My Speech Against Budget 2024
Plus, I talk about how the NDP-Liberals new job killing tax that will drive doctors as well as entrepreneurs out of Canada, testifying at a parliamentary committee, and more.
MPs debated this past week the NDP-Liberal's inflationary budget (Bill C-69) and their spending plans. On Tuesday, this past week we debated the contents of the omnibus budget with its hundreds of pages of legislative changes. I put forward a positive series of proposals summarizing what a conservative government would do on the carbon tax, housing and fixing the federal budget. I have pasted the transcript below.
The following is a transcript of my speech:
I want to start by thanking the residents and constituents of my riding for again allowing me the opportunity to represent them in the House. We are now several years into this particular Parliament, but we all know that it is a great honour to be sent here to represent them. We speak on their behalf. We do not just speak for ourselves.
In preparation for speaking today, I did go through the many emails and phone notes I have written to myself from calls with constituents, people who have told me about the misery they are suffering through with the NDP-Liberal government's policies and Bill C-69 specifically, which is basically an encapsulation of many years of policy-making by the government that has led to the doubling of mortgage down payments and the doubling of rent.
I speak as a renter. My rent has gone up significantly, and I do not fault my landlord. He has no choice, because interest rates have much more than doubled. When an interest rate goes from 25 basis points or 50 basis points to 4.75%, that is a multifold increase. That is not a doubling; it is not a 4.5% increase. We are talking about a manifold increase, like an 800% increase in some cases, on the interest people are paying on the total amount of their loan. I do not fault them.
We have seen the price of homes double since the Liberal government took over. We have seen the price of many goods go up significantly. It is the number one issue in my riding, the cost of living. It hits people in the grocery stores when they see it. It hits them at the pump when they go to refill their trucks or vehicles that they use to get their families around my riding. My riding is one of the bigger ones in Canada. Thankfully, the electoral boundaries commission is drastically shrinking it, by 40%. That will make it much easier for me to get back to everybody on time, those who make phone calls and send emails and those few who still send letters.
I often get asked the question, “What would Conservatives do?” I have taken the time to summarize a few things that, for me, are the highlights of what Conservatives would do. We have our main points that we make, and all parties do this. I often hear the NDP-Liberals accuse Conservatives throughout Canada of sloganeering. We are just making it simple for people to understand. There are vast amounts of information online, on YouTube, on social media. I trust Canadians to go through those things. If they are interested and curious about what Conservatives are proposing, there is an entire docuseries that, for example, the member for Carleton, the leader of His Majesty's opposition, has made, “Debtonation.” I highly recommend it. Those who are interested should go check it out.
I will start with “pay as you go”. It is a very simple idea. It has been time-tested. It has worked. In the U.S. Congress, between 1998 and 2002, when it was introduced, it basically said that for every new dollar of government spending, the current government had to find a dollar of cuts in current government programs or propose one dollar of new taxation to cover this cost. In the span of those four years, they were able to balance the budget of the United States government. That is a government that runs trillion-dollar deficits at this point.
Our national debt is in the trillions, but we do not run trillion-dollar deficits yet. I do not want to suggest anything. I am sure the Liberal government, if given half the opportunity, would reach that level. After all, as I remember it, there was a certain Prime Minister who promised to run small deficits, less than $10 billion for three years, and that never happened. The Prime Minister has run multi-billion dollar deficits ever since he was elected to office, and it has never stopped. In fact, none of the budgets that the Liberals have tabled since then have shown a balanced budget.
“Pay as you go” is a proposal from the Conservatives to adopt that would ensure that we could fix the federal budget. Fixing the federal budget would lead to lower interest rates. Lower interest rates would lead to lower housing costs and lower rents and, at the very minimum, stop this massive inflationary increase in the costs of everything.
It would make it easier for small businesses, like those of fishermen, giving them an opportunity to actually be able to afford new equipment. It would give them an opportunity to plan for their retirement and have the certainty that the equipment, goods, boats and everything else they use to run their business would have the same value at the end of the day, so they could retire with dignity.
The second thing is the building homes not bureaucracy act, which this House voted on. I find it interesting that one of the NDP members who spoke was trying to give a hard time to one of our members, the member for Battlefords—Lloydminster, saying that we had not proposed anything on housing. We proposed legislation on housing, legislation that they voted against, in fact. The NDP members voted with their coalition partners in the Liberal Party.
There is a proposal, the building homes not bureaucracy act. It went very specifically to the heart of what is going on in our country, which is that we have people at the very local level, in the planning departments of different cities, who are making it more difficult to increase density and, as is is in my community, to build more greenfield housing of single-family detached housing and low-rises. Calgary has generally done a really good job of building housing that is necessary, but so has the city of Edmonton.
As Calgarians, we do not often praise the city of Edmonton, but I used to live in Edmonton, and if I look at its housing costs over the last nine years, it probably has the smallest increases of any major metropolitan region. That is because, locally, they have decided to prioritize pricing and make sure that pricing stays low and affordable, so people can afford the homes that they want to live in, and there are different types of housing for different people to make sure they have the choices they need at different stages in their lives.
However, the building homes not bureaucracy act had provisions in it to ensure that we divested ourselves from federal government properties that are no longer necessary, to ensure that we can pass them over to developers to encourage them to build more housing and more development around TUCs, and also to cut CMHC's bonuses. This is the housing agency that is supposed to ensure we build sufficient amounts of housing. I have long been a critic of the CMHC. It does not matter which CEO has been there. It has completely failed in its mandate, so at minimum we should be cutting these bonuses, the performance base or whatever euphemism we want to use for the bonuses and the extra pay they are giving themselves when they are failing. We should not reward failure.
The government needs to cancel the carbon tax. It is very simple: Axe the tax. The carbon tax is adding on to the misery of all Canadians. We can see it in our grocery stores with the prices, but if we tax the farmer who makes the food, and we tax the shipper who takes the food to the producer who adds second-level value, and then they take it to the grocery store, all of those costs are being passed on through the entire system, and we have higher costs at the end of the day. That is simply how math works, and axing the tax is the solution.
What would we do to replace the tax? We are Conservatives. Generally, we do not like taxes. We would not replace it with any other tax. There are a lot of technological changes that we could do. There are a lot of things that we could do on the grid side in Canada to make sure we have a national grid, or something closer to a national grid, where there would be a better flow of electrical power between the provinces. We can do that through encouragement. We do not need to mandate things.
I watched the Minister of Environment mandate things, such as forcing Calgary Co-op, the grocery store of my choice, with 400,000 members in Calgary, almost a third of the city, to abandon its completely compostable bags. They are completely compostable in the city-owned compostable system, and the government is saying that they have single-use plastic in them. It is a compostable bag. Not even the ink is made of plastic. It is also compostable, but an insistence that Ottawa knows best is why we see so much division in this country and so few Liberal provincial governments left. There are so few of them left in existence.
I know many members wait for this, but I always have a Yiddish proverb. I have a great love for that language, and when a wise man and a fool are debating or arguing, there are two fools debating. That is what I feel while watching the Liberal cabinet when it has these disagreements about whose fault it is that there is a massive increase in mortgages and massive increase in housing prices and rentals. They seem to always point their fingers at somebody else. It is never their fault when things go wrong. It is always someone else's. It is as if they've not been in power for nine years.
The government members often, during question period especially, say that they will find the person who is responsible for this. They love labelling small business owners as too rich, with too much for their retirements, while the Liberals basically have golden-plated defined benefit plans that are afforded to them by the taxpayer. They should stop accusing those who create richness in our country and who contribute to the hiring in all of our communities. It is often that the government members are always looking for someone else to blame. It is the cabinet. It is just that person. I have not found a wise man among them yet, but I have found those fools who continuously blame Canadians for every single one of their mistakes.
As such, of course, I am going to be voting against Bill C-69. I have moved several amendments to it as well. It is also a matter of confidence, so I will also remind my constituents back home that on these types of matters, I have zero confidence in the NDP-Liberal government and this coalition, and we must vote this legislation down.
We have to have a carbon tax election, so let us axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
Watch my speech on the NDP-Liberals inflationary budget and the reasons why I will be voting against:
"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." That quote from the late Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, perfectly sums up the same problem the NDP-Liberal government created. They have run out of Canadian taxpayer monies. As a result, they have implemented another job-killing tax on healