Cheryl Gallant

Mr. Speaker, Procedure · 29 wordsI am pleased to rise on behalf of my hard-driving constituents in the expansive riding of Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke to speak to Bill C-38, an act to amend the Excise Tax.Procedure Claims · 17 wordsYesterday, the finance minister told the House that the Liberals would take no lessons from the Conservatives.¹ Aside · 12 wordsToday, class is in session, and the lesson plan is lower taxes.Aside Claims · 10 wordsConservatives have been calling for gas tax relief for months, Positioning · 6 wordswhile Liberals enjoyed vacations in Tuscany.PositioningOff point Claims · 48 wordsThey left the decision to extend the gas tax holiday until the last minute in an effort to maximize uncertainty. The Liberal decision to end this tax break in the middle of winter is perplexing. The Prime Minister has claimed he speaks to the United States President regularly. Positioning · 18 wordsDoes the Prime Minister have secret knowledge about when the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz will end?PositioningOff point Reasoning · 39 wordsBased on the legislation before us, it appears the Liberals think the oil shipments through the strait will be at 50% of pre-war levels by January 31, and the entire strait will be open by the end of March. Positioning · 73 wordsOf course, the Liberals have no idea when the conflict will end. The government wants to provide as little relief as it can get away with. Hiking the tax by 50% on February 1 is its way of boiling the frog slowly. It takes a certain level of Liberal arrogance to call a bill that schedules tax hikes the Canadian fuel affordability act. This is all part of a plan with the Liberals.PositioningPartly on point Claims · 9 wordsThey call the bill, which would hike taxes, affordability. Positioning · 5 wordsThey call inflationary spending affordability.Positioning Claims · 68 wordsThey call doubling the deficit fiscally responsible. Despite their elbows up rhetoric, the Prime Minister is adopting the exact same form of state-led capitalism we see coming from the White House. The fact that the Prime Minister copied the U.S. President’s plan to launch a sovereign debt fund is very telling about how both view the economy. The U.S. President has often compared himself to a mall manager, Positioning · 9 wordswhile the Prime Minister acts like a bank manager.Positioning Reasoning · 15 wordsNeither of them should be so intimately involved in the operations of any particular business. Claims · 40 wordsThis is exactly why Norway’s actual sovereign wealth fund does not invest in Norway.² It is the exact opposite of the sovereign debt funds in Canada and the United States. These debt funds are specifically designed to pick domestic companies. Reasoning · 19 wordsThe temptation to politically interfere in the operations of companies or on behalf of the companies is too great. Claims · 180 wordsWe have too many examples of this already happening in Canada, even without the sovereign debt fund. The company formerly known as SNC-Lavalin is a perfect example. The last prime minister tried to bully his justice minister into letting SNC off the hook for bribery and corruption.³ When that did not work, he fired her.⁴ Then he replaced her with a man whom the current Prime Minister made our UN ambassador.⁵ Now SNC has a new name and new business partners who together have formed the consortium Cadence.⁶ When the Liberals released a request for proposals to build Via’s high-frequency rail system, Cadence submitted a proposal that called on the Liberals to scrap this popular plan and replace it with a much more expensive high-speed rail line.⁷ One of the partners in the consortium is the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, whose former president just so happened to be the Clerk of the Privy Council.⁸ Together they cooked up a secret plan to privatize the most profitable parts of Via while taxpayers pay for the rest of Via.Off point The ask · 24 wordsIf the Liberals are going to hike taxes, the least they could do is not actively make every alternative form of transportation more expensive, Partly on pointClaims · 54 wordsyet that is the plan they cooked up with their billionaire buddies last week, to privatize our airports and to privatize Via Rail.⁹Off point Now, their first bill back proposes to hike the gas tax in the middle of winter. To defend these choices, the Liberals have already started to point to examples of Europe. Positioning · 62 wordsThe Liberals want Europe’s private airports without its robust airline competition. They want a French company to build their high-speed rail, without France’s transparency laws.Off point They want European levels of gas taxation to force us all into Chinese cars running on an electric grid powered by Brookfield.Partly on point What the Prime Minister really wants is to partner with Europe to impose carbon tariffs.Positioning Claims · 47 wordsThe legacy media may have memory-holed the fact that the very first policy the Prime Minister ever proposed when he was just a Liberal leadership candidate 20 months ago was to impose carbon tariffs on Canadians who dared to purchase products from countries without a carbon tax.¹⁰ Positioning · 34 wordsIs it any surprise the carbon tariff Prime Minister appointed the only Liberal MP to acknowledge carbon tariffs are coming as his parliamentary secretary?Off point This is all part of the Liberals’ war on affordability.PositioningPartly on point Claims · 53 wordsFrom their ban on plastic food packaging to their inflammatory deficit spending, everything they touch becomes more expensive. When the U.S. President endorsed our Prime Minister, he said it was because they agreed on many things.¹¹ When President Trump attacked our Conservative leader, it was because we did not support the President’s agenda.¹² Reasoning · 41 wordsWhat the Liberal Prime Minister and the Republican President agree on is that they should be at the centre of every consequential economic decision in the country. They both agree that the government should serve the interests of the investor class. Positioning · 16 wordsNow the Liberals even have one big, beautiful omnibus bill to make Bay Street great again.Positioning Claims · 41 wordsEven Liberal-funded reporters are calling this latest move Trumpian. We would think they would have caught on to the similarities when the Prime Minister literally borrowed an oversized novelty page from the U.S. President’s playbook on his first day in office.¹³Off point Positioning · 36 wordsFortunately for Canadians and Americans, there is still one political party on this continent that actually believes in freedom. As our leader ably demonstrated last week, there is a clear path to long-term sustainable economic growth, PositioningReasoning · 12 wordsand that is to empower the free people in a free market.Partly on point Positioning · 179 wordsThe Prime Minister and the U.S. President have a faith-based approach to running a country’s economy. They have the faith that their business acumen is more than enough to pick winners and losers.Off point Conservatives put our faith in the Canadian people. We trust Canadian entrepreneurs to out-innovate and out-compete the world. We trust Canadian consumers to buy the products and services that work best for them. We reject the tired idea that a president, a prime minister or even a king can decide who we can trade our property with. We believe in cutting red tape for all businesses, not just the ones that hire the best Liberal lobbyists.Vague promise We believe in cutting taxes for all businesses, not just for the ones that invest in projects that Liberals find politically acceptable to support.Vague promise Conservatives trust and believe in Canadians because we have confidence born of true patriotic love.Partly on point The Liberals and Republicans have succumbed to the siren song of economic nationalism and protectionism. That is rooted in insecurity. It saps confidence. It breeds corruption.Off point It makes life less affordable.PositioningPartly on point Claims · 45 wordsIs it really any coincidence that the sectors of our economy protected from foreign competition are the most expensive, such as domestic air travel, cellphone bills, insurance rates and broadband Internet?Off point Canadians can reasonably blame the U.S. President’s actions for the high price of gas, Partly on pointPositioning · 37 wordsbut Canadians have only the Liberal Party to blame for the high cost of everything else.Off point While the finance minister can pretend not to copy our policies, he cannot ignore reality for long. Canadians are being squeezed, PositioningReasoning · 18 wordsand the Liberal plan to hike the gas tax in the middle of winter is not the solution. Claims · 12 wordsThe Liberals are already raking in GST windfall from higher gas prices. Reasoning · 16 wordsThey do not need to compound the pain with a frosty tax hike on February 1.¹⁴ The ask · 21 wordsInstead of teasing Canadians with temporary tax relief, the Liberals could do the hard work of committing to substantial tax reform. Positioning · 50 wordsOf course, this would actually force the Prime Minister to spend time in Canada rather than hitting the globalist gala circuit. It is clearly more enjoyable for the Prime Minister to spend all his time in Europe re-reannouncing our partnership strategy for a new future alliance for a strategic future.PositioningOff point The ask · 39 wordsInstead of introducing a bill to raise gas taxes and calling it a fuel affordability act, maybe the Prime Minister could use some of his international rizz to negotiate an end to the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz.Partly on point Aside · 46 wordsWith any luck, that would earn him a Nobel Peace Prize, which we could trade off for tariff relief, or instead, he could spend his time helping his former colleagues at Brookfield partner with a Crown corporation he controls to launch a new maple-flavoured investment fund.Aside Claims · 32 wordsBarring any attempt to subvert the fixed elections act, Canadians will get to render a verdict in October 2029 on how they think the Prime Minister has spent his time in office.¹⁵Off point