Parliamentary Speeches

Mr. Speaker, freedom is never pertinent to the Bloc Québécois. The same thing is happening in Saskatchewan. The premier announced that he was going to eliminate restrictions and the vaccine passport. The Quebec premier made an announcement about health measures. Prince Edward Island is also starting to give its citizens their freedoms back. Now we are even hearing Liberal members starting to rise and speak against the government's partisan approach against Canadians. Two courageous members spoke out against the Prime Minister's approach and in favour of Canadians' freedom. I am therefore asking the government to start giving Canadians back their freedom, to eliminate mandatory vaccination, to allow public servants to return to work and to let every Canadian to take back control of their lives. Our objective should be for Canada to be the freest country in the world so that each Canadian is the author—

Mr. Speaker, it is obvious that the Bloc Québécois is afraid and is trying to silence me. That is a good sign. We are going to give Canadians their freedom back and make them the authors of their own stories. That is the approach we will take as Conservatives. Everybody has their story, and the story that I am hearing right now is that people feel like they are losing control of their lives. There is the young couple living in their parents' basement, even though they are 30 years old, because they cannot afford an $800,000 house. They are calculating that they may never be able to own a home. There is the immigrant who has come here as a doctor, but is blocked by bureaucracy from ever doing that job or getting a licence to practise. There is the first nations community that wants to harvest its resources to lift itself out of poverty, but is being blocked by government gatekeepers. More recently, there are the countless small businesses that have been flattened by endless lockdowns and rules that often seem to have no link to science, and there is the trucker, who has been dutifully putting the goods and services in our communities, on our shelves and on our kitchen tables and is now called names and prevented from doing his or her job by a Prime Minister who is not interested in listening. I am vaccinated and I encourage others to do so, but every person has their story. People have their reasons. They might be medical reasons or cultural reasons. They might even have had an unfortunate medical experience with prior prescriptions that has prevented them from making that decision, but that decision must be theirs. Their bodies belong to them. They are masters of their own decisions. Instead of listening to these people, the Prime Minister has insulted them, called them names and left them with no choice but to engage in legitimate and peaceful protest. If he wants to put an end to those protests, if he wants to actually reunite the country, then he should do what others have begun doing, because freedom is on the march in this country. Saskatchewan, Alberta, Prince Edward Island and Quebec are beginning to lift these restrictions. At midnight in Alberta, the vaccine passport came to an end, and people across the country are showing their support for restarting freedom in this country, including two of the Prime Minister's own members of Parliament. Let us get these restrictions out of the way. Let us open up our economy. Let us bring back freedom. Let us make Canadians the authors of their own stories again.

Mr. Speaker, I do not want any of this to continue. In fact, the truckers themselves have said they will not stay here one minute longer after the Prime Minister ceases to impose measures against the freedoms of Canadians. As for the member insulting the people who have spoken up, I encourage him to listen to his own member of Parliament, the member for Québec, a Liberal MP who said he went to the protest and saw a very kind grandmother who demonstrated for her grandkids. She looked and sounded nothing like a white supremacist, nor did the Black, Sikh and indigenous Canadians I saw demonstrating on my way to Parliament Hill these last two weeks or in Quebec City this last Saturday. I have enough respect for my fellow Canadians not to engage in these easy and absurd labels.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question. My position is that I am in favour of freedom. I want to end the blockade that this government and the other governments have forced on Canadians. That means putting an end to the vaccine mandates, giving the legitimate public servants who were fired over their vaccination status their jobs back, and repealing the vaccine mandate for the truckers who deliver our groceries and other goods. Giving Canadians their freedom back will put an end to all of these protests and will help us start to make Canada the freest country in the world.

Mr. Speaker, one person is responsible for this mess, and that is the Prime Minister. He caused this mess by attacking Canadian citizens and taking away their freedoms. The rest of the world is moving on. Other countries all around the world are lifting restrictions. Provinces across the country are doing exactly the same, but we have this holdup. The Prime Minister is hunkering down and, out of spite and personal pride, is refusing to lift these unjustified and unscientific restrictions. If he would only do so, then the truckers could get back to work and the other protesters could go back to their lives and everything in Canada would get back up on its feet and we could get back to working on giving people control of their lives.

Mr. Speaker, just because the Prime Minister dressed up in racist costumes so many times he cannot remember them all does not mean every single Liberal is a racist. Just because the Prime Minister tried to help a corporation avoid prosecution after it stole from some of Africa's poorest people does not mean all Liberals are racist. Just because about a half-dozen Liberal MPs who are racial minorities have complained about his treatment of them does not mean all Liberals are racist. That is guilt by association. Why does the Prime Minister not opt instead for personal responsibility?

Mr. Speaker, I agree. We should always call out evil symbols and the individuals who are individually responsible for putting them up. I remember a January 2018 event at which the Prime Minister stared straight at a swastika and, instead of condemning it, said, “Thank you for coming, sir.” We on this side condemn evil symbols whenever they are used. I respect the member. I just wish his government would respect the thousands of people who are fighting for their livelihoods right now and trying to do their best to get this country back on track.

Mr. Speaker, the problem is that the Liberals have shown no respect for the people. This country right now is like a raw nerve, and the Prime Minister is jumping up and down on it again and again with his inflammatory rhetoric. We are talking about people who have 14-year-old kids who are suicidal after two years of lockdowns. I just spoke to a waitress whose business was wiped out by lockdowns. I am talking to truckers, who have been delivering foods to our plates throughout this. These are the very people, honest, hard-working and shirt-off-their-backs types of people, that the Prime Minister keeps attacking.

Mr. Speaker, I could not agree more. I was at an overpass as the truckers went by, and what I saw were cheerful, patriotic and optimistic Canadians who want their freedom back and want their livelihoods back. They are standing up for their fellow Canadians: the 60% of families who fear they cannot feed themselves, the 28-year-old kid living in mom's basement because he cannot afford a home and the small businessman wiped out by endless lockdowns by incompetent politicians. These are the people who are standing up and fighting for their livelihoods and their freedom. Why will the government not finally stand with them?

Mr. Speaker, let me correct the member. Every single Canadian needs housing that is geared to their income. By definition, people cannot pay their mortgage on a house that is out of line with their income. However, that is exactly the problem the government has created. When the government started printing cash in the spring of 2020, housing prices were dropping. Then suddenly it reversed course and went on a rampage that we have not seen at any time in this country's history, according to the top economists for The Canadian Real Estate Association just yesterday. What has that meant? It has meant that not only are the very poor unable to afford housing now, but when they calculate how many months it would take to save up for a future down payment, they realize they do not have enough living years to get there. There is now a class of people in this country who have made the mathematical calculation that they will never own a home. I want the member, before he and his government start printing more cash and inflating the assets of their rich friends, to think carefully about the very dangerous societal impacts of a country where millions of people believe they will be dispossessed of home ownership forever.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday we learned that Canada's inflation rate is at its highest point in 30 years and that the 4.7% inflation rate is growing about 2% faster than Canadians' wages. For the average Canadian, that is equivalent to a pay cut. We talked about “just inflation” and said the government was behind this inflation rate. What the Liberals said in their own defence was worse than the allegation. Let me explain. They said that the inflation rate was the result of global supply chains being disrupted by COVID-19, leading to higher prices. That is a bizarre explanation, since it is the prices for Canadian products that are rising the most. For example, the cost of home heating has gone up 26%. In Canada, we have 1.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That domestic energy supply provides heating for Canadian families. It has nothing to do with global supply chains. In addition, gas prices have gone up 43%. What do we have right here in Canada? We have the second-largest oil and gas reserves in the world. In that case, why are we relying on global supply chains? Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that we are relying on foreign oil in order to save the planet. He even mocked the Conservative Party by saying that those who want to produce oil here simply want to “drill, baby, drill”. However, he is the one who wants to “drill, baby, drill”, just anywhere else in the world besides Canada. The other day, I was in Saint John, New Brunswick. As I gazed out over the ocean, I saw a big ship that was carrying oil from the Middle East to Canada, oil coming from Egypt. Oil from the Red Sea was loaded onto that ship on Egypt's north coast, on the Mediterranean. How did the Egyptians get that oil from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean? They did so with the help of a pipeline. The government is in favour of the pipelines that Egypt built to carry oil from the Middle East to a ship that has to cross the entire Atlantic Ocean. Ironically, that ship burns diesel fuel and increases the risk of oil spills in the ocean in order to bring that oil to eastern Canada at a higher price. Eastern Canadians are paying more for gas and other oil products. Why? It is because the Government of Canada blocked the extension of a pipeline from western Canada to Saint John, New Brunswick. The Prime Minister says that the cost of gas is too high because of problems in the global supply chain. This policy is even more reprehensible when we know that if he had allowed a pipeline to be built and increased production of western oil, which is green, instead of importing more from the Middle East, our oil could have been delivered to Canadians in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and elsewhere in eastern Canada. Thirdly, according to the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, the cost of food for a middle-class family will increase by $1,000 next year. A single mother will have to pay $1,000 more to feed her children. Canada ranks third in the world for the amount of farmland per capita. Why is the government saying that global supply chains are responsible for the rising cost of food in Canada when we have the capacity to produce our own food? We have enough farmers and land to produce our own food, so let us take advantage of that. In fact, if every Canadian had an equal share of that land, we would each have the equivalent of 33 football fields. Canada clearly has enough land to produce its own food and should be able to manage that, but it cannot because carbon taxes, red tape and other regulations prevent our farmers from producing more food more affordably. Yesterday, the Canadian Real Estate Association announced that housing prices have gone up 20% to 25% since last year, despite Canada being second only to Russia in sheer size. Canada also has enough lumber to build more houses, so the Liberals cannot blame global supply chains for the rising cost of land in Canada, because the Earth was created thousands of years ago, long before we got here. That land is already here and is not dependent on global supply chains, so the problem is here. Canada is not producing enough energy to heat our homes and put gas in our cars. We are not producing enough food to feed our people, and we are not building enough houses to shelter them. About 85% of young Canadians say they want to buy a house, but they cannot afford to. As the very wealthy owners of big cottages and palatial homes watch their property values rise, people who have to rent are getting poorer and poorer because the value of the dollar is shrinking by the day. What are we producing here in Canada? We are producing money. We are printing more money. Perhaps the only way the government has found to support the forestry sector is to produce more paper money. The reality is that when there are 400 billion more dollars chasing the same number of goods, prices go up. There is another way to go. For example, Switzerland has a 1.5% inflation rate. That is one-third of our inflation rate. Why is inflation lower in Switzerland? It is because they are not printing any money. In Switzerland, the money supply went up 6%, compared to 23% in Canada. Canada is printing four times more money, which is why our inflation rate is four times higher than Switzerland's. People will say we cannot consume everything Canada produces. It is true that we could not possibly consume all the oil and gas, natural gas, food and all the other products we make. However, one way to fight inflation is to sell more products around the world in order to bring up the value of our dollar. If we export more of our high-value products, that has to increase the value of our dollar, and it means we can buy more on the world markets. We are seeing this in Switzerland. Since the Swiss franc is worth 8% more than the U.S. dollar, Switzerland has a competitive advantage when purchasing products on the international market. The Swiss franc has far more power, because it is worth more. The Canadian dollar is worth 20% less than the U.S. dollar, so we have less purchasing power in international markets. Using and producing more of our own resources is not only about providing products to our own population. It also serves to increase the value and purchasing power of our dollar internationally. Before anyone rushes to say that a stronger dollar is bad for our exports, I would point out that that is not what happened in Switzerland. In fact, the Swiss enjoy a trade surplus in terms of international trade, meaning they sell more to the rest of the world than they purchase. Why? Because they give their businesses the freedom to produce more. The Swiss create products, while Canada prints money. That is what needs to change. The Conservative Party's policy is about supporting the construction of new pipelines in order to provide clean, affordable energy to our own population and to export it to the rest of the world. It is about allowing our energy companies to produce natural gas to provide Canadians with more affordable heating options. It is about allowing our farmers to sell more of the food they produce at a more reasonable cost. It is about selling 15% of the 37,000 federally owned buildings that are underutilized, especially since the onset of COVID-19 and the increase in teleworking, and converting them into affordable housing. Rather than printing money, we will create more products, which can be purchased with money. That is our approach: purchase more and spend less. Let us do this with paycheques, not debt. Statistics Canada reported a 30-year high in inflation. Inflation rising 2% faster than wages means a real pay cut for Canadians, and the government's defence against the allegation that it was to blame was worse than the charge. It claimed that the cause is COVID disruptions to international supply chains. The question is this: Why would we need international supply chains for the products that are rising most quickly in price, when those same products are made here in Canada? Energy, food and real estate have increased more than almost any other product in the basket of goods Canadians buy. What do we have? We have energy, we have farmland and we have land and lumber for housing, so why is our country so dependent on the rest of the world for the goods that we have beneath our feet right here at home? Let us go through them. Home heating has gone up 26% in one year. Canada has 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Why are we depending on the rest of the world to heat our homes, when we have the energy to do it right under our feet here in Canada? Gas is up 43%. What do we have here? We have the second-biggest supply of oil on planet earth, and yet the Prime Minister says we should not produce it here. He even tried to mock others by accusing them of them “Drill, baby, drill!”, but “Drill, baby, drill!” is his policy. He wants to drill oil wells all around the world; he just does not want any of the wages from those drilling projects to go to Canadian workers. I stood at the Bay of Fundy, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean two weeks ago, watching a tanker that had travelled from the northern coast of Egypt through the Mediterranean and all the way to Saint John, where it will have been processed at the Irving refinery. Do members know how they got the oil onto that tanker? It was by a pipeline that went from the Red Sea across northern Egypt to the Mediterranean. Do not tell me this Prime Minister is against pipelines. He is in favour of every pipeline that one could build anywhere outside of Canada, as long as it does not use Canadian steel, pay Canadian wages, hire Canadian energy workers or provide jobs to refinery workers in eastern Canada. As long as the paycheques go to other countries, he is 100% in favour of pipelines. Now, to go back to inflation, the question is this: Why are we paying a premium for Saudi, Middle Eastern, African and American oil when we have the second-biggest supply here in Canada? That should not be a question of international supply chains; it should be a question of domestic self-sufficiency. The next issue is food, which is up $1,000 next year, according to Dalhousie University's food institute. It expects that the average family will spend an extra grand feeding itself next year. Why? We have the third-largest area of farmland per capita in the world, and we have the best farmers, so why can we not supply our own nutritious food? The answer is that our foreign competitors do not apply carbon taxes at our rate to the farmers who are producing their food, nor do they face the same kind of regulatory and red-tape obstacles that drive up food production. Therefore, our farmers have to pass those costs on to consumers in the form of inflation, and our consumers then have to rely, embarrassingly and humiliatingly, on foreign supply chains to feed ourselves, even while we have been blessed with the best and the third-largest area of farmland on planet earth. Then we come to housing. Just yesterday, the Canadian Real Estate Association reported that Canada has seen a 20% to 25% increase in real prices, which is the single biggest increase on record ever. Not adjusted for seasonal variation, the average house now costs $720,000 and it is over a million bucks to buy the average house, not a mansion, in Canada's biggest city, Toronto. We are developing in this country a landed aristocracy of extremely wealthy people who make more money through the appreciation of their real estate than they do from the wages of their labour, while we have a growing class of working millennials who now have no hope of ever owning a home. According to an Ipsos survey, 85% of millennials say they want to own a home but cannot afford to. Who would be surprised about that when one has to pay a million dollars? One would have to save up $100,000 in order to make a down payment on the average home in Toronto today at 10% down. If a person is saving $500 a month, that is 200 months to save up for a down payment to have the privilege of then bearing a mortgage of $900,000. We have the second-biggest housing bubble in the world, according to Bloomberg. Again, how does one blame that on foreign supply chains? By definition, land does not have supply chains. It is already here under our feet, and we have the second-biggest land mass on earth. If we spread Canadians out evenly, each and every one of them would have 33 CFL-sized football fields to themselves. We would not actually be able to see another person in Canada if we were spread out evenly. We have more places in Canada where there is no one than we have places where there is anyone, yet we cannot find room to house our own people. This is ridiculous. Vancouver and Toronto are the second and fifth most unaffordable housing markets in the world when we compare median income to median house prices, more unaffordable than Manhattan; San Francisco; London, England; Singapore and countless other places with less land, more money and more people. Why? One cannot blame international supply chains or COVID for that. In fact, all the land and almost all the housing on the market today was built before the first case of COVID even hit our shores. As a result, one cannot blame any of those things. This is, by definition, a homemade problem, pun intended. The government's defence for its 30-year high in inflation is ironically worse than the allegation itself. It has created an economy where we cannot supply ourselves with the very things God blessed this land with before we even arrived here. We have more land, yet we cannot grow our own food. We have more lumber, yet we cannot build our own homes. We have more energy, yet we cannot heat or power our lives. We are hopelessly dependent on the rest of the world, and that is why, when prices go up, we are so weak in trying to pay the price for it. Some will say it is not that simple and we cannot simply supply every Canadian with domestically generated goods. What we can do, where we have to buy on an international level, is have more purchasing power with a stronger dollar. When we compete for scarce global goods, we do so against countries that have real purchasing power. I give the example of Switzerland. It has increased its money supply by 6% since COVID struck. We increased ours by 23%. What is the result? Its inflation is 1.5% and our inflation is more than three times higher, at 4.7%. Part of that is because the Swiss franc has real purchasing power. The Swiss can go out into the world market and buy things with their money that we cannot. Their franc is worth 8% more than the U.S. dollar and ours is worth 20% less. Therefore, when there is a widget that a Canadian needs and a Swiss citizen needs and we both walk up and we have the loonie and they have the franc, let us be frank about who is getting that widget. They are getting it, because they have good, sound money. They produce things while we produce cash, and as a result, they have more valuable money. Before we hear Liberals whine on about how we could not export goods if we had a powerful dollar on the international markets, the Swiss are running a trade surplus, because they do not rely on cheap cash to sell their goods. They rely on a productive economy that generates value to sell their goods. That is how to increase the well-being of a population. It is how to lift people out of poverty and give them an opportunity. It is not by producing cash, but by producing more of what cash buys. Let us unleash the free enterprise system to grow more affordable and nutritious food, to supply more affordable homes to our people and to bring the prodigious energy with which our land has been blessed to our consumers. In other words, let us make more and cost less, with paycheques, not debt.

Mr. Speaker, I will take responsibility for the fact that someone could buy an average house in Canada for $450,000 when our party was in power. I will take full responsibility for that. Right now, that price is $720,000. It is 58% higher today than it was when the Conservatives were in office. The member is quite right that in his province, the problem is the worst. There is an NDP mayor in Vancouver, and we cannot get anything built. It is great for the rich. Do not get me wrong, it is not bad for everybody. Those who have a mansion in Vancouver are getting richer every day. They do not have to do a lick of work. They can sit back on their big, fat assets and get richer every day. There is also an NDP premier who is equally antidevelopment and is preventing people from building houses for more affordable living. The snobs who like to keep poor people and minorities out of their neighbourhoods are doing just fine in that NDP city, because they will not allow any construction to happen in those ritzy, trendy, champagne socialist neighbourhoods. As for the issue of wages, the places that are beating us have high wages. Free-enterprise Ireland, free-enterprise Switzerland and free-enterprise Singapore have significantly higher wages than there are here in Canada, and they are beating us all around. High wages are good for competitiveness. High cost of government is not.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out that it is not the Liberals who are doing the most for oil consumption, it is the Bloc. The Bloc Québécois wants us to subsidize Bombardier. What fuels Bombardier aircraft? Is it oil? Are these aircraft fuelled by solar energy? What do we find at the refineries in Montreal and Quebec City? Oil, but oil from the United States. We need to pay attention to that. The Bloc supports only foreign oil companies. No one in the world does more for foreign oil than the Bloc Québécois. In my opinion, it is important to point that out.

Mr. Speaker, I can say objectively that was the best question we have had so far. There is no doubt about it. The member is absolutely right. We were the last to go into the 2008 recession and we were the first to come out of it. Why? It was because our spending was timely, targeted and temporary, because we cut red tape and taxes to stimulate investment and growth, and we did so while balancing the budget only four years later. We managed to keep our debt-to-GDP ratio the lowest in the entire G7, a great fortune that the government inherited from the Conservatives but unfortunately is quickly squandering.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, we learned that housing inflation hit a record 25%. Bloomberg says we have the second-biggest housing bubble in the world. However, where is the money coming from? After all, the wages with which Canadians buy housing are down in real terms. The number of immigrants is also down. For the Minister of Finance, if the number of people and the amount of wages needed to buy homes are down, yet house prices are up, where is the money coming from?

Mr. Speaker, the finance minister has gone into hiding on this housing-inflation question. Her officials tell The Globe and Mail that she has been skipping her briefings, so perhaps she did not have the answer, but I will ask it again. Housing price inflation is hitting a record 25%, even though the wages with which Canadians buy housing is down and the GDP is still down from 2019 levels. Given that we have less wealth with which to buy housing, where is the money coming from?

Mr. Speaker, I refer to the $100 billion of new and unnecessary spending as a slush fund. That is $6,600 in new costs for every single family in Canada. We know those families cannot afford to pay it, even if the finance minister is in hiding from this question. The reality is that house prices are up 25%, the worst housing inflation on record and the second-worst housing bubble in the world. With wages actually down, meaning the money with which people buy houses has dropped, where is the money coming from?

Mr. Speaker, asked about the $120,000 year-over-year increase in housing prices, the top economists for The Canadian Real Estate Association say this is the biggest gain of all time and that certainly in dollars it is far larger than anything that has ever happened. Why is this? We cannot blame supply chains, because land does not have supply chains. We cannot blame COVID, because almost all of the houses in Canada were built before COVID happened. In fact, the things that drive house prices, namely wages, immigration and GDP, are all down. If the underlying means with which to buy housing are all down, why is it that real estate prices are up by record amounts?

Mr. Speaker, the question is: Why did housing prices go up so much with wages, GDP and immigration down? With all of the housing supply being right here in Canada, not linked to a so-called global supply chain, what is causing this eye-popping record increase in the cost of owning a house? It just so happens that prices started rising right when the government began printing $400 billion of new cash into the financial system, $200 billion of which went into increased mortgage lending, with the investor class getting the preponderance of that new money. Why did the Prime Minister give so much to the “have yachts” and take from the have-nots?

We did, because they all failed, Mr. Speaker. The proof is in the pudding. Housing prices now are higher than ever before. It costs $720,000 for the average house, not a fancy mansion like the one the Prime Minister inherited or the one taxpayers pay to house him in. An average house costs $1 million in Canada's biggest city. This is broadening the gap between rich and poor. He cannot blame the rest of the world for the problem that is happening here at home. Why exactly does Canada have the world's second-biggest housing bubble?

Mr. Speaker, what makes sense to him is to give cheap debt to investors to buy their buildings. Investors have doubled the amount they have been able to borrow on the cheap because of the Prime Minister's money printing. I am sorry that the Prime Minister took my question personally, but the 30-year-olds who will be celebrating Christmas in their parents' homes are taking that personally as well. They cannot afford houses for themselves, because this Prime Minister's policies have inflated those costs out of existence. Here is a simple question: Does Canada have a housing bubble or is it just inflation?

Mr. Speaker, I guess with all the money-printing deficits, the Liberals did not have enough paper left to print these documents. I want to thank the minister of inflation for her presentation today. It reveals that inflation is in fact 50% higher than she promised in the budget, and the deflation she said we would have a year ago has definitely not materialized. A half a trillion dollars of inflationary deficits mean more dollars chasing fewer goods and higher prices. The result of course is that housing and gas are up by a third, making it hard for people to get to work or house themselves; food prices will rise $1,000 for the average family next year, not to mention that taxes cost the average family more than food, clothing and shelter combined. The more the government spends, the more Canadians pay. To add insult to injury, we learned today that the government is collecting a windfall of tax revenue as it gets higher taxes on higher prices. It is called the inflation tax or, as the Liberals would say, “just inflation”. My question is a very specific one. How much in extra tax revenue will the government collect as a result of higher-than-expected inflation on the backs of Canadian consumers?

Mr. Speaker, when the finance minister told committee that she did not know how much debt was in Canada or how much a 1% increase in interest rates would cost the federal government, or when she predicted that there would be deflation right before the biggest run-up in inflation in 20 years, we assumed it was just more media manipulation like Twitter found she had already done. Now we learn, in her favourite newspaper, that in fact she “rarely takes department briefings” and has not spoken to her deputies in months. When will she consult with her department before getting it wrong again?

Mr. Speaker, the only thing they are doing for seniors is driving up inflation to vaporize seniors' savings, increase the cost of home heating and increase the cost of groceries by $1,000 a year. What is the minister doing about it? According to her favourite Liberal newspaper, she is not attending her briefings. In fact, she has not spoken to many of her deputies in months and is spending her time on political outreach. When will the finance minister start doing her job rather than just passing the bill for her failures on to Canadians?

Mr. Speaker, the finance minister refuses to rise and defend herself against this report, even though it was in her very favourite newspaper, The Globe and Mail. The Globe further said that her department is in total disarray. This is while inflation is at a two-decade high, we have a housing bubble that could lead to a housing crash and the national debt is over a trillion dollars. Before she causes inflation to gallop further and the cost of living to go higher on Canadians, will she stand and commit that she will get a handle on her department and get back to work?

Madam Speaker, that is right. We all learned that in grade school, but apparently some lessons need to be learned and relearned here in this House of Commons. What happened was by the early 1980s, inflation had risen to 12% in Canada. The government claimed that if it kept printing money, this would stimulate the economy and create jobs. What it delivered was 12% unemployment and 12% inflation. It is worth spending a minute on this. Why is it that high inflation actually kills jobs, contrary to what the so-called experts always tell us? The answer is that prices are information; prices are some of the most powerful and condensed forms of information ever known to humankind. The great economist Milton Friedman explained how complicated it is to make a pencil. He basically said that the lead comes from a lead mine in Asia; the rubber comes from a rubber tree in another part of the world; the timber might come from a forest in the western United States, and the paint might come from a titanium mine somewhere in Africa. All these people are working together to make a pencil. None of them actually know they are making a pencil, but they agree to make the ingredients of the pencil because they are zapped with a laser beam called “the price signal”. The price is high enough to incentivize them to make the investments and do the work to supply the goods. The consumer knows what it costs to make that pencil, not because they called all the mines and all the forests and asked them all to feed in the price, and pulled out their calculator and figured out what it should cost to make a pencil. No, the consumer knows because when they walked into the store there was a price, and that price basically zapped to them the cost of making the pencil; the hundreds of people who unknowingly conspired to make it communicated that information to the buyer just like that. Then the consumer calculated in their mind that the pencil was worth more than the money they had to spend to get it. Therefore, all of those laser beams led to that wonderful little transaction that brought the consumer home a pencil. Here is the problem with inflation: It messes with all those information signals. Just last week, I was in New Brunswick and I was speaking to a gentleman who was in a recycling business. He signs five-year agreements to do the recycling work for other companies. Here is the problem: When he does not know what the price is going to be over the next five years, he does not know what he should charge. He locked in contracts that expected inflation to be the normal 2%. Now, we have 5% inflation and it is potentially rising. The difference is that over a five-year period, instead of having 10% total inflation it will be closer to 25% or, with compound interest, 30%. Now, he is getting actually 20% less in his fifth year than he thought he was going to get. Therefore, all these information signals that allow people to exchange work for wages, product for payment and investment for interest are totally scrambled by inflation. The technology that is supposed to allow us to transport value through space and time is scrambled. It is like scrambling the hard drive on a computer. All these signals mess with the ability of humans to exchange value with one another, and when that system breaks down, everything breaks down. That is why inflation has almost always led to social disorder. It also allows those with the greatest means to profit the most, because they can move their money into things that are inflation-protected, like land, buildings, private businesses, stocks, bonds and countless other assets that inflate in price. Meanwhile, the people who actually live off their wages see a real pay cut. Those people who are wealthy enough not only profit by watching their assets inflate in value, but the real value of the debts that they take on shrinks in inflation-adjusted terms. Therefore, those who have access to the financial system get vastly richer as their debts shrink in real value and their assets inflate; and those who do the work, the people in the fields for whom we painted these floors green, watch the fruits of their labours wither away by this inflation. Therefore, I rise today to call for a restoration of the real integrity of our money, to bring back the meaning of money, which is to transport value over space and time, to restore free markets among free people and to put the commoner ahead of the Crown.

moved: “That it be an instruction to the Standing Committee on Finance that it have the power to divide Bill C-2, an act to provide further support in response to COVID-19, into two bills: Bill C-2A, an act to provide further support in response to COVID-19 (business support programs); and Bill C-2B, an act to provide further support in response to COVID-19 (benefits and leave), provided that (a) Bill C-2A be made up of part 1 of Bill C-2; (b) Bill C-2B be made up of all other parts of Bill C-2; (c) the House orders Bill C-2A and Bill C-2B to be printed; (d) the Law Clerk and parliamentary counsel be authorized to make any technical changes or corrections as may be necessary to give effect to this motion and; (e) if Bill C-2A is not reported back to the House within two sitting days after the adoption of this motion, it shall be deemed reported without amendment.” He said: Madam Speaker, sometimes the simplest questions are the hardest to answer. The other day, I was in the finance committee, where the government was asking parliamentarians to approve another $7-billion expenditure. It sent 10 government officials to tell us all of the wonderful things this $7 billion would do. I had a simple question: Where does the money come from? Silence blanketed the room. I sat quietly and patiently, looking up at the Zoom screen, to find out if a reassuring voice would answer an obvious and simple question. We were told the majority of the 10 officials were from the finance department. If any department were able to tell us where the money comes from, one would expect it would be finance, but silence continued to triumph. The awkwardness thickened to the point that it could be cut with a knife. Finally, the chair broke in and encouraged me to ask another question that might be easier for these 10 government officials to answer. I then asked the chair if he could tell us where the money comes from. He was likewise perplexed. He sat baffled in front of the committee, unaware of what to do. This is the chair of Canada's parliamentary finance committee, here in a G7 country. Of course, there are really only four places that money that passes through the House comes from: one, it can be taxed; two, it can be borrowed; three, it can be printed; or four, God forbid, it can be cut from something else and reallocated. However, none of those answers were forthcoming. Instead, a fifth novel explanation of the providence of this money came forward, finally, about three minutes into the long committee silence. One official said that the money is within the government's broader macroeconomic framework and that he could not speak to it. If $7 billion can appear magically from something called a “government's broader macroeconomic framework”, then everyone should have a broader macroeconomic framework. Imagine what a single mother could buy at the local grocery store if, instead of having to rely on decreasingly valuable Canadian dollars to buy food for her kids, she could carry around with her a broader macroeconomic framework. Imagine if the worker who cannot afford to gas up his car could just open up his wallet and, instead of pulling out increasingly worthless Canadian dollars, he could pull out a card inscribed with “broader macroeconomic framework”. Then he might even be able to fill up his tank with gas. Maybe that 28-year-old who lives in his parents' basement despite having a good job, because house price inflation has made it impossible for him to buy, could, instead of using inferior Canadian currency to bid on a house, walk up to the realtor and say that he has decided to pay not with cash, not even to pay with debt, but with a broader macroeconomic framework card. I hope that at the end of my remarks, a minister and the government will announce, just in time for Christmas gift purchases, that they will mail out a broader macroeconomic framework to every Canadian household, so parents could, in collaboration with Santa Claus, make sure there are gifts under the tree for every child in these impossibly difficult times. If we are going to ask the simple question of where the money comes from, why do we not ask the yet simpler question of what money is, because sometimes it is important to go back to first principles in order to make sense of this crazy world of ours? Money, of course, is merely a technology by which we transport value over time and space. Without it, our spaces would have to consume in the present everything that it produces. Most species do. They have to eat what they kill right away, lest it be stolen or spoil. Squirrels can squirrel away a bit, which is a good habit the government should learn from, but most species have to use it or lose it. We developed a technology to allow two people exchanging things to go ahead with their exchange. Even if each did not have the ability to supply the other with what they wanted, they could simply use this technology, called money, to transport the value between each other across time and different geographies. Over time, money has taken many forms. In one island in the South Pacific it was a ledger carved on scarce limestone. In some places it was beads or seashells. In prisons, they use cigarettes. When I was a kid in school, it was candy. Throughout history it became metal, some precious, some brute. We had gold, silver and copper. Many different means of translating value across space and time have been used. Politicians have found it a nuisance to pay their bills and use money with integrity. Back in 1215, poor old King John was forced by the barons and the commoners to sign this nuisance of a document called the Magna Carta, the great charter. In that document was inscribed the principle that the crown could not tax what the people had not approved. That principle is still in place here in this Parliament today. The government cannot spend what we do not vote on, 800 years later. When we look around and see the beautiful green here, we know where it comes from. It was the colour of the fields in which King John was made low. That green should remind everyone that the people in the fields doing the work are the ones who produce the money we spend around here. That might have been a better answer in the committee than “the government's broader macroeconomic framework”, but I digress. After King John was prevented from taxing what people had not approved and was forced to go back to the commoners to get their permission to take their money, he and his successors became increasingly creative in sourcing the cash they acquired. Years later, King Henry VIII, who is more famous for clipping off the heads of his subjects, decided that he could get his hands on money by clipping coins. He and his regime would clip off the edge of a coin. That way, they could melt those edges down and make more coins. Back then, it was hard to make coins because it was the British pound, which was a pound of silver. By clipping off a piece, they could melt it down and create more coins and Henry could inflate the value of currency in his hands, thereby deflating the value of the wages that his peasant class earned. He got even more creative later on, which is how he got his famous nickname. He would have his minters melt down the British pound and re-mint it with just a tiny coating of silver around the outside of a copper coin. People thought they were getting a silver coin. Meanwhile, on the inside, they actually got copper. The problem was this: Being the egomaniac he was, he did not want a profile shot, so he had his face placed facing outward on the coin, so it stared everyone in the eye when they looked at it. Because his nose protruded out from the coin, it would rub against the inside of people's pockets and the silver would scrape off the tip of his nose. Then they had a silver coin with a red nose, which is how he got the nickname “old coppernose”. Every time someone saw that red copper nose, they knew the king had stolen the real value of their money. Throughout time, other politicians found other creative ways. Dionysius, who was a Greek dictator in Syracuse, actually took all the one drachma coins and restamped them to give them a value of two drachmas, so all of a sudden he had twice as much money. I hesitate to tell that story in the House because I worry the Prime Minister might think he could do the same. If we run out of money, we can always get more and turn loonies into toonies, and toonies to fours. That might be the next creative idea by which government could get its hands on money. Throughout the 20th century, we saw this same tactic of cash creation. The most famous example was in the early 1920s in Germany. It created so many new units of account that inflation ran out of control. People needed to have a wheelbarrow full of cash in order to buy a loaf of bread. If people went to the bar to try and drink away their inflationary blues, they ordered all their beer at the beginning of the night because, as the minutes went on, beer became more expensive. We, in this part of the world, have not been immune to this inflationary disease ourselves. During the post-war era, we inherited monstrous debts from fighting the fascists, but governments had hard money from the end of the war until the early 70s. We basically operated on an American-led standard. If someone had a U.S. greenback, they could exchange it at a rate of $35 per ounce of gold. In that period, we had an enormous amount of prosperity. The Americans paid off their war debts here in Canada with solid currency. We wrestled the inflationary beast to the ground in the post-war era. We took our record debts, which we inherited from the war, and we paid them off. We increased the size of the Canadian economy by 300%. By 1973, we had basically become a debt-free country. However, what happened in the 1970s? President Nixon wanted to spend on warfare and welfare. Of course, the Americans were bogged down in Vietnam, which was a costly enterprise, and President Nixon wanted to keep his popularity at home, so he decided to spend, spend, spend. In the decade that followed 1971, not only did they unleash the American dollar from any particular standard, but they also increased the number of U.S. dollars in circulation by 150%, while output only grew by about 39%. In other words, the amount of money grew about four times faster than the amount of underlying output that the money represented. Here in Canada, we had Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He looked down at all the inflation that the U.S. government was creating. It had reached double-digit inflation down there. It was a total inflationary crisis. The American dollar was devalued on an international basis and was incapable of buying affordable petroleum on the world market. They like to blame OPEC, but they took no responsibility for the fact that the unit with which they were buying oil on the international markets was itself devalued. Trudeau looked at all the misery in the United States. He looked at how people were lined up at gas stations waiting for an hour and a half to gas up their cars. He saw the poverty that was overtaking inner-city streets. He saw the expanding wealth gap in the United States of America. What did Pierre Elliott Trudeau say to all that? He said, “Let us have some of that up here.” Then he started printing money here in Canada and massively increased the money supply within Canada. I have the data right here. Between 1971 and 1981, the money supply in Canada grew by over 200%, while GDP only grew in real terms by about 47%. We can imagine that money is growing in supply at more than four times the rate the economy is growing, so we have more dollars chasing fewer goods. What does that get us?

