Parliamentary Speeches

Mr. Speaker, in order to supply themselves with cheap cash for their record deficits, the Liberals had the central bank flood lending markets with $400 billion of cash. We now learn that $192 billion of that overflowed into mortgage markets, and a quarter of all mortgages outstanding today are low quality and variable rate, which are highly subject to increases in interest rates. That has inflated housing prices by one-third and created the second-biggest housing bubble in the world. Will the finance minister admit that Canada has a housing bubble?

Mr. Speaker, it is always reassuring to have your credit rating backed up by those who said subprime mortgages were rock solid in late 2008, but the question was about Canada's housing bubble. I have asked the minister eight times now in the House of Commons if we have a housing bubble. Raj wants to know. He is driving Uber in addition to having an IT job in order to save up over the next 15 years to make a down payment on a $1 million Brampton home. Canadians deserve to know. Bloomberg has said Canada has the second-most-inflated housing bubble on earth. Yes or no: Will the minister admit that Canada has a housing bubble?

Mr. Speaker, despite the fact that Canada has the second-biggest housing bubble in the world, according to Bloomberg, and Vancouver and Toronto are the second and fifth most unaffordable housing markets on earth, according to Demographia, the Liberal media and the Liberal government want me to stop talking about housing inflation. Who does not want me to stop talking about it? Raj, who is an IT worker from Brampton. He has had to drive Uber in order to save up over 15 years to make a down payment on the average house in his community. Will the minister tell Raj and other Canadians whether we have a housing bubble, yes or no?

Mr. Speaker, it is no surprise that the finance minister is running away from her record on housing inflation. After all, since she took the job, prices are up by 20%. Since this government took office, they are up 58%, almost $300,000. They really started to rise when the government started to flood financial and mortgage markets with $400 billion of easy money, which has raised not only house prices but also land prices. Now that we have the second-biggest housing bubble in the world, will the finance minister finally recognize that Canada has a housing bubble, yes or no?

Mr. Speaker, the member loves to quote the Liberal, state-funded media to defend herself. Well, let us do that. Let me quote The Globe and Mail, which wrote, “The Liberal government is asking Parliament to approve billions of new spending during a brief four-hour sitting in Ottawa but is facing questions because it has not released a full accounting of how it spent more than $600 billion last year”. We do not know how this deficit ranks because the Liberals will not release the public account. All we know is that they have flooded the economy with over a half trillion of deficit spending, driving up housing prices to be the second highest in the world. I will go back to the same question: Does Canada have a housing bubble, yes or no?

Mr. Speaker, I wish she would go on because she loves to quote Liberal media commentators. One of the articles she quoted earlier actually talked about how she put manipulative media on Twitter, making history as the first minister in Canadian history to be sanctioned by a social media company for sharing misinformation online, so enough with the misinformation. The question was about housing prices. According to Bloomberg, we have the second-largest housing bubble in the world. Will the minister acknowledge that there is a housing bubble in Canada, yes or no?

Mr. Speaker, the more the Prime Minister spends, the more it costs. Housing prices have gone from $450,000 under the last year of the Conservative government to $716,000 under the government, up 32% in just over a year. We now have the biggest housing bubble in the world outside of New Zealand, and Toronto and Vancouver are the fifth- and second-most expensive housing markets in the world, ahead of Manhattan, San Francisco, London and others. If the Prime Minister is not to blame, then exactly what is causing this housing price inflation?

Mr. Speaker, when the Conservatives were in office, it cost less to own a home. The average family could buy a place for $450,000, not the $720,000 of today. Why are prices rising so suddenly? Well, the number of wealthy landlords buying houses went up by 100% since March 2020, according to the Bank of Canada. What happened in March 2020? That was when the government began printing money, flooding the mortgage system and ballooning housing costs. When will the Liberals stop flooding the market with cheap cash for wealthy landlords?

