr. Speaker, Canadian children are in pain and there is no medication available. Mark Parrish, the president of a drug distribution association that represents 19 countries, says that Canada is the only country that has a shortage of essential drugs. Parents are even having to go to the United States to buy these drugs, because although we do not have them here in Canada, they are abundant south of the border. Why is it that children in other countries have these drugs, but Canadian children do not?

Mr. Speaker, it does not answer the question. I will quote from the Wall Street Journal, which had an article about Canada's shortage of children's medication. Mark Parrish, president of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers, a trade association with members from 19 countries, says that no other country is experiencing similar shortages as Canada is. That forces our parents to drive south of the border and buy the medications in the United States, where they are abundant and in supply, and bring them back here. Many people are actually hawking them with a profit back in our country. Again, why are these medications available abroad but not here at home?

Mr. Speaker, the Governor of the Bank of Canada has said that inflation here is domestically generated, not imported from the rest of the world. He agrees with our friend and the future leader of the Liberal Party, Mark Carney, who says that inflation is coming from Canada. However, interestingly, the governor says that the solution is to cap wages and cut jobs. He says that the only way to stop inflation is to drive up unemployment. Does the government agree that it needs to kill jobs to fight the inflation that it has caused?

Mr. Speaker, what is not looking pretty good is the cost of diesel. In New Brunswick, it is over three dollars a litre. Diesel is not a luxury; it is a necessity when one lives in the country and drives a big truck. It is a necessity for the truckers to bring us our goods to our grocery stores. No wonder we have 11% food price inflation. and home heating bills are not looking any better. They are going to double this winter and families in oil-heated communities will have to spend thousands of dollars. Cutting their subscription to Disney will save them $13, which is not enough to pay the bill, but what would help is that Liberals cancelled the plan to triple the tax. Will they?

Mr. Speaker, if she really wanted to empathize with low-income people who are struggling, then she and her NDP coalition partners would cancel their plan to triple the carbon tax. They want to do it at a time when home heating bills are expected to double, costing thousands of dollars for families in oil-heated communities, and when the diesel price is over three dollars a litre. Canadians cannot afford it, nor can they afford to spend $6,000 on the Prime Minister's hotel rooms, nor do they need lectures about cancelling Disney+. Will they cancel the carbon tax instead?