Madam Speaker, it is because the member forgets the other side of the equation, which goes back to the very first question I asked at the outset: Where does the money come from? He has another $7 billion of expenditures that he wants to impose on Canadians. I very helpfully explained to him how a pencil is made. I thought he would take out his pencil to scribble some notes so that he could finally explain on behalf of his government where the $7 billion will come from, but apparently I gave him too much credit.

Madam Speaker, the member is forgetting that debts repaid by Canadians, whether they are from Quebec, Alberta or anywhere else in the country, are not paid by a group or a government. Those debts are paid by working people. We need to stop thinking about identity groups and starting thinking about individual working citizens. Every person is responsible for themselves, and every person must have more economic freedom. If people had had more economic freedom in those days, the government would not have been able to impose its debt on them.

Madam Speaker, I find it very interesting that the NDP does not seem to care about the effect on seniors of government-created inflation. Of course, inflation hurts savers the most. Seniors, because of this incredibly high inflation, get rates of return on their savings that are inferior to the rise in the cost of living, which means that every single year they are becoming poorer. Meanwhile, the cash creation that the government has done floods financial markets. Just yesterday, the finance minister said that housing prices are up and food prices are more expensive, but not to worry as the stock market is rising. Of course it is rising. Having had $400 billion pumped into it, it has gone up. The big corporations and their CEOs can use all that money for share buybacks, dividends and capital appreciation. Meanwhile, the inflated cost of living leaves our seniors poorer and poorer every single year.

Madam Speaker, the question I asked was, “How much debt do Canadians owe, publicly and privately?”, and the finance minister said she could not say. This is the person responsible for the finances of the nation, so I asked the top bureaucrat she had on the panel with her. He said he did not know either, so I went to Statistics Canada, which just by chance updated that number today. Therefore, I announce, on the floor of the House of Commons, that Canadians owe nine trillion dollars. That is “trillion” with a “t”. Our debt level is now 371% of our GDP, $3.71 of debt for every dollar of output. That is nearly double the historic level, and it is a massive risk that could lead to detonation when interest rates return to normal.

Madam Speaker, one example of a fossil fuel subsidy would be the taxpayer-funded plane ticket that the member receives to fly here on a petroleum-burning airplane in order to sit in the House of Commons, but speaking of corporate subsidies, she raises a good point in general. I believe we should let businesses keep more of what they actually earn instead of providing them with government handouts. That way, we would go to a free-market economy, instead of state capitalism.