Madam Speaker, it has been my practice to consider my response to the Speech from the Throne to be my maiden remarks in every Parliament, and I want to begin by thanking the good people of Carleton for electing me a seventh time to this chamber. They have vested their trust in me and I am deeply humbled by it. I want to thank my wife Anaida, my daughter Valentina and our new son baby Cruz. Cruz was born eight days before the election. He was born premature. He rushed to get here and then they told him he had to wait 18 more years to vote. It is another example of the red tape and rules that are holding people back. The poor little guy could not even vote for his dad. We hope to fix that when we are in government. The other thing he found out is that he owes something like $60,000 of federal government debt. Those were two pieces of bad news, but all else has been good news for him. He has a wonderful and loving mother, and he is fortunate to look more like her than his father, which all members will agree is a good thing. As members can see, I was not elected for my good looks, but I am very thankful to have the support of my family. I also want to thank my father Don, my mother Marlene and my brother Patrick, as well as the countless volunteers, workers and other supporters who have stood by me through thick and thin. I am very pleased to be back here on the floor of the House of Commons to work with everyone here in the service of the common people. Today, I would like to speak about the question everyone is asking. Why does everything cost so much? No matter where we go, prices have gone up. Young people who are still living in their parents' basements are wondering why housing prices have risen so much. The single mother doing her grocery shopping is wondering why it costs so much to buy food for her children. The worker trying to fill up his truck is wondering why he can only afford to buy a quarter of a tank of gas. The answer is clear: inflation. There is too much money chasing too few goods and services. How did that happen? The Liberals are trying to blame COVID-19 and the resulting disruptions. It is strange because the Minister of Finance and the current and former governors of the Bank of Canada said that COVID-19 would cause deflation. However, this week, we heard Stephen Poloz claim that COVID-19 is causing inflation, when he is the one who said that the problem we would have would be deflation. The same people who said that COVID-19 would cause deflation are now blaming COVID-19 for inflation. COVID‑19 is obviously not the main cause. We know this because many other countries have also had COVID‑19, but they have a much lower inflation rate than here in Canada because they have printed less money than here. I am thinking of countries like Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, India, China, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France and the United Kingdom. For its part, the Canadian government has decided to follow the disastrous policy of the United States and print money to finance a deficit. In the United States, we have seen the result of this policy: the rich have become much richer. Their assets have increased. However, the wages of the poor and the working class are losing value. Their dollar buys less because of the supply of that currency. Of course, in the United States, the two main parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, agree on one thing and one thing only. Both parties like to print money. The Republicans like to fund Wall Street, and the Democrats like to fund Washington. One party likes big business, and the other likes big government. To finance both, they are printing a lot of money, and this has caused very negative effects for the poor. It has increased the gap between the rich and the poor. Here in Canada, we have not followed this approach. During the Harper years, there was almost no inflation. After the great recession of 2008-09, we had the best economic recovery and we eliminated the deficit in five years. We were able to do that because we did not print money. We spent real dollars to help Canadians during the crisis, and we returned to a balanced budget soon after. Suddenly, in 2020, during the COVID‑19 crisis, the government decided to start copying what the U.S. Federal Reserve has done, which is to print money to pay the bills, because Canada's deficits were the highest in the G20 and the government was unable to get the financing it needed from the traditional bond market. What this means is that the government increased the amount of money in circulation by $400 billion, which is about a 25% increase. Since then, inflation has been astronomical. For example, the price of a house has increased by 30%, which is strange, because one would have expected prices to go down in the midst of the COVID‑19 crisis. There was no immigration, which reduces demand. Wages went down, which limits the amount of money people have to buy homes. People were scared, which would normally make people think twice about purchases. Prices did not just go up, however. Property prices increased at an unprecedented rate in Canada's modern history. International supply chains cannot be to blame since land does not have a supply chain. The land has been here for thousands or maybe millions of years. Land does not appear or disappear, so when the gross value of land increases by 20% in a single year, it has nothing to do with the virus or with the delivery of goods. Once again, land does not get loaded onto a ship to be sent to Canada. It is a question of demand. What caused this demand? When the government printed the $400 billion, it did not throw that cash out of a plane. That may have been fairer than what it actually did with the money. The government is giving that money to the banks and these banks are loaning it to homebuyers, which is causing the price of real estate to go up. Clearly, the government is behind the whole situation, and this creates a great deal of unfairness. We need to stop printing money, pay down the deficits and let builders build homes. That is how Canadians will be able to live a dignified and respectable life.

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for his kind words. I have enjoyed conversations with him. In fact, I had the chance to meet his lovely children, who were on Parliament Hill just last week. I think he is preparing them to run for office, although he had better be careful, because he might not have long in his seat if one of them is too ambitious. That said, I congratulate him on his election and on his wonderful family. The question about child care is particularly pertinent, because, as the government keeps reminding us, child care is more expensive than ever after six years of Liberal government. It is ironic, because every time the Liberals say they are going to spend money on a particular thing, that thing gets way more expensive. They said they were going to spend $70 billion on housing, and what happened to housing? It got a lot more expensive. It went from about $450,000 for the average house to $716,000. Now homebuyers are paying more and taxpayers are paying more for the same thing that used to cost less for both. I just hope the Liberals do not get the same results on child care that they got on housing, because God knows parents are paying too much as it is.

Mr. Speaker, let us get this straight. When Conservatives were in power, according to the minister, we spent $250 million on housing, and the average house cost Canadians $450,000. With Liberals now in power, they are spending 27 billion tax dollars, and the average house costs $720,000. Housing is now not just more expensive for taxpayers, it is more expensive for homebuyers. Failing is bad. Failing expensively is even worse. Why do we have the second-biggest housing bubble in the world?

Mr. Speaker, he seems to be bragging that he is the most expensive housing minister in Canadian history. Not only are Canadians spending more when they buy a house, but now they have to pay more on their taxes for the failed programs that this minister and the government put in place to inflate the housing bubble to begin with. Canada has the second-biggest housing bubble in the world, behind a tiny island in the South Pacific called New Zealand. Every other country has less housing inflation. What is causing this massive bubble? Is it “just inflation”?

Mr. Speaker, maybe the Prime Minister will listen to the Deputy Prime Minister's book, and in that book she could explain how she has managed to create the second-biggest housing bubble in the world. In fact, Vancouver has the second-highest home prices on earth. Toronto is number five. They are more expensive than Manhattan; San Francisco; London, England; and other places with far less land, far more people and far more money. This is housing inflation that has resulted since the government unleashed a torrent of money printing. Will the finance minister finally tell us what is causing this housing bubble? Is it “just inflation”?

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question. What is the cause of real estate inflation? First, it is not COVID-19. It should actually have driven housing prices down. There is no immigration, so there are fewer consumers buying houses; wages are lower, because people have lost their jobs; and there is a lot more uncertainty, which usually discourages people from buying anything at all; yet prices have gone up. Second, international supply chains are not the issue, because that does not include land, since it is already here. Third, Canada has the world's second-highest real estate inflation. We have the second-largest housing bubble after New Zealand. Other countries also have COVID-19, but real estate inflation is not as high elsewhere. What is causing it? The government printed $400 billion in the last year and a half. The money went to the banks and was loaned to buyers, specifically to very wealthy investors, to inflate real estate prices and keep the dream of home ownership out of reach for many Canadians. This means that we need to stop printing money to drive out inflation, and start building housing instead of printing money.

Mr. Speaker, if the hon. member thinks that somebody cancelling their $3,000 vacation is what caused housing prices to rise 25% in one year, one-third since COVID, then he needs to pull out his calculator and do a little more math. What actually happened is that mortgage lending went up 41%, most of it going to rich people and wealthy landlords, after the Bank of Canada began printing its $400 billion. Too many dollars chasing too few houses equals house price inflation.

Mr. Speaker, 27-year-old José of Greely called me on Friday from his parents' basement. I see the Liberals are laughing about that. He cannot afford a home. He has a job, the same job his mother had in fact, but while her family could afford a two-acre lot and a nice property to raise the kids, he cannot even afford a condo. He wants to know why, during COVID, while wages were down and immigration was next to zero, housing prices rose under the current Liberal minister by 22%. Can she tell José why, according to Bloomberg, Canada has the second-worst housing bubble in the world?

Mr. Speaker, the problem for José is he cannot start a family without a house and he cannot get a house because, under the current minister, housing prices are up 20%, led by increases in land prices. We cannot blame land prices on supply chains, because land does not have supply chains. The reality is this. We have the second-biggest land mass in the world and the second-biggest housing bubble on planet earth, with only New Zealand, an island in the South Pacific, having more expensive housing. Can the minister please explain why, under her short tenure as finance minister, housing prices are up 22%?

Mr. Speaker, the minister's defence on housing is that not only are homes more expensive under the current government than they were under the previous Conservative one, but also the programming is now 100 times more expensive, so now it is more expensive for homebuyers and for taxpayers. However, I noticed the Minister of Finance was too afraid to get up and answer a question about house-price inflation that she has caused. I was specifically asking about the 20% increase in both land prices and housing prices since she took her job. She cannot pass the buck to another minister or to another country. When will she explain why house prices have risen so much?

“Supply and demand”, screams out an economic genius on the Liberal side of the House. From whence came that demand? Where did the money come from? When the economy had just lost $100 billion and everyone was locked in their basement, where did the demand come from? It came from the printers in the government money-making machine. The money-making machine started printing cash in the spring of 2020 and within weeks, real estate prices started to skyrocket. I reiterate that all the land that was transacted in those real estate purchases has been here for thousands of years. That cannot be the result of a COVID supply chain quirk. The housing was already here before COVID came. About 96% of the houses in Canada today were built before COVID, and therefore it is chronologically impossible to blame the cost of their construction on the COVID phenomenon. In other words, it is not supply and demand, as my friend suggests, it is simply demand, demand driven by the massive creation of money, $400 billion of it, the biggest money supply increase since the first Trudeau caused runaway double-digit inflation in the seventies and eighties. We now have incontrovertible evidence that it is decisions of the government, which, I grant, are being replicated by other irresponsible big-spending governments around the world, that are causing the inflation we see today. What are the consequences of that inflation? We see them. First, there is a massive growing gap between rich and poor. People who are rich love inflation. Why do we think big banks have been so thrilled with the money-printing policies of the government? Bob Fife went on CTV the other day and said that Bay Street was not happy with the member of Parliament for Carleton being appointed to finance critic. Of course Bay Street is not happy, because I am the one who has been speaking out against all the free money the government has been pumping into the financial system, inflating their assets and letting them arbitrage a profit between the price of a bond the government sells them and the higher price for which the Bank of Canada buys it back. Of course Bay Street does not like the fact that I am speaking out against that. The good news is that I do not care what Bay Street likes. I work for main street here in the House of Commons. Yes, the financial elites are thrilled with quantitative easing. They have loved it in the United States of America. Both Washington and Wall Street love quantitative easing. It is the one thing that gets bipartisan support in Washington. Republicans love ballooning Wall Street and Democrats love ballooning Washington. Therefore, together, they both love seeing their central bank flood their economy with cash and balloon the assets of the super-rich in the urban centres, while eating away at the wages of working-class people. The Prime Minister looks across the border at the growing gap between rich and poor, at the higher cost of living, and at the poor and the young who can never live where the jobs are because real estate prices are too high, and he says, “Let us have some of that up here,” and replicates the same disastrous policies that have led to so much social and economic division south of the border. Here on this side of the House of Commons, we do not believe in central bank money printing to pay our bills. During the great global recession, we rejected that approach. Governments around the world decided to do it. Here in Canada, we did run modest deficits, the smallest in the G7, but we did it borrowing real money and returning quickly to a balanced budget. This meant we had low inflation, low unemployment and the fastest recovery from the great global recession. It turns out that sound money does not just keep inflation low, but allows growth and job creation. We know inflation does not just eat away at paycheques; it kills jobs. For example, we now have among the highest unemployment in the G7 combined with one million vacant jobs. Can members imagine that: high unemployment and record-high job vacancies? Well, it is no wonder. When the government prints money to pay people not to work, what do we get? We get jobs without people and people without jobs. Of course, all the money that is going into the economy to pay people not to work means more spending with less making, which means higher prices. We need to do exactly the opposite. We need to restore sound money. We need to stop printing cash, get the Bank of Canada focused on its real mandate, which is low inflation, bring government spending under control, cancel the hundred-billion-dollar slush fund the government has created for the post-COVID period, and return the cost of government to pre-COVID levels. Simply put, a more affordable government will mean a more affordable cost of living for Canadians, and that is what Conservatives support. Instead of creating more cash, why do we not create more of the stuff cash buys? Why do we not unleash our energy sector to supply more affordable energy for consumers and more paycheques to our workers, approve pipelines to create jobs for western energy workers and eastern refinery workers, get the carbon tax and other red tape off the back of our farmers so they can produce more nutritious and affordable food, incentivize our municipalities to speed up building permits so we can build more houses rather than just pushing out more mortgage lending, and sell off 15% of the underutilized 37,000 federal buildings so there is more space for housing our young and our working class? Here in our nation's capital, we have massively underutilized real estate that could be used for private-sector affordable housing built in the free market to supply our youth with opportunity to live in an affordable place. In other words, we need to move from a debt economy to a paycheque economy. We need to make more and cost less. We need to unleash the free enterprise system to supply our workers with paycheques and our consumers with affordable products and services.

Mr. Speaker, of course, when the government deprives people of their income, it has to replace that income. We supported that at the very outset in the spring of 2020. However, what we did not support was having the biggest deficit in all of the G20. All of those other countries had COVID lockdowns as well. Many of them had lower unemployment and lower COVID mortality rates with a significantly lower deficit. Taiwan, for example, which responded in a way that Conservatives originally suggested, had among the lowest COVID mortality rates in the world and a deficit of 4% of GDP rather than 16% like this government. Yes, COVID may have forced the government to spend, but it did not force it to give money to prisoners and organized criminals. It did not force the government to give wage subsidies to corporations that were already wealthy enough to pay out dividends and bonuses. Those were irresponsible decisions that no one, not even COVID, imposed on the government.

Mr. Speaker, everybody is asking the same question. Whether it is 28-year-old couples living in their parents' basements because they cannot afford the $300,000 increase in the average house price that occurred since the government took office; or the single mother walking down the grocery aisle noticing that she cannot afford nutritious food for her kids; or the senior who is watching his savings disappear as inflation gallops through his bank account and vaporizes what he spent a lifetime storing away for his golden years, all are asking the same question. Why are prices rising so fast? Even the finance minister has had the epiphany that there is an inflation crisis. In fact, just last fall, she said that the greater risk was deflation, not inflation. She ignored my warnings to the contrary. She was not alone in that false prophecy. The current and the former governors of the Bank of Canada, a Liberal journalist and Liberal academics all laughed when I started warning about inflation back in May of 2020. Before we can answer why prices are rising today, I have to answer the other question that I often get, which is, how did I get it so right when so many others got it so wrong? The answer is that the Liberal academics, journalists and the finance minister relied on ideology; I relied on empirical economic science. The man who wrote the book on inflation, the empirical economy scientist who won the Nobel Prize for it, Dr. Milton Friedman, published famous graphs in which he demonstrated a nearly perfect correlation between the rise in inflation and the increase in money supply per unit of economic output. He showed in all five of those graphs, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Japan and Brazil, that the correlation was nearly perfect. When there is more money chasing fewer goods, we always get higher prices. When I saw the government beginning to print money to pay for exorbitant spending, I knew that inflation was just down the road. The Liberals said that those old rules did not apply, that history was over, that it no longer repeated itself and that they could ignore the thousands of years of economic history, which had demonstrated this correlation again and again, because they had reinvented the laws of economics. I was expecting the Liberals to introduce a bill repealing the law of gravity, given their penchant for thinking they could do away with the laws of economics. Of course, history has not been repealed. Nor has economic law. The massive influx of cash as a result of a half a trillion dollars of deficits has, indeed, driven up prices. This is the funny part. The same people who said that COVID would give us deflation now blame it for inflation. The same doctors who misdiagnosed the disease now can tell us that the disease's cause has nothing to do with them. What is the cost? Some people say it is supply chain kinks resulting from COVID. They point to the fact that other nations are also getting high levels of inflation, therefore it cannot be the government's fault here at home. The truth is other countries are getting inflation. Those countries that are doing the same stupid things our government is doing are getting a lot of inflation, and the correlation holds up even today. For example, yesterday the minister pointed out that other G20 countries had high levels of inflation, and she is right about that. Argentina has 52% inflation. Why? It has increased its money supply by 80% in a year and a half. Turkey has 20% inflation. Why? It has increased its money supply by 43%. The Americans south of the border, the money-printing mammoths in Washington, have 6.2% inflation. Why? They have increased their money supply by 35%. In Canada, we have a two-decade-high record of inflation of 4.7%, after we increased money supply by 23%. In fact, if we put the G20 countries on a graph, we see a near-perfect correlation between money supply growth and inflation. Those countries that have flooded their economies with deficit spending have high inflation and those countries that are also supply chain dependent but have kept their money supply in control have low inflation. Let me give some examples. Japan's inflation is 0.2%. Why? Its money supply growth has been half of ours in relative terms. Saudi Arabia's inflation is 0.8%. Its money supply growth has been a third of ours. Switzerland has 1.2% inflation. Its money supply growth has been a mere quarter of ours, only 6.5%. In other words, those countries that are not printing money to pay their bills have maintained a low cost of living and an affordable life for their citizens. Those countries that are flooding their economies with cheap cash are driving up the cost of living for their people. The Liberals will say they had no choice, that COVID made them do it. This will be their excuse for everything. Let us remember that the Prime Minister tried to give half a billion dollars to a group that had paid his family half a million dollars, and the Prime Minister said, “COVID made me do it.” COVID required that we spend money, but we did not need to have the biggest deficit in the G20. All the other G20 countries had COVID too. COVID did not force the Prime Minister to give CERB cheques to wealthy families that did not need it; to people who could have been working, with over a half a million vacant jobs; to prisoners; to organized criminals; and even to people whom the public servants suspected of making fraudulent applications. He did not have to give wage subsidies to large corporations that had so much money they were simultaneously paying out dividends and bonuses to their executives. COVID did not force any of that on the government. Those were decisions. The government knew it could not pay for those decisions by simply borrowing from the marketplace. There was not enough money in the whole world to lend the government enough to spend and fulfill its appetites. That is why it directed the Bank of Canada to create the cash out of thin air, which, unfortunately, the bank was all too happy to do, and now we see the consequences. Now that I have demonstrated the correlation between money supply growth and inflation in the G20 countries, let me show another piece of incontrovertible evidence that our inflation problem is not just the result of supply chain quirks. This evidence is that the biggest inflation in our economy has been in an area where there is no supply chain: land. Land is not waiting at a port. Land is not stuck on a ship. Land is not held hostage by a COVID outbreak in some faraway place. Land was supplied to us by geological forces millions of years before we even arrived, it is right under our feet, and yet land prices are up 20%. How does the government explain that? Is it that the acreage of land caught COVID and all of a sudden became more expensive? Of course, not. Land prices started rising after the government started printing money. Let us get very specific here. In the first two months of COVID, real estate prices actually started to drop, which we would expect. We would expect that when people's incomes fall, when a hundred billion dollars disappears from the GDP, when people are afraid about their ability to earn a future living and when we shut off immigration altogether thereby decreasing the demand for real estate, prices would go down. In fact, CMHC, our housing authority, predicted there would be a 14% reduction in housing prices. It made sense to predict that at the time. However, then, all of a sudden, in May 2020, real estate prices started to rise. In the middle of a lockdown, when people cannot even go and see the properties they are buying, why would prices suddenly and supernaturally go up?

Mr. Speaker, on average, G20 countries have deficits representing about 9% of their GDP. Canada's deficit was 16% of GDP, or almost double. Other countries were able to protect their citizens while limiting their deficits to about half of ours. Second, the government did not need to have a $100-billion deficit before COVID‑19. Those are choices that have nothing to do with the pandemic. They are the ideological choices of an extreme left-wing government. We could have spent less had we simply helped people in need who were prevented from working and by returning to a pre-pandemic level of spending as soon as possible.

Mr. Speaker, I was a voice in the wilderness, there is no doubt about it, as I showed up at the finance committee. I started warning people on my very first morning, in May of 2020; I started telling them that inflation would be our future if we did not stop printing money. Those warnings continued throughout the last year and a half, up until yesterday, when the finance minister completed her flip-flop. After having warned of deflation, she now admits we have an “inflation crisis”. In fairness to the minister, she was not the only one who was wrong. Central bankers, Liberal academics and the media all said that inflation was something we need not worry about. Fellow parliamentarians, let us study the facts of history in order to see the future, rather than being blinded by ideology.

Mr. Speaker, certainly this party is going to carefully study the legislation before simply giving a check mark for the government to push another $7 billion out the door. We all know that when the Liberals get to spend without scrutiny, money ends up in the hands of organized criminals, of prisoners and of people whom the public servants suspect of fraud. It ends up in the hands of corporate CEOs and shareholders, who take money that was supposed to go to subsidized wages. That is what happens when the government does not face proper scrutiny, so unlike the NDP, which is just thrilled to shovel the money out the door and ask for more and more and more, we on this side of the House of Commons will defend taxpayers and consumers against irresponsible Liberal incompetence.

Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. Not everyone had a multi-million dollar private country mansion built for them with taxpayers' money right in the middle of COVID either, unlike his leader. Very clearly, we would not have paid corporations a subsidy for their dividends and their CEO bonuses. We would not keep paying people not to work now that there are a million vacant jobs in Canada. We would not have given half a billion dollars to the WE Charity. The list of waste and corruption goes on and on, and we would have none of it.

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals have proven again that trickle-down economics does not work. They said that if they printed cash, gave it to government and bought up financial assets, this money would eventually trickle down to the working people. In fact, it all stayed on the top, and the billionaires got one-third richer in the first six months of COVID while the working class saw its real wages decline. Inflation is now rising twice as fast as wages. It is a massive wealth transfer from the working poor to the super wealthy. Conservatives want to reverse the trend, stop the big government, stop trickle-down economics and restore a bottom-up paycheque economy.

Mr. Speaker, my reason for rising is the need for an emergency debate on the Liberal inflation tax. As the Speaker knows, half-a-trillion dollars of Liberal inflationary Liberal deficits mean more dollars chasing fewer goods leading to higher prices. It is a long-proven statistical correlation that when governments run huge deficits and print money to pay for it, prices rise for everything and everybody. Academics, the media and Liberal politicians are trying to tie inflation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, that does not hold water. Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, England, Germany, China, India, Japan, Singapore, the other G7 countries and the eurozone are all grappling with the COVID-19 crisis, and yet inflation is not as high in those places. Obviously, the cause of our inflation is the major increase in government spending, which is causing an increase in prices. More money and fewer goods mean higher prices. We need to have a debate to protect the interests of consumers. Young people are unable to buy homes and often have to live in their parents' basement. Seniors are having a hard time buying groceries. The cost of gas in Canada is going up, partly because of the world price but also because of the stunning weakness of our dollar, which is linked to the fact we are printing money here in Canada. Price hikes are taking their toll on poor people, those who are suffering, and those who do not have any financial or real estate investments to help them make money. These people need us. I am therefore calling for an emergency debate to discuss the Liberals' inflationary tax.

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the finance minister on her flip-flop today. She had said that deflation was a bigger risk to Canada than inflation. Now that Canada has the second-highest inflation rate in the G7, higher than the eurozone and higher than most of our competitors, and the second-highest housing inflation of any country on earth, she has admitted that we have an inflation crisis. I congratulate her for finally waking up to that. Will she acknowledge that this inflation is, in fact, a homegrown problem?

Mr. Speaker, let us just see about that. Land does not have a global supply chain. It was supplied by geological factors many millions of years ago, and yet land prices in Canada have gone up by 20% in one year, giving Canada the second-highest real estate inflation on planet earth. It is ahead of every other nation on earth, except for New Zealand, a phenomenon that really kicked off after the finance minister began flooding markets with cheap cash and ballooning prices. Is that not a homegrown problem?

Mr. Speaker, it would be impossible to listen to what she has to say about inflation, because before today, she had not even mentioned the word. She suggested that we would have deflation. As for the claims of her Liberal media friends, they are disproven by the fact that countries all over the world, including five of the other six G7 countries, have lower inflation than Canada, and every country on earth has lower housing inflation than Canada except one. Given that we are doing so much worse than our competitors, will she finally admit it is a homegrown problem?

Mr. Speaker, the cost of government is driving up the cost of living. Almost half a trillion dollars of inflationist Liberal deficits means more dollars chasing fewer goods, driving higher prices. However, the Prime Minister says he does not think much about monetary policy. That is no surprise; after all, it is “just inflation”. Given that housing and gas prices are up by a third, has he had time since he got off the surfboard to think a bit more about monetary policy?

Mr. Speaker, every time he creates a new program, the cost of the said object goes up. For example, he spent $70 billion on affordable housing to make housing prices go up by almost $300,000. Many members of this House were not even born when Liberals first started promising to make day care affordable. When will he realize that more dollars chasing fewer goods means higher prices and that the more he spends, the higher the cost?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister likes to blame his inflation on something that is happening in a faraway place around the world. Why is it then that Canadian consumers are paying higher rates of inflation than Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Singapore, India, China, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, the U.K., the eurozone? In fact every country, except the money-printing mammoth south of the border, has lower inflation than us. Why does he not take responsibility for the higher cost of living that his out-of-control spending is piling on the backs of Canadians?

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister needs to get his facts straight. The fact is, other countries have lower inflation than Canada. France, Italy, Germany, Japan and the U.K. all have much lower inflation rates than Canada. Only the United States, which is printing money like crazy, has a higher inflation rate. The Prime Minister wants to copy that. Everyone knows that this Prime Minister does not think about monetary policy. After all, it is “just inflation”, but will he start thinking about the real cost burden he is putting on the shoulders of Canadians?

Mr. Speaker, the member's heart bursts with so much generosity that he had no problem with the original CERB, which kicked people off benefits the second they dared earn more than $1,000. That is not compassion. Our people want paycheques, but what we are learning today is that we have the worst of both worlds. Not only are there half a million more people without jobs, but there are half a million jobs without workers. The Liberals, of course, have mismanaged the labour market policy to block Canadians from job opportunities. Why are they preventing Canadians who want a paycheque from getting one?

Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister thinks he has discovered a cornucopia of cash. In the last fiscal year he ran a deficit of $354 billion. From February 2020 until February 2021, the Bank of Canada increased the money supply by, guess what, $354 billion. The Prime Minister thinks this is great: It is easy money. He is starting to get addicted to this idea of cash flying out of printing machines and new coins being machine-gunned off the top floor of the Bank of Canada building, only a few minutes from where we stand. I raise this today because there is a very interesting debate that is not happening, for which the deadline is quickly approaching, about the Bank of Canada's inflation target. Starting in 1991, the bank and the government signed a deal that inflation would be targeted between 1% and 3%. They called it the “monetary policy framework”: These are sleepy, boring words that may impact the financial health of Canadians more than anything else that happens here in Parliament. That deal to target inflation renews every five years. It comes up for renewal on October 24 of this year. The Prime Minister has made it clear he is going to call an early election during the summer, meaning that if he were to win he would be able to impose a brand new rule about inflation without Canadians having anything to say about it. I suspect that 99% of Canadians do not even realize this is up for debate, but here is why it matters. If the Prime Minister were to change the bank's mandate this coming October, he could begin to permanently fund larger shares of government spending with printed Bank of Canada cash even if it leads to above 3% inflation, as we have right now. That would have been impossible prior to the pandemic. Based on agreements with the bank, we as Canadians were protected from undue price increases and unacceptable and unjustifiable money creation, but with the renewal of this agreement, about which there has been absolutely no debate in the House of Commons or at the finance committee, the Prime Minister may be able to carry out the biggest unapproved tax increase in Canadian history: the inflation tax. What is the inflation tax? It is very simple. When the Bank of Canada creates cash to fund the government, it provides the government with a new revenue source. Last year, cash newly created by the Bank of Canada was the single-greatest source of revenue for the government. It was not income tax, the GST, tariffs or even borrowing from private sector lenders, but new cash creation that constituted a $303 billion source of revenue for the current government. The Prime Minister might like to see this go on into the future. The problem is that, like all taxes, it increases costs for Canadians. This tax would be paid in the form of higher prices. The price of housing went up by 30%. The prices of food, lumber, automobiles and transportation have all broken recent records. That is naturally what we can expect when the government floods the marketplace with cheap money. When money is cheap, everything else suddenly gets expensive. We might ask if it is viewed as a tax by the experts. Let me quote the experts. I will go through them one at a time. In a 1978 lecture, Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman stated: There has never been in history an inflation that was not accompanied by an extremely rapid increase in the quantity of money. There has never in history been an extremely rapid increase in the quantity of money without inflation.... This is why Dr. Friedman wrote, in his exhaustive study entitled “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960”, that “inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon”. He also said that “inflation is taxation without legislation”, thereby violating the basic principle that Parliament should approve every single tax before government is able to apply it. Some might say that this is just a classical economist view. Let us take a look at John Maynard Keynes, who is obviously not a classical economist. He said: By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. This has been demonstrably proven. Inflation does benefit the extremely wealthy. That is why, in the last year of inflationary money printing, we saw a large increase in economic disparity between the rich and the poor. In the first six months of the central bank's money-printing bonanza, the 28 richest Canadians got 32% richer. That happened while our economy was tumbling by $120 billion. Where did they get all the money from? The bank created cash, which inflated the assets of the super-rich while devaluing the wages of the working poor. This is one of the reasons we have the principle of no taxation without representation: It is not simply to approve the quantity of taxes, but the composition of taxes. Quantity refers to the dollar value. Of course, that was gargantuan last year, but composition refers to who pays it. We know that the poor overwhelmingly pay the inflation tax. In fact, the governor of the Bank of Canada conceded that point to me when he came before the finance committee. He said the poor pay more in inflation because they deal more in cash. They are not able to hold their limited wealth in inflation-proof assets, like gold, land, stocks, bonds, etc. Therefore, the very small amount of money they have gets nibbled away by this silent thief we call inflation. No one in this chamber would be able to get re-elected if they stood in their place and voted for an increase in taxes on the working poor and used the money disproportionately to inflate the wealth of the super-rich. That is why no such vote was held. The government simply passed that process on to the Bank of Canada to let money creation do the dirty deed on its behalf. I will return to Dr. Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laureate, who said, “Inflation is the only form of taxation that can be levied without any legislation.” He was, of course, speaking as an economist. I will show the deliberate choice that the inflation tax has made and that has done so without the parliamentary approval of Canadians. I will show it by referring to the undeniable empirical evidence that Dr. Friedman produced. He showed that, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany and Brazil, there was a perfect correlation between the rise in the consumer price index and the increase in the money supply for each unit of economic output. In other words, in all five of those countries on four continents, inflation rose almost perfectly in line with the growth in the money supply. That is empirical evidence proving beyond a doubt that when we create cash, we raise prices to the benefit of the rich and at the expense of the poor. Modern financial sector experts say the same. HSBC's senior economic adviser, Stephen King, wrote in The Financial Times last year that “inflation and taxes are, in many ways, simply two sides of the same coin”. He further said that this is because “higher-than-anticipated inflation serves to redistribute wealth away from private creditors, pensioners for example, to public debtors. At this point, we come full circle: the distinction between the printing press and taxes begins to break down.” Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of all time, said: The arithmetic makes it plain that inflation is a far more devastating tax than anything that has been enacted by our legislature. The inflation tax has a fantastic ability to simply consume capital. It makes no difference to a widow with her savings in a 5 percent passbook account whether she pays 100 percent income tax on her interest income during a period of zero inflation, or pays no income taxes during years of 5 percent inflation. Either way, she is “taxed” in a manner that leaves her no real income whatsoever. Any money she spends comes right out of capital. She would find outrageous a 120 percent income tax, but doesn't seem to notice that 5 percent inflation is the economic equivalent. Let us say that a widow has $100,000 of savings. If she earns 5% on that, and if inflation is 5%, then she gains nothing. All of her savings income is vaporized by inflation. That would be the equivalent of the Parliament of Canada passing a bill effectively taxing her at a rate of 100% on all of her savings income, something we would never do but yet something that ultimately happens because the central bank does it without politicians being held accountable. Mr. Buffett's business partner, the famous Charlie Munger, said: I think democracies are prone to inflation because politicians will naturally spend excessively, they have the power to print money and will use money to get votes. If you look at inflation under the Roman Empire, with absolute rulers, they had much greater inflation, so we don't set the record. It happens over the long-term under any form of government. Onward to John Kenneth Galbraith, a famous Canadian economist on the left, who said, “Nothing so weakens government as persistent inflation.” Other international economists, Nouriel Roubini and David Backus, wrote, “Note that since the government, by printing money, acquires real goods and services, seigniorage is effectively a tax imposed by the government on private agents. Such a seigniorage tax is also called the inflation tax.” They go on to explain what impact that tax has, particularly on the poorest people. This is not simply an opinion. This is a mathematical fact backed up by some of the most renowned economists on planet earth, many of them winning the Nobel Prize for their work, many of them having done hundreds of years of empirical research that proves the taxation effect of inflation. These are the insights of some of the world's best-ever investors. They all concur that inflation, when created by central bank money creation, is nothing more than a tax. This kind of a tax has been mostly done by the worst possible leaders. We think of Henry VIII, for example. They used to call Henry VIII “Old Coppernose”, and that is because, despite the fact that he inherited a monstrous fortune from his father, and I do not know if that reminds members of anybody, he spent the cupboard bare. He kept running out of money, and the British pound, which was literally a pound of silver, was becoming more and more scarce to him. He needed more coins, but he did not have enough silver to make them all, so what he did was melt down the existing coins and reconstitute them by making them of copper but putting a tiny, thin layer of silver around the outside. He had his face, of course, on the coin because he was an egomaniac, and his face pointed outward from the coin; it was not a profile picture. Because his nose protruded on the coin, it would rub against the inside of pockets and money sacks and the silver would rub away, leaving nothing but a red copper nose. Everybody would know that King Henry had given them a fraudulent, fake silver coin by virtue of the fact that his nose was red. We often say politicians' fibs can be exposed through the length of their nose. In the case of Henry VIII, it was the colour of his nose. In fact, he did undergo the mass debasement of the currency. Originally, when he took reign, the British pound was 92% silver. It dropped to 75%, then 50%, then 33% and finally to 25% by 1551. His successor brought it down further. The result was, ultimately, that the amount of silver in each coin dropped by about 87%, and guess what happened to the prices. They rose by about 75%. Things got more and more expensive. Life got better for him. Of course, he was known for having the king's disease, gout, which people get from massive self-indulgence, orgies of food and drink. Therefore, life was very good in the king's court because he had created all of this fake cash that enriched him and his friends, but it was terrible for the peasants and the common people who actually did the work of the land. They got poorer and poorer as their money got more and more worthless. That is the inflation tax, so this Prime Minister of ours teaches us nothing new. This is not a new concept. In fact, if we look throughout history on these matters of economics, we see that leaders make the same mistakes over and over again. As Kipling would say: That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire— Therefore, we get burned again and again by making the same mistakes of our predecessors. That brings me back to the Bank of Canada. The bank recently has been talking about all kinds of different things that have nothing to do with its mandate. For example, the former governor Stephen Poloz regularly commented on things that were completely out of his domain, inappropriately commenting on social policy when he proposed government takeover of child care. That is well out of the realm of the Bank of Canada's mandate. We have seen recent comments by governors and deputy governors of the Bank of Canada on everything from fiscal policy to environmental policy to a whole plethora of things that find their place nowhere within the bank's mandate. Even on the bank's website, Paul Beaudry, a deputy governor, talks about, in his words, “the great reset”, whatever that means. He believes this is part of the Bank of Canada's mandate, and of course it is not. The worry is that the bank will simply become a political instrument for the agenda of a left-wing government, trying to do undemocratically what it could never convince Canadians to support democratically. Canadians would never support a massive tax increase on the poor in order to fund the ideological fantasies and the enrichment of the super rich and the super elite. That is why we in Parliament have to reclaim our powers, the powers that have been invested in this chamber and in its predecessor chambers in the mother Parliament for 800 years: that governments, including central banks, cannot tax what the commoners have not approved; that the principle of responsible government remains; that Parliament reigns supreme; that citizen goes before state and commoner ahead of Crown.

Madam Speaker, once again, we have an example of a Liberal judging his success by how expensive he can be. If we look at the other countries that responded to COVID, they managed to deliver better results. They managed to deliver better COVID outcomes and lower unemployment with significantly smaller deficits. In fact, we have the largest deficit, as a share of GDP, anywhere in the G20. In fact, we had a bigger deficit last year, as a share of GDP adjusted for inflation, than we did in World War I, in the Great Depression and in the great global recession. What the government is building us toward is a debt crisis. It has massively inflated the housing market by flooding the mortgage system with printed cash. It is now creating consumer price inflation, and our $8.6 trillion of household, corporate and government debt will “debtonate” if interest rates rise before our debt ratios come down.

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her question. The problem is that all of the other parties measure success as a function of how much it costs. Personally, I measure results based on people’s quality of life. For example, Taiwan, Singapore and Australia spent far less than Canada and had far fewer COVID-related deaths. Moreover, their unemployment rates are far lower than Canada's. It is true that the Liberals’ approach is the most expensive among all the G7 countries, but that does not mean that we received the best product. If someone pays more for a car, that does not mean that it is a better car. Personally, I want value for our taxpayers; I want the best outcome for the lowest price. That is the Conservatives’ approach.

Madam Speaker, yes, we do support going after people who do not pay what they owe, especially the richest. The member is quite right: The richest are making off like bandits when it comes to tax evasion in this country, despite the rhetoric from the other side. However, I would point out that it is actually not profits that are most enriching the wealthy; it is capital gains. It is the monstrous increases in capital gains that have resulted from flooding the economy with $350 billion of new Monopoly money. That money has gone into asset price inflation, making the rich vastly richer and creating a kind of aristocratic feudal economy, as opposed to a free market, bottom-up economy.

Madam Speaker, they can affect it very drastically. For example, I think the member has been looking into new appliance regulations that would make the appliances that Canadians buy far more expensive than the same appliances that are available south of the border, even though we live in an integrated market for those same products. By the way, big corporations do not pay the cost of regulations; they pass it all on to their workers in reduced wages and on to consumers in higher prices. In fact, many of the biggest companies love regulation, because they can use it to shut out their competition by making it more and more difficult and more and more expensive for other entrepreneurs to get into the field. What does that mean? Less competition always means higher prices for consumers and lower wages and fewer career opportunities for workers.