Official Hansard
Mr. Speaker, I am sharing my time with the member for Trois-Rivières. Let me start with a quote that says, for all my life, I have been a Liberal who believed in rights, equity and an independent foreign policy. Since 1982, the charter gave us something that transcended party...courts that could check governments, refugee protection as obligation, reconciliation as shared responsibility. “The story is being re-written. The language hasn’t changed. Ministers still invoke the Charter, the ‘rules-based order’.... But...what’s actually happening....” Asylum seekers are cut off before they reach a hearing, immigration detention is relocated into a federal prison, climate architecture is quietly dismantled, indigenous funding is eroded by inflation and international law is treated as optional when inconvenient. “The Liberal convention in Montreal confirmed the direction...security, defence, and major project....” Election reform was rejected. “Small-l liberals...are running out of political space. Their values haven’t disappeared. The party that used to carry them is just moving on.” Those are the comments of the Hon. Dr. Lloyd Axworthy, a former Liberal foreign affairs minister. I think he is reflecting the views of many progressives in Canada. After the tabling of the spring economic update, the headline of Althia Raj’s opinion piece in the Toronto Star, which names the Prime Minister, reads, “[He] has forgotten who helped get him elected”. Her article opens with this, “If one thing is clear from [the Prime Minister’s] economic update this week, it’s that he’s taking progressive voters for granted.” Indeed the months since the fall 2025 budget have confirmed a hard truth. The Prime Minister is governing like a centralizing conservative. The warning signs were already in the budget itself: public service cuts, reduced immigration targets and a growing emphasis on sovereignty spending including defence. The NDP flagged it as an austerity-leaning framework at a time when Canadians were struggling with unaffordability, unemployment and rising costs. Since then, the direction has only hardened. This government has overridden labour action, forcing striking workers back on the job, drawing fierce backlash from unions. It has pursued international trade and so-called nation-building legislation with Conservative support while sidelining indigenous rights and environmental standards. It has cut or constrained programs in areas like science, foreign aid, community support and public services, all while expanding military commitments and giving big corporations significant tax incentives and benefits as they continue to make record excessive profits. Day by day, it is becoming clearer that this is not progressive governance, but the consolidation of power, decision-making and priorities that tilt toward the market, megaprojects and militarization over people. It is a government that asks its working people to tighten their belts while opening the fiscal floodgates for defence and corporate-led growth. That is not balance; it is a political choice, and one that looks increasingly conservative by the day. The spring economic update saw health care spending cut as Canadians continue to struggle to find a doctor. The provinces and territories that did not sign on to the pharmacare deal that the NDP forced the Liberals to move forward on before the last election will likely not get an agreement. Meanwhile, mental health funding will not be renewed. The chronic underfunding for mental health and addictions continues. The highly touted dedicated funding for transit has been axed. Support for many critical services, including the Right Fit program for people with disabilities, will sunset. Canadians are worried about their future and are facing an everyday emergency to keep costs down. Instead of taking bold action that would actually make a difference in people’s lives, the Prime Minister is relying on the private sector to save us. In fact, the spring economic update ensures the private sector is the biggest beneficiary in this affordability crisis. With the creation of a $25‑billion sovereign wealth fund, Canadians will see public funds shuffled into privately owned projects that will make a few wealthy investors and CEOs richer than they already are, including big oil and gas companies that are poised to reap over $90 billion in profits this year alone. The Prime Minister’s approach is to take public tax dollars to subsidize private projects all while income inequality is at a record high. Canada’s wealth inequality report by Oxfam Canada cited that in 2025, there were approximately 89 billionaires in Canada. The report further noted that the richest 1% have a net worth of $7 million and above, and they hold nearly $3.9 trillion in wealth, almost as much as the bottom 80% combined. This is just plain wrong. The Prime Minister invoked the example of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and the banker PM is doing the mirror image of what Norway did. In contrast, Norway’s success is built on state-led development. It directed its resource revenues into a sovereign wealth fund that is now worth over $2 trillion U.S., investing in green energy and initiatives and securing Norway’s social safety net. Canada once had a similar opportunity with the state-owned Petro-Canada, but the Conservatives began the privatization process and the Liberals finished it off, costing Canadians a vital source of national wealth. Instead of filling the pockets of big oil and gas companies, the NDP wants to see a windfall tax on oil and gas companies that are projected to make over $90 billion in profits this year alone because of Trump’s illegal war in Iran, and use that money to grow the sovereign wealth fund to benefit Canadians. This past week the Prime Minister told Canadians at the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, “We don’t want to hear what people are against. We want to hear what they’re for. And if you’re for something, we will get behind [it].” He is delegitimizing the work of environmental groups and climate defenders who have been calling for green energy and infrastructure for decades. He is also threatening provinces and sidelining indigenous rights at the same time. Is it a wonder that the former minister of environment, the member for Laurier—Sainte-Marie, resigned from cabinet? Now 14 Liberal MPs have written a letter anonymously, raising their concerns. If the Prime Minister can make such a comment to the Canadian public, one can only imagine how his cabinet is treated behind closed doors if any of them dare to voice their opposition. The Prime Minister was the UN special envoy on climate action and finance, which championed integrating climate risks into mainstream financial decision-making. He called for faster decarbonization. In 2015, Canada played an important role in the signing of the 2015 Paris Agreement. We agreed to lower emissions by 45% by 2030, a key deadline and organizing principle for the climate strategy. To achieve this, the main pillars of Canada’s pan-Canadian framework for climate change included carbon pricing, an EV mandate, an emissions cap on the oil sands and clean energy growth. The consumer industrial carbon pricing was to reach $170 per tonne by 2030. The EV mandate was to see that 60% of vehicle sales were EVs by 2030 and 100% by 2025. The emissions cap on the oil sands was to be 45%. Those targets have all been cancelled or delayed by a decade. Clean energy growth was watered down. Deadlines were pushed back. Instead of faster decarbonization, the Prime Minister signed a new agreement with Danielle Smith to build a new pipeline that would emit 160 megatonnes of carbon dioxide, 10 times more emissions than with its carbon capture project. Canada will not meet its climate goals by 2030. The Canadian Climate Institute is saying Canada will not get to net zero by 2050. The Prime Minister has abandoned climate, plain and simple, and what did we get for that? It was not unity but a referendum for Alberta to separate from Canada. Moreover, Canada is on a path to significantly increase defence spending to 5% of GDP. We have barely had public debate about this, nor was this talked about during the election. National security matters, but so does economic security. At the very same time as we are considering major increases in defence spending, we are also hearing about fiscal restraint, about the need to limit spending in other areas. Let us be clear. When the government makes these choices, it falls hardest on people who rely on affordable housing, on the health care system, on income supports, on child care, on mental health and on accessible public services. It falls on middle-income and low-income Canadians. It falls on renters and on young people trying to get ahead. In other words, without careful and deliberate policy design, those trade-offs can deepen inequality. We know policy choices can make a difference in people’s lives. This is what the Prime Minister is doing. He is trading off the needs of Canadians for the oil and gas companies, which are already making billions and billions in profits.