Madam Speaker, why? That is the most basic question anyone asks when something strange happens anywhere in nature. Why is it that a family in Riverside South, a suburban community 25 minutes from here, has been bid out on seeking a house eight times, most recently watching one normal middle-class house go $400,000 over the asking price, from $800,000 to $1.2 million? Why? Why have housing prices gone up 32% in a period of just a year and a half, while the economy has actually shrunk? Why are housing prices going up while wages in real, inflation-adjusted terms are going down? Why is this incredible bubble filling with air? Let us go through the reasons that we have been given for the recent housing bubble. Some people blame house prices in Canada wrongly on immigration. We know that cannot be true, because throughout COVID there was almost no immigration, yet house prices went up. The normal flow of roughly 300,000 newcomers seeking houses nearly came to a grinding halt. Immigration cannot explain the ballooning house prices. Some have blamed inflation in general on supply chain problems, but of course land does not have supply chains. It is already right beneath our feet. We do not import land on a ship. It is not stuck at a port. It was put here by billions of years of geological development. We cannot blame foreign supply chains for the booming price of housing. Nor can we blame it on global factors, because housing inflation here has been far worse than in any other nation, with the exception of New Zealand. According to Bloomberg, Canada has the second most inflated housing bubble. Similarly, The Economist magazine has named Canada along with New Zealand and Australia as the countries it thinks might experience a massive crash on the scale of the 2008 crisis in the United States of America. If this was a global problem, we would not be suffering a much bigger bubble than the rest of the globe. Some trendy commentators have said it is just that Canadians' preferences have changed. Because of all of the cabin fever that came with lockdowns, people want to live in the countryside and have more space; therefore, they are paying more for real estate. If that were true, we could verify it simply by seeing a drop in housing prices for inner-city condos. If people were all unloading those condos to go and live in the countryside, we would see the prices of urban condos drop. In fact, they too are up 15%. Finally, and more plausibly, some people have pointed to the fact that it is very hard to build anything here in Canada. That is true, and that is one of the long-term structural reasons why we have inordinately high real estate prices in Canada. We all are aware of the incompetent municipal and provincial governments that drive up housing prices with their bureaucracies, and the rich urban snobs who like to prevent people from living in their neighbourhoods by lobbying city councillors to prevent development. That is all true, but it does not explain the rocketing prices that began in the spring of 2020 because, of course, snob-zoning and incompetent bureaucracies are nothing new. They did not appear in Canada. We did not suddenly have an airdrop of one million inner-city snobs on Canada when COVID hit. They have long been here with the bureaucracies backing them up, blocking us from building housing for other communities for a very long time. That is nothing new, so what is new? Why all of a sudden, when the economy fell off a cliff, did the price of housing suddenly rocket? If we look more microscopically at the data, we will see that in March and April of 2020, house prices actually started to drop. We forget that now. It was just as our number one housing agency predicted. CMHC said that house prices would drop 10% to 14%, and then suddenly there was a change of direction. Prices went up and up, until they were far out of reach for everyday, ordinary working-class people. What happened in the spring of 2020 that would cause this inexplicable phenomenon to begin? The answer is that in late March, and running through until about a month ago, the government had the central bank pump $400 billion into the financial markets in order to make it cheaper for the feds to run deficits. The thinking was that if the central bank printed cash to buy bonds, it would drive down interest rates enough for the Government of Canada to be able to run consequence-free deficits, at least in the short term. The problem is that much of that money overflowed into the mortgage market. Just this week, we found out that mortgage borrowing totalled $193 billion in that period of time. That is almost a quarter of a trillion dollars of mortgage lending, and what do we know? When the financial and mortgage markets are flooded with cash, that cash goes out and bids up the price of houses. In fact, the multiplication effect of a dollar inserted into the housing and financial system is really powerful. To simplify, let us say that we have 10 houses in a given country and each is worth $100. The total market value of all those 10 houses is $1,000. If one person manages to get some of that money from the central bank and bids up the price to $200 for one of those 10 houses, that house then has a market value of $200. What happens to the entire street? That entire street's market value now doubles, so $100 of extra purchasing power adds $1,000 of market price. This is the incredible multiplication power that leads to housing bubbles. That $400 billion led to $200 billion of new housing demand, which led to many more multiple increases in market value. What happens with that? People then go out and borrow against their new home equity. They have unrealized gains in their homes that they use to collateralize more debt to buy more assets, which further inflates asset bubbles. We have seen a massive increase in the market price of assets across the economy since this experiment with central bank money printing began. Here is the problem. What goes up can come crashing down. People are basing their economic decisions on assets that are floating on top of a bubble. When that bubble bursts, all of those assets, and the people who rely on them, come crashing down. In the meantime, the poor and the working class can no longer afford to purchase those assets. Thus, we see a massive expansion in the gap between the rich and the poor. Trickle-down economics has never worked. Giving money to large financial institutions and expecting it to reach the working-class people at the bottom is a figment of the government's imagination. The people who do the work will pay the price in the crash, but get none of the benefit during the bubble. The answer is to stop printing money, free up more land and start building housing. We need to incentivize our municipalities to clean away the red tape and create work for our carpenters, framers and other tradespeople. We need to open up more land to supply our young people with homes and restore the great Canadian dream of having a place to live and a roof over one's head in a country that is a meritocracy, not an aristocracy.

I am sorry, Madam Speaker, I was just trying to help. Come on. He was having trouble making sense of the motion, so I was going to read it for him, right before him. It says here: review and consolidate all federal real estate and properties in Canada in order to make at least 15% available for residential development; It is not the Parks Canada land. Parks Canada land does not have buildings. The motion says, “federal real estate and properties”. That member should—

Madam Speaker, not only do we care about it, but we are the only party that has a solution to it. The approach of the NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc is all the same: more big, fat government programs in Ottawa that do nothing for first nations people on the ground. Our approach, if I could continue, is that we believe in empowering local first nations to give their people the opportunity to have title over their own properties. That is the fundamental problem. People cannot get mortgages if they cannot own property. If they cannot get mortgages, then they cannot develop home equity and they cannot get a credit history or collateral or participate in the modern economy. That is what we—

Madam Speaker, it says it right here in the platform: “Review the extensive real estate portfolio of the federal government—the largest property owner in the country with over 37,000 buildings—and release at least 15% for housing, while improving the Federal Lands Initiative.” There are 37,000 buildings that are underutilized, and with an increased tendency to work from home, more of that space will be freed up for—

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal inflation tax is now hitting grocery stores. Today, a report shows that the average family will have to spend $15,000 on food. That is a $1,000 increase. Canadians and Canadian families do not have $1,000, especially after real estate inflation and with gas prices at $1.50. Yesterday, the Prime Minister admitted, in English, that there is something called “just inflation”. To respect linguistic duality, can he repeat it in French and say that it is just inflation?

Mr. Speaker, all the other so-called experts have given up on the term “transitory inflation”, yet the Associate Minister of Finance is trying to resurrect it on the same day we get a report saying that the average family will have to spend another $1,000 just to put nutrients on their kids' tables. We already have the second-worst housing bubble on earth and it is $1.50 a litre for gas. The average family cannot keep up with the cost of living and the minister says it is transitory. If so, how long until all of this price inflation reverses itself and the prices come back down?