Mr. Speaker, when we learned that the costly coalition would be introducing this economic update today, we had two demands: no new taxes on workers and seniors and no new spending unless matched by equal savings. Today, this inflationary scheme triples the tax on home heating, gas and groceries, and adds $20 billion of inflationary spending that will drive up the cost of living. The Conservatives will stand up for Canadians, their paycheques, their homes and their savings, and we will vote against this inflationary scheme. How did we get here? Well, the cost of government is driving up the cost of living. Half a trillion dollars of inflationary deficits have bid up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay. Inflationary taxes have increased the costs for businesses, farmers and workers to produce those very same goods. The Liberals will pretend that they had no choice but to double the debt. The Prime Minister will claim that it is not his fault that he added more debt than all previous prime ministers combined. Let us start with the fact that he added $100 billion of debt before the very first COVID case was ever discovered here in Canada. He cannot blame COVID for that. In fact, he blew through his promise that the deficit would never exceed $10 billion. It was already $100 billion in total before the first case of COVID. Then when COVID came, 40% of all the new spending measures had nothing to do with COVID, according to the Prime Minister's own named Parliamentary Budget Officer. There was $200 billion of spending unrelated to COVID, and even among the COVID spending, there was an “all you can eat” buffet of waste and mismanagement. The Liberals sent CERB cheques to prisoners. They sent them to public servants who were simultaneously drawing public salaries. They gave wage subsidies to wealthy corporations that were rich enough to pay out dividends and bonuses to their executives, even after I warned that they should ban that hideous practice. They tried to give half a billion dollars to the WE Charity, an organization that had given half a million dollars to the Prime Minister's own family. The Liberals then spent $54 million on an app we did not need, that did not work and that could have been designed in a weekend for $250,000. The previous Conservative government had successfully delivered apps that were necessary, useful and of a similar complexity for $200,000 to $300,000, but somehow this one went up to $54 million. Many of the recipients of the money admit they did not do any work. They just hired other people to do work. The Liberals gave the money to people who did not do anything other than delegate the work to someone else. Do we not have public servants getting paid within the government to deliver that type of contracting? The government will not even tell us the identities of all the recipients of that money. Do not tell me the government had to double the size of the national debt. Do not tell me that every dollar of inflationary spending was necessary. The Liberals were irresponsible and unnecessarily profligate with the dollars of Canadians, and now people are paying the price. The Prime Minister will now say that Russia caused the inflation in Canada. Of course, we do less than 0.3% of our trade with Russia and Ukraine combined, beyond which the stuff they make is the stuff we have here already. They have energy and food. We have energy and food. If only the Prime Minister would get out of the way of our farmers and energy workers and let them produce those things. Beyond that, under the previous Conservative government, there were wars. There was a massive war in Afghanistan, and there were others in Iraq and Syria, but we never had inflation anywhere over 4%. In fact, we were able to successfully contribute to defeating terrorists and tyrants in those conflicts while keeping the inflation level low here in Canada. We were able to get our spending under control and our budget back into balance. By contrast, the government's spending today is 30% higher than in the pre-COVID year 2019. Why? The Liberals said all the deficits were the result of COVID. COVID is now behind us and spending is still 30% higher because we know it is not COVID that has caused the costs to rise. It is a costly coalition and an irresponsible Prime Minister who put these burdens on Canadians' shoulders. This is a Prime Minister who has no control and no respect for Canadians' money. Canadians are the ones paying the bills here in Canada. The more the government spends, the more Canadians pay. That is why we have the highest inflation rate in 40 years. It is “justinflation”. The Prime Minister also loves to blame all the cost of living rises on other people. Why is it, then, that house prices in this country are the second most inflated anywhere on planet earth? Why is it that land costs have gone through the roof? Land is not imported from Ukraine or Russia; land is right beneath our feet. We have the second biggest supply of it anywhere on earth, yet Vancouver is the third most overpriced housing market on planet earth and Toronto is the 10th. Can members imagine that? Two of our biggest cities have more inflated housing prices than New York City; London, England; and countless other big metropolises that have more people, more money and less land. In fact, Vancouver's house prices are more inflated than Singapore's. Singapore is an island. It is out of land. Canada has more land where there is no one than it has land where there is anyone, so why is it that we cannot find a place to house everyone? The first reason is that local government gatekeepers prevent housing construction by piling on massive delays that drive up costs and drive down the supply of housing. The Prime Minister has had seven years to stand up to the municipal and provincial gatekeepers who stand in the way of housing construction, but he would never do that because he does not want to confront the Liberal and NDP radical left in city halls across the country that has made this problem worse. What he has done instead is continue to shovel money into their local bureaucracies to reward them for blocking the poor, our immigrants and our working-class kids from ever owning a home. When I am prime minister, we will impose conditions so that if cities want more federal infrastructure money, they will have to remove the gatekeepers. We will connect their infrastructure dollars to the number of houses that actually get built so that young people can find a place to live. We will also sell off 15% of the 37,000 federal buildings we have so they can be converted into housing and our young people can have affordable homes. The second reason we have such expensive housing and such expensive everything is the Prime Minister has engaged in a massive orgy of money printing over the last two years. He said money printing would not cause inflation, even though that is exactly what it has done every single time it has been tried over the last roughly 3,000 years. Here is how it worked. The Prime Minister wanted to be able to claim that he was borrowing all this money on the cheap. He loved to stand in the House and say his debt was not costing any money, because interest rates were so low. The only reason he could borrow for next to nothing was that his central bank was creating the cash out of thin air. If it had been a real lender, it would have demanded a real rate of return on the loans. What happened was that they created something called “quantitative easing”. Whenever they invent new, incomprehensible terminology, we can be sure that there is something sinister behind it. Here is how it works. It is very simple. The government sells bonds to lenders. The Bank of Canada buys back those bonds at a higher price. The lenders love it. That is why the banks thoroughly endorse this strategy, because they made the money on the difference. It is simple arbitrage. The government sells them something on a Monday and buys it back from them at a higher price on a Wednesday. Who would not go for that deal? Unfortunately, only about 100 financial institutions are eligible to participate in it. The rest of the ordinary, hard-working Canadians who pay for it are not, but the banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions profited off of this transaction. The Bank of Canada pays for those bonds by depositing money in the accounts of those large financial institutions held on reserve at the Bank of Canada. Those reserves skyrocketed over the last two years as the bank bought up to $400 billion of new debt. What happened? That exploded the money supply, and more dollars chasing fewer goods caused higher prices. Much of the money then funnelled into the financial system and was lent out in mortgages to wealthy investors, who saw a massive expansion in the number of real estate holdings they could accumulate. Thus, housing prices went up 50% in two years, creating the biggest housing bubble in Canadian history. Now that the central bank is forced to raise interest rates, it risks bursting that bubble. All of the people who got on the balloon when it was on the ground floor and went up into the sky now risk coming crashing down as that balloon is bursting. Worse than that, the Bank of Canada now has hundreds of billions of dollars of deposits that it made into the accounts of those large financial institutions that it has on its reserves. What has happened to those deposits? They now bear more interest, because interest rates have gone up. The wealthy bankers who participated in this arbitrage transaction at the beginning and were paid for it by having more money deposited into their accounts at the Bank of Canada now collect 3.75%, because that is the policy rate that the bank pays. What does that mean? It means that the central bank is now losing money for the first time in its history and Canadian taxpayers are forced to bail them out to a tune of $4 billion every year. This entire wretched scheme, of which I warned two years ago, will, maybe in the end, amount to the single biggest wealth transfer from working-class people to ultrawealthy insiders, from the have-nots to the have-yachts, at any time in our history. Now we see the painful consequences. It is not just about numbers on a ledger. It is about 1.5 million people forced to go to a food bank in a single month. It is about one in five people skipping meals or cutting portions because they cannot afford their food. It is about the forthcoming winter, of which the minister spoke in metaphorical terms. People are now not going to be able to heat their homes, as the cost of home heating is expected to double or even more for those people who are on home heating oil. It is about the 35-year-old living in his parents' basement, despite the fact that he did everything we asked him to do. He got a job. He got an education. He worked hard every day, and now he cannot afford a home, which means he cannot build up collateral, cannot build a credit history, cannot build savings for his future and, therefore, cannot start a family. In Canada, a country with among the most abundant supply of land on earth, we cannot find places for people to live. These are the real-world consequences of irresponsible decisions. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister sits and smirks at the fact that he took a $6,000-a-night vacation to sleep in the fanciest hotel on planet Earth, staying up in opulent hotel lobbies and jazzing it up with his friends while people back home cannot pay the rent. Canadians are out of money and the Prime Minister is out of touch. We are going to inherit this mess, all of us, and we are going to have to fix the problem. We have a big job ahead of us; do we not? We have a very big job ahead of us. He will leave a big mess just like his dad left. He will be off on a beach somewhere surfing, and the rest of us will be busy working to clean up the mess he left behind. The sooner that happens, the better it is. Only then he will have to pay for his own hotels. We will not be paying for them anymore. He will have to pay his own way like Canadians are today. How are we going to clean up this mess? For one, we are going to bring in a pay-as-you-go law so that every time we bring in a new dollar of spending, we will find the savings to pay for it. Do members know who does that? Everybody in the real world. That is how single mothers pay their bills. When they want to send their children on vacation, they find a way to save money in other areas. The same goes for small businesses. When they want to increase their advertising spending, they find ways to save money in other areas of the business. It is normal. It is the reality of every person living in the real world. In fact, scarcity is the condition that faces every creature in the universe as there is only so much to go around, everyone except for the Prime Minister, who just takes everyone else's money to pay for his own wants and desires. In the real world, if a family wants a new deck, they might pass up on their vacation, or find a deal on the vacation and maybe pick up some used lumber at a local construction yard to save some money so that they can do it all within the same budget. Imagine if instead of just piling on new spending all the time, the government actually had to find savings to pay for it. That would force the same real-world trade-offs—

Mr. Speaker, I am not allowed to mention the presence or absence of the Prime Minister, but I will just say that some people bring happiness wherever they go and others bring happiness whenever they go. Conservatives are going to cap government spending. We are going to get the Bank of Canada back to its core mandate. For 25 years, the Bank of Canada had a very simple mandate of 2% inflation, brought in by the Mulroney government. It was to stick to 2%. Interest rates and money supply were all governed to that purpose, and it worked. It worked until the current Prime Minister came along and pushed the bank to print cash to pay for his spending. We are going to have no more of that. Conservatives will fund our programs with real money, rather than printed cash, because we know that there are no freebies in this world and we know that, ultimately, the taxpayer and the consumer pay for everything. We will reinstate that mandate and we will audit the central bank through the Auditor General to make sure that never again is there such a horrendous abuse of our money as we have seen over the last couple of years. Instead of creating more cash, we are going to create more of what cash buys. We are going to grow more food, build more houses and produce more resources right here in Canada, and here is how we will do it. We will incentivize our municipalities to remove their gatekeepers so that we can build more houses. We will remove the gatekeepers off the backs of our farmers by cancelling the tariffs and taxes on their fertilizers and fuel so they can produce more in this country. We will remove the government gatekeepers that stand in the way of our resource sector. Do members know that Canada today has the second-slowest time for building permits of any country in the OECD? The only other country that is worse is the Slovak Republic. In Canada, if we take all the types of building permits that exist, everything from a renovation permit on a house all the way up to a full uranium mine, and we average it out, the average permit time is 250 days. In South Korea, it is 28 days. We wonder why investors are taking their money to places like South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and Ireland. It is because they can actually get things built in those countries. That is what Conservatives are going to do in this country. We are going to compress the timelines and speed up approvals. We are going to challenge all levels of government to meet the goal of Canada being the fastest place to deliver a building permit anywhere in the developed world. The minister said today she is going to pitch the world on our critical minerals. The problem is that she cannot get them out of the ground. She is going to tell everyone that they exist. Out there in that field there is some lithium, copper and nickel, but companies have to wait seven years for us to give a permit for anyone to dig that mine. She says she is going to give out a bunch of corporate welfare to mining companies, which can fill their bank accounts with taxpayers' cash. If they cannot get a permit to dig the mine, they will not be able to turn it into anything other than big, fat boondoggles for taxpayers. Conservatives will repeal the anti-energy law, Bill C-69, so that we can build Canadian pipelines with Canadian steel to take Canadian energy to Canadian marketplaces and around the world. We are going to eliminate the anti-investment taxes that pile on the backs of our entrepreneurs so that it is actually rewarding to build things in this country. We are going to axe the carbon tax so that it is possible for our industries to compete and for our people to afford energy in this country. As for energy, there are two very different approaches. Across the aisle, they believe that we should tackle climate change by making traditional energy that Canadians rely on more expensive. Conservatives believe in tackling climate change by making new alternatives more affordable. We will do that by incentivizing and speeding up permits to mine lithium, copper, cobalt, graphite and other necessary minerals that will eventually go into Canadian-made electric cars and other forms of renewable energy. We will incentivize the production of these energies here in Canada. We will incentivize nuclear energy here on Canadian soil so that we can power our economy emissions-free. We will also get rid of the red tape to get dams built in Quebec. We know that in Quebec, there will not be enough electricity in the future to charge electric cars and to meet all the needs of a green future. Their solution is to build dams. However, the Prime Minister wants to prevent or delay the construction of those dams with duplicate processes. We agree with the Government of Quebec. It is not necessary to add three or four years to the time frame for these projects since the Government of Quebec already has processes in place to protect the environment. Quebeckers are capable of protecting the environment, and we are going to help them by approving the construction of hydroelectric dams. Finally, we will make this a country where work pays again. It does not pay to work for a lot of people. Let us look at someone on disability who recovers to a point or arrives at a point in their life where they realize they can work 10 or 15 hours and they want to get out into the world and contribute. The clawbacks right now mean many people on disability lose more than a dollar for every extra dollar they earn. The government published a report showing that if a single mother with three kids who earns $55,000 a year earns another dollar, she loses 80¢ of that dollar. She earns about $25 an hour. She loses in clawbacks of her benefits and taxes on her income 20 of those dollars, so her real wage on that extra hour of work is five dollars an hour. Nobody in Canada should be expected to work for five dollars an hour. That is an outrage. That is why my government will reform the tax and benefit system to ensure that whenever somebody works an extra hour, takes an extra shift, or earns an extra bonus, they are always better off and they always keep more of that dollar. We will do this to restore the Canadian promise. I look around this chamber and I see many inspiring stories, like my finance critic, who rose today to ask the first question. He is the son of immigrants. He grew up in a tough neighbourhood and had a difficult childhood, but he was able to get a diploma in accounting, which he is putting to very good use in this House. He started a business, built homes and was elected to serve in a G7 Parliament. I, myself, am the son of a 16-year-old unwed mother who had to put me up for adoption to two school teachers. They always taught me it did not matter where I came from, that it mattered where I was going, and it did not matter who I knew, that it mattered what I could do. That is the country I want my children to inherit, and that is the country we will fight for every single day in this House.

Mr. Speaker, first of all, the Conservative government created what the Liberal government now changed the name of to the workers benefit. We created that benefit in the first place, because we wanted to allow, along with increasing the personal exemption, more and more Canadians to be off the tax rolls altogether and keep a bigger share of their paycheques. Furthermore, on the child benefit, the Liberals wanted to take the money from parents and give it to bureaucrats. We were the ones who put the money directly in parents' pockets. There is something very simple to realize. The government cannot give people anything without taking it away. The government does not have any money. First they try taxing it, which makes people worse off. Then they try borrowing it, which means that future generations are worse off. Then when they ran out of those two options, because they ran out of other people's money, they tried printing the money and now we have 40-year highs in inflation. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Stop the insanity. Stop the inflation.

Mr. Speaker, yes, the government is out of touch, but we should not be surprised. The Prime Minister spent $6,000 of taxpayers' money for each night he spent in London. At a time when Canadians cannot pay their bills and are skipping meals, he forced them to pay for a hotel room that costs $6,000 a night. Yesterday, he admitted that he was the one who stayed in the infamous $6,000-a-night room. He told the truth by accident. It happened by chance. That is the only way to get the truth from the Prime Minister. It is an important fact, not because a $6,000 expense will bankrupt the Government of Canada, but because it shows that this Prime Minister is completely out of touch with the day-to-day reality of Canadians who work hard but cannot pay their bills. We, the Conservatives, will stand up for the common people, their paycheques, their savings, their homes and their country.

Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to offer the hon. member my condolences on the loss of his father, who was indeed a wonderful gentleman. Second, the member is right. We worked together to try and stop the government from giving tax money to companies so they could spend it on bonuses and dividends for their wealthy executives. Third, on the issue of building permits, it is not true that building permits are exclusively municipal. We have federal permitting for large-scale resource projects. They require federal permits. In fact, there are far too many projects that require federal permits. One of the reasons we cannot get pipelines and many other resource projects built is the immense delays imposed by the federal government on local projects. When we were in government, we made a rule during the economic action plan of one project, one approval. Prior to that, oftentimes the same consulting firm was hired to do three separate environmental assessments, delaying the project and driving up the costs, so we said it would be one project, one permit. That is what we are going to do when I am the prime minister. That is why we are going to get more dams built in Quebec. We are going to deliver more Canadian clean, low-carbon, upstream oil and gas projects. We are going to deliver civilian grade uranium and we are going to have more nuclear energy. Other major projects are going to happen quickly and effectively. Finally, yes, I will attach conditions to federal tax dollars that go to municipal governments. These woke left-wing mayors keep telling us they are out of money for housing, yet they are the ones who are driving up the cost of housing. If they want me to burden taxpayers by sending more money to their municipal governments, they need to get out of the way, remove their gatekeepers and build more homes.

Mr. Speaker, I do not have to google that, because Jim Flaherty was against quantitative easing. We specifically said we would not do it, and we did not do it, and we proved this nonsense today that the Liberal government had to do quantitative easing because the Americans did it. That is the excuse. The Americans did it in 2008, 2009 and 2010. They printed money like crazy and ballooned income and wealth inequality as a result. Here in Canada we said no. We banned our Bank of Canada from doing that. As a result, we did not have an inflation crisis. We kept our debts low and we kept income inequality lower than it would have been. We can have an independent monetary policy. Our mothers taught us that just because all of our friends are jumping off a bridge does not mean we have to.

Mr. Speaker, a month ago, the Conservatives warned the Prime Minister that there was a shortage of pain medication for children. This medication is widely available in the United States, but here in Canada parents are scrambling to find it. Widely available in drugstores in the United States, pain medication for small children cannot be found here in Canada, leaving mothers and fathers scrambling to help their suffering children. The Prime Minister has had a month since we warned him about this problem. He said he would fix the supply chain issues in our medical system. Why has he not solved this problem?

Mr. Speaker, I guess in the meantime Canadians will need to continue to drive to the United States, where these medications are widely available for parents. Back here at home, the Prime Minister's half a trillion dollars of inflationary deficits have given us a 40-year high in inflation. Now they are driving up interest rates. Inflationary taxes, including the Prime Minister and NDP's plan to triple the carbon tax, threaten to force Canadians to turn off the heat during winter. Tomorrow is the fall economic update. Will the government commit today to freezing spending and freezing taxes?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's $500-billion inflationary deficits and his coalition with the NDP have increased the cost of things we buy and the interest rates we pay. Now the Prime Minister wants to triple the taxes on heating, groceries and fuel to make the situation even worse. Tomorrow, the government is presenting its economic update. We have a very clear demand or we will vote against this update. Will the government freeze spending and freeze taxes?

Mr. Speaker, actually, Conservatives are the only ones protecting pensions and employment insurance against the inflation that is eating up the paycheques and the benefits of Canadians. Now the finance minister is suddenly pretending to agree with me on all of this. She sent a memo, that has since been leaked, in which she says that her ministers will have to find savings to match any new spending in the fall economic update. It is not clear whether the Prime Minister got the memo. He still wants to continue to pour inflationary fuel on the fire with more spending still. Will he listen to his finance minister, who has started to listen to Conservatives, and cap spending and taxes?

Mr. Speaker, we stand in opposition to the policies that have sent 1.5 million Canadians to food banks in a single month. We oppose record credit card debt on which the Prime Minister's policies are now driving up interest rates. We oppose policies that have forced one in five families to skip meals because they cannot afford food. If we want to talk about cold-hearted, this is the guy who wants to triple the carbon tax on home heating when bills are already expected to have gone up 100%. Why will he not cancel that cold-hearted plan and cap taxes?

Mr. Speaker, this is from the guy who robbed a record amount from Canadian workers' paycheques when he imposed the highest inflation in 40 years on them. There was no negotiation for workers; in fact, they all took an across-the-board pay cut without ever giving their permission, and now the position of his government is that they should have their pay capped. The Governor of the Bank of Canada told CEOs that there should be no pay hike for Canadian workers to compensate them for the Prime Minister's inflation. Does he agree with the Governor of the Bank of Canada that Canadian workers do not deserve a pay hike, yes or no?

Mr. Speaker, I am condemning the attack the Prime Minister has undertaken on Canadian workers by giving them the highest inflation in 40 years, eating up their paycheques so that they cannot afford food. It is the Prime Minister who has sent 1.5 million Canadians to food banks in the month of March, the Prime Minister who has given them record credit card debt, and the Prime Minister who has forced one in five people to skip meals because they cannot afford to eat. Now the Governor of the Bank of Canada says those workers do not deserve a raise. I condemn those comments. Will he?

Mr. Speaker, I think all parents would agree that the matter I am about to raise is indeed an emergency. Across this country, there have been shortages of medications required for pain relief by small infants and babies. Children's Tylenol, ibuprofen and other medicines are necessary to relieve the often intense pain that young children feel during sickness, teething or other conditions. It has come to be expected that one could go to a local drug store to get these medications. Unfortunately, in Canada, that has not been the case. There have been shortages right across the country. We raised this matter a month ago. The good news is that in the United States, they do not appear to have this problem. We did check online today and found it was easy to order these medicines, but an American address is needed to get them. The American shelves are stocked, but here in Canada the shelves are empty. I want to thank the hon. member for Fort McMurray—Cold Lake who brought this to my attention. She was the one who first alerted me to this crisis. She is a young parent. I am a parent, although not a young one. We were lucky last night. My little one needed children's Tylenol. We had a few pills left, but I cannot imagine what kind of night it would have been for her and us if we had run out. On behalf of parents right across the country, Conservatives are seeking an emergency debate on how Canada could restore its supply chains and supply parents and children with these necessary medications that are available in other countries, but for some reason that the Prime Minister still cannot explain are not available here in Canada.

moved: That, given that, (i) the cost of government is driving up the cost of living, (ii) the Parliamentary Budget Officer states that 40% of new spending is not related to COVID-19, (iii) Canadians are now paying higher prices and higher interest rates as a result, (iv) it is more important than ever for the government to respect taxpayer dollars and eliminate wasteful spending, the House call on the Auditor General of Canada to conduct a performance audit, including the payments, contracts and sub-contracts for all aspects of the ArriveCAN app, and to prioritize this investigation. Madam Speaker, I will begin by saying that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Calgary Forest Lawn. I am rising today in the House of Commons at a time in history where more Canadians than ever are saying that they are worse off financially than they were last year. In one month, 1.5 million Canadians had to use a food bank, and 20% of Canadians polled said that they had to skip meals because of the cost of groceries. To top it all off, the Jane and Finch food bank was forced to relocate because the landlord raised the rent. More Canadians are using food banks because of inflation, which is affecting food prices, and food banks have to relocate because of inflation, which is affecting the cost of rent. What is causing this phenomenon? Obviously the cost of government is increasing the cost of living. A $500-billion inflationary deficit is driving up the cost of the goods we purchase and the interest we pay. Inflationary taxes further increase the cost of production of goods and services for our businesses, farmers and workers. That is “justinflation”. The government says that it was impossible to avoid this spending, which was entirely related to COVID-19. However, the Parliamentary Budget Officer told us that almost 40% of the spending announced since 2020 had nothing to do with COVID-19. Rather, it was related to discretionary decisions made by the government to spend more money. Even some of the COVID-related spending was wasteful. The government continued to pay benefits to keep people off work, despite the fact that there were almost a million vacant positions. It also sent cheques to inmates and to public servants who were already employed but were still receiving the benefit. Lastly, there was the wastefulness of ArriveCAN, which we are discussing today. We know that this was a huge waste of our money. The government spent $54 million on an app that could have been developed over a single weekend for $250,000. Moreover, we know that the app was unnecessary. Canadians have been able to cross the border without it for decades, and even centuries. Why did this app suddenly become necessary? According to some, it was needed to show people’s vaccination status. Personally, I was against that requirement. However, even if I believed in the requirement, it was not necessary to develop an app. There were other ways of providing that information. In short, it was not necessary, it did not work, and it could have been developed at a cost of $250,000 instead of $54 million. Also, we do not know where the money went. We asked that question here in the House of Commons, and the government tabled documents with a list of companies that received contracts, including ThinkOn, which was purportedly given $1.2 million. The problem is that, a few days later, the company said that it never received the money. Ernst & Young was supposedly paid $120,000, but, there again, the company said that it never worked on ArriveCAN. A few weeks later, the government said that it was a mistake, that it thought it had paid these companies, but it was other companies instead who received that payment. There is obviously something fishy going on. The government does not want Canadians to know the truth. That is why the Conservative Party is introducing a motion in the House of Commons that calls on the Auditor General of Canada to investigate so that Canadians can know the truth. We will find out the truth. The government will have to answer to Canadians. In fact, at a time when Canadians are unable to pay their bills, it is an outrage to force them to pay $54 million for such a useless waste of money. As I stand in the House today, 20% of Canadians are skipping meals because they cannot afford the cost of food and 1.5 million of them are going to food banks in a single month. Speaking of food banks, one food bank at Jane and Finch was forced to move because the rent doubled. Food price inflation is driving people to the food bank and rent price inflation is driving food banks out of the neighbourhood. Meanwhile, Canadians tell pollsters that they are in their worst financial situation ever. How did we get here? The cost of government is driving up the cost of living. A half-trillion dollars of inflationary deficits have bid up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay. Inflationary taxes have increased the costs for businesses to produce those goods and services. The more they spend, the more things cost. It is just inflation. The government said it had no choice but to add this half-trillion dollars to it. It had no choice but to double the debt or add more debt than all other governments in Canadian history combined. However, we know that is not true because the Parliamentary Budget Officer said that 40% of new spending announced in the last two years alone had nothing to do with COVID. It was discretionary spending. On top of that, the money that was linked to COVID was often wasted. The government paid CERB benefits to people, even when there were a half-million vacant jobs and the economies had been totally reopened by provincial governments. It paid CERB cheques to prisoners. Even federal public servants who were employed managed to get their hands on CERB cheques at the same time. We also know that the government tried to give half a billion dollars to the WE Charity, only to be caught by Conservatives who held it to account. Now we learn that it spent $54 million on an app that we did not need, that did not work and that could have been designed for $250,000. We looked into this. We wanted to know where the money went and who got rich. The government tabled documents in the House that showed us that among the contracted companies, one was ThinkOn, which was paid $1.2 million for QR code experimentation. The only problem was that the company, ThinkOn, said the government should dream on as it did not get the money. It said, “We have received no money from the CBSA”. The government has since put out a correction saying it thought it gave ThinkOn $1.2 million, but it turns out it did not. It is a strange mistake to make. It is kind of hard to envision it happening. Did the government put a cheque in the mail and send it to the wrong address? Did it get an invoice from the company asking for reimbursement for costs and accidentally wrote the wrong name on the invoice? These are curiosities.

Madam Speaker, no, they are not, but they may well be. In fairness, Napoleon said to never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. That is a plausible theory for the government. At the same time, we need to know the truth. When $54 million goes out the door and government officials cannot get their stories straight about where it went, the least we can do is to have an audit. Put the Auditor General in charge. Look into these costs. Find out who got the money, who got rich and why we spent $54 million on an app that could have been designed for a quarter of a million dollars. Why did we waste this money when Canadians are paying so much? How could the government be so out of touch? We need answers. We need the truth. Support this motion and let us get to that truth.

Madam Speaker, we have since learned that measure would largely be gobbled up by administrative costs. As with so many Liberal initiatives throughout this pandemic, they have cost too much and delivered too little. Insiders, bureaucracies and special interest groups have become fabulously wealthy over the last seven years and, in particular, the last two years. We know the WE Charity is one example. We know Frank Baylis, a former Liberal MP, got a special contract. We know that the SNC-Lavalin company, a favourite of the Prime Minister, got contracts to produce field hospitals that were never used. There are countless examples of insiders getting rich while Canadians get poor. Conservatives will never vote for that.

Madam Speaker, I did not hear a question, I only heard a complaint that the Conservative Party was talking too much about inflation. Is the hon. member from the Bloc Québécois talking to real Quebeckers? When we speak with Mr. and Mrs. Tremblay, they talk about inflation. That is the reality. They are not talking about sovereignty or the king or queen, they are talking about their ability to buy bread and butter. That is the Conservative Party's priority.

Madam Speaker, we did introduce the Federal Accountability Act, which cracked down on corruption after 10 years of sponsorship scandals, billion-dollar boondoggles and other Liberal corruption. That was dirty, illegal Liberal money. The NDP was actually forced to support our Federal Accountability Act measures. We will always work to make the law more strict. That is why we caught the Liberals with SNC-Lavalin, the WE Charity scandal and the Aga Khan island, on which the Prime Minister illegally vacationed. All of those scandals were exposed as a result of the Federal Accountability Act, which I was proud to shepherd through this House. The real question is why the NDP continues to support Liberal scandal and Liberal waste today. Why does the member not start working for the people of Hamilton instead of working for the Prime Minister? We on this side work for our constituents. We work for the common people.

Mr. Speaker, first inflation ballooned thanks to the Prime Minister's $500-billion inflationary deficit. Then he added inflationary taxes that are making it even more expensive for our businesses and farmers to produce goods and services. Now these deficits are raising the interest rates for Canadians. Everything he does makes things worse. Canadians are telling him to stop raising taxes, stop the inflationary deficits and stop the inflationary spending. Will he listen to them and stop?

Mr. Speaker, everything he does makes the problem worse. It started with half a trillion dollars of inflationary deficits; more money chasing fewer goods equals higher prices. Then he brought in more inflationary taxes. With the help of his costly coalition partner, they want to triple that tax. Now his deficits are driving up interest rates faster than at any time in 30 years. There is really one thing for him to do, which is to stop, stop the inflationary taxes, stop the inflationary deficits, stop driving up the cost of living. Will the Prime Minister do the honourable thing, the compassionate thing and stop taxing Canadians?

Mr. Speaker, he claimed he had to add that half a trillion dollars of debt because of COVID, but according to his own Parliamentary Budget Officer, 40% of the new debt he added in the last two years alone had nothing whatsoever to do with COVID. The Prime Minister has added more debt than all previous prime ministers combined, saying that low interest rates would make it a costless proposition. Now we learn from Desjardins Bank that Canadians will spend more on debt interest from the federal debt next year, $50 billion, than we typically spend on health care transfers to the provinces. Why is the Prime Minister giving the money to bankers and bondholders instead of doctors and nurses?

Mr. Speaker, it kind of reminds me what he was saying about the carbon tax, that paying higher taxes would make people better off. We found out from the Parliamentary Budget Officer that was not true. Then he said that he would take on all the debt so Canadians would not have to. Not only are they stuck with a higher national debt with more interest payments, but now their personal debts are going up. According to Equifax, the average Canadian household has more credit card debt than at any time in Canadian history and the Prime Minister's inflationary policies are driving up interest rates on those costs. If the Prime Minister really took on all that debt so Canadians would not have to, who is going to pay those Canadians' credit card bills?

Mr. Speaker, no one has done more to attack workers' rights than the Prime Minister, who eats up their paycheques with 40-year high inflation. Who did he give the money to? He spent $54 million for the arrive scam app, an app we did not need and that did not work. It sent 10,000 wrongly into quarantine and it could have been designed for a quarter million dollars in a weekend, but took $54 million instead. Some of the companies the Prime Minister said got the money said they never received it. It is time for the truth. Will the Prime Minister support our motion to call in the auditors?

Mr. Speaker, the $500‑billion inflationary deficit has caused the highest rate of inflation in 40 years. Canadians are cutting back on food so they can afford groceries, and 35-year-olds are having to live in their parents' basement. The fiscal update presents an opportunity for the government to reverse the policies that have caused this crisis. Is it not ironic that the only solution to this crisis is for the government to reverse 100% of what it has done for the past seven years?

Mr. Speaker, future Liberal leader Mark Carney has said inflation is domestically generated, and so has the Governor of the Bank of Canada. After a half-trillion dollars of inflationary deficits, the finance minister is pretending she believes, like Conservatives, that government spending is driving this crisis in the first place. Is it not ironic that the solution to the problem the government will have to pursue if it wants to make life more affordable is to do exactly the opposite of what it has been doing for the last seven years?

Mr. Speaker, none of what the Liberals have done has actually worked. This week, we found out that 20% of Canadians are skipping meals or cutting portions to afford groceries. In fact, 1.5 million Canadians, in one month, have visited a food bank. Speaking of food banks, the one at Jane and Finch actually got kicked out of its location, because the rent doubled. How much pain will Canadians have to suffer before the government stops its inflationary policies?

Mr. Speaker, according to a Nanos poll for Bloomberg, the largest share of Canadians in recorded history say they are worse off than a year ago. What did the NDP do as a solution to that? It voted to raise home heating bills. Yes, the NDP, along with its costly coalition partners in the Liberal Party, voted twice to make home heating more expensive by tripling the carbon tax. The Liberals understand that the purpose of the carbon tax is to make home heating more expensive. Will the Liberals tell the NDP that it is, in fact, the plan?

Mr. Speaker, the carbon tax is not a climate plan. It is a tax plan. The Liberals have not hit a single climate change target since they took office, and now they want to not double down, but triple down on their failure by tripling the carbon tax as we go into winter. When analysts expect that heating costs will go up more than 100% for families in the member's riding who heat their homes with oil, will the costly coalition, including the NDP, finally reverse itself so Canadians can keep the heat on?

Mr. Speaker, this country has a $500-billion inflationary deficit and farmers are being forced to pay higher taxes, so the price of food has gone up faster than it ever has in the past 40 years. We recently learned that Canadians visited food banks 1.5 million times in a single month. When will the government acknowledge that Canadians can no longer afford it? When will it reverse its inflationary policies?

Mr. Speaker, the member would have Canadians believe that they have never had it so good. If that were true, then we would not have 1.5 million visits to the food banks in a single month in Canada. That is a 35% increase since 2019. This is after a half trillion dollars of inflationary spending bid up the cost of goods, and new taxes on farmers has made food more expensive. Now the Liberals' plan is to triple the carbon tax. Will they reverse that plan so Canadians can afford to eat?

Mr. Speaker, when the Prime Minister spent $6,000 for one hotel room per night in London and then spent that evening singing up a storm and partying in that fancy hotel lobby, it was really an analogy for his whole government: a half trillion dollar party with other people's money and Canadians got the hangover; a million and a half visits in one month to the food banks; the fastest-rising interest rates in 30 years; the fastest inflation in four decades. When will the government realize that Canadians are out of money and the party is over?

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals had a big party with other people's money. The only problem is most people were not invited to the party. The WE Charity was invited; it got half a billion dollars. The arrive scam contractors were invited; they got millions of dollars in contracts, in many cases to do no work, and many of the dollars are still unaccounted for. Of course, other Liberal insiders got the money. Even prisoners got CERB cheques. That is how they racked up a half trillion dollars in inflationary deficits that have bid up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay. Will the Liberals realize that the money is out and the party is over?

Mr. Speaker, as part of its money printing scheme, the government flooded the financial and mortgage markets with $400 billion of cash that bid up house prices faster than at any time in history. Home prices doubled under the Prime Minister, creating the second-biggest housing bubble on planet earth. The government said that rates would never rise and families believed it. Quoting CityNews, now that they have risen, “Rob and his wife have an adjustable-rate mortgage and say their payments have gone up by $2,000 a month.” They have three kids. They cannot pay it. What the hell do they do now?

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are now getting the bill for the Prime Minister's $500-billion inflationary deficit. Today, interest rates are being raised again. A family that bought a typical home five years ago with a typical mortgage that is now up for renewal will pay $7,000 more a year. The Prime Minister said that the government was taking on debt so that Canadians would not have to. Who is going to make the extra mortgage payments?

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are now getting the bill for the Prime Minister's half trillion dollars of inflationary deficits that first drove up inflation and now drive up interest rates. A typical family who bought a typical home with a typical mortgage five years ago but are now up for renewal are paying $7,000 more per year. The Prime Minister said the government was going to take on all this debt so that Canadians would not have to, as if they do not have to pay back government debt. If that were the case though, who is going to pay the extra mortgage payments for these families?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister caused this inflation crisis. Even Mark Carney, who will be the successor to the current Liberal leader, is saying that inflation is a homegrown problem. He is right. It is caused by the half trillion dollars of inflationary deficits that have bid up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay. Today, rates went up another half point, meaning many families will be handing in their keys to the banks, because they will not be able to afford those bills. Has the Prime Minister been briefed by his officials on how many Canadians will lose their homes because of the higher interest rates that his inflationary policies have caused?

Mr. Speaker, what they have come to expect of this government is that it raises the cost of living. The cost of government is driving up the cost of goods and now the cost of interest. Two hundred billion dollars of the half trillion in deficits had nothing to do with COVID, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and even that so-called COVID spending included the ArriveCAN app, an app that could have been designed in a weekend for a quarter of a million dollars but cost $54 million. The government claims that $1.2 million of that went to a company called ThinkOn. That company says it did not get that money. Who did?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister cannot tell us who got the $1.2 million. He blames public servants for the mistake. Surely in the week since he learned of this misappropriation he could have found out where the money went, but he has not. That is not the only example. There was also the $400,000 trip to London, for which there was a $6,000 suite for one night. It is just another example of the massive Liberal waste that has contributed to the inflationary deficits we now face. If he cannot tell us which company got the money, can he at least tell us who got the $6,000 a night room?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister loves to blame the war by Russia against Ukraine, but less than 0.3% of our trade is with those countries. In fact, the things they make are things we already have here, energy and food, if the Prime Minister would get out of the way and let Canadians produce it. Maybe that is why Mark Carney disagrees with him. He said of inflation, “It’s quite broad, so it’s not all imported inflation. In fact, most of it is now domestically generated inflation.” The Prime Minister is responsible for that inflation. Why will he not take responsibility?

Mr. Speaker, it is the half trillion dollars of inflationary deficits that have bid up the cost of the goods we buy and the interest we pay. Inflationary taxes are making it worse, including a tripling of the carbon tax, which will raise home heating prices. Maybe that is why Mark Carney, the future leader of the Liberal Party, is saying, “Really, inflation is principally a domestic story.” He disagrees that it can all be blamed on the rest of the world. Who should the Liberals believe, their current leader or their future one?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has built a house of debt. He doubled Canada's debt. He added more debt than all Canadian prime ministers combined. He flooded our financial and mortgage system with easy cash, which bid up house prices, forcing Canadians to pay over a million dollars for the average home in Toronto or Vancouver. Now the bill is coming due tomorrow, and interest rates are expected to go up half to three-quarters of a point. Those same Canadians who the Prime Minister forced to over-leverage themselves will be hit with an uppercut of surprise higher interest rates that his government said would never happen. How could he have been so irresponsible?