Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today on our motion. Food Banks Canada had a stark warning, and this is a stark quote from its most recent report: “Something fundamental has shifted in Canada.” It goes on to further say that, in Canada, “a job is no longer enough to ensure a reliable pathway to stability.” One in four Canadians is facing food insecurity, and 20% of the 2.2 million lining up every month at food banks are employed. I am going to read again that line from the report: in Canada, “a job is no longer enough to ensure a reliable pathway to stability.” That is what over a decade of the Liberal government has inflicted upon Canada. Something has fundamentally changed in this country, and it has fundamentally changed for the worse because of the government. In Edmonton alone, we have two separate food banks just serving veterans. Those who have served our country in the military, but also RCMP, have two separate food banks to serve them, just for them to get by. At the same time, we have the Prime Minister spending close to $200,000 for gourmet meals on his jet just for three trips, while the Liberals are spending $200 million for Liberal insiders for a concrete pad, a cement pad, in Nova Scotia. Canada has entered recession territory. The Liberals will quibble and say that it is only a technical recession and really does not count, but the economy is shrinking: not just the last two quarters, but three of the last four quarters. We are the only G7 country with a shrinking economy. In fact, even basket cases like France and Italy do not have shrinking economies. We are in fact the only economy that has shrunk in the last four quarters in the G7. No one else has: not the U.S., not Germany, which continues on its path to net-zero economic suicide, and not Italy, without all the oil resources we have, but just us. Again, think of the old world, the G7, and all the issues they are having with the Ukraine war and being cut off from their natural gas resources, and yet somehow they have avoided a recession like ours. This GDP issue reflects our stagnating standard of living and anemic productivity growth and highlights our weakness in business investments. According to the Fraser Institute, investment in plants, machinery equipment and IP has fallen 20% as a share of the economy in the last 10 years. I wonder what happened 10 years ago that would cause us to be on such a decline. Further, the last four years have seen this decline accelerate, matching about four years ago when the current Prime Minister started helping the government as a special economic adviser. What a coincidence, I know. More sobering news is from the Bank of Canada monetary policy report. The member for Winnipeg North just previously was saying that the Liberals believe in the Bank of Canada and that the Bank of Canada has all the information, and he asked if we did not believe in the Bank of Canada. Well, I believe in the Bank of Canada monetary policy report, which actually shows that the government is misleading Canadians on growth. The Bank of Canada is predicting, next year, a 16% lower GDP growth than the government just did in its spring budget. The year after that, it is predicting a 13% lower growth. I ask the member for Winnipeg North whom he believes. Does he believe the Bank of Canada, as he just stated he does, or does he not now, when it is not convenient for him? Even the Bank of Canada does not believe the government when it says that we are the fastest-growing economy in the G7. We are not. Further, which is even more sobering, for 2026, of the anemic growth that we have under the Liberal government, the Bank of Canada is saying 75% is from added government spending. It is not from exporting oil, perhaps, and not from IP or investment, but from government spending. In 2027, 44% of the growth in the forecast is government spending. The year after, 25% of all the growth that the Bank of Canada is seeing in GDP is coming from government spending. This is not a way to grow out of the troubles we are in, by just simply borrowing more money and spending more money. Over the next five years, we are going to have almost $400 billion just in interest payments. What are we getting for it? We are not getting growth, like the one we see in the other countries. We are seeing a shrinking economy. What do we do about this? Well, apart from joining Marty McFly and Doc Brown, getting into a DeLorean and going back to 2015 to ensure that Trudeau does not get elected, we can change the policies now. We can start undoing the Liberal policies that are wrecking the economy. The Chamber of Commerce, just recently in a submission to the finance committee, said that the government needs to focus on competitiveness, and that we cannot compete globally because of a regulatory and red tape regime that is seen as cumbersome and anti-investment. We have well over 300,000 different rules and regulations, over 450 different acts, sometimes with thousands of regulations per act that are tying up and slowing our economic growth. What does the government do? Well, normal governments around the world would perhaps say, “Well, let us reduce red tape. Let us cut some of the red tape.” We know defence procurement is a mess, but instead of actually addressing it, the government created another bureaucracy to work around its own rules that it created. For major projects, it is same thing, adding more bureaucracy to work around the other bureaucracy it created. Further, the government created another bureaucracy for red tape reduction, and 34 full-time equivalents were added to the bureaucracy to cut red tape. We submitted an Order Paper question asking what the government managed to cut for regulations. With 34 full-time employees, we ended up with 29 regulations repealed. Here are some of them. They repealed UN regulations regarding Sierra Leone. Wow, that is going to grow the economy. They cut regulations on corded window covering products. They cut regulations regarding board elections for the Wheat Board, years after the Wheat Board went away. This is what 34 full-time employees managed to do over a period of a couple of years to cut red tape. They changed regulations on the Wheat Board elections for the board of directors of a Wheat Board that does not exist anymore. How are we going to grow the economy if this is the best the government can do? We could get our energy products to market. We could build pipelines. We could get rid of the oil and gas emissions cap. The government will say that we do not have that anymore, but it has not come out and said that the cap is dead. We could get rid of the anti-Alberta tanker ban, Bill C-48. We have a private member’s bill before this House right now to eliminate the tanker ban, and Liberals are opposing it. It is perfectly fine to have Saudi Arabia oil come up the St. Lawrence, but we cannot have Alberta oil off the north B.C. coast. We could get rid of the costly industrial carbon tax and the unconstitutional “no new pipelines” bill, Bill C-69. If we want northern gateway to get built, which could add tens of billions of dollars of added growth to the economy, the government needs to get out of the way. It needs to kill Bill C-48, the anti-Alberta tanker ban. It needs to kill Bill C-69. It needs to get rid of the oil and gas emissions cap. We need to get rid of the government’s determination to wreck our economy.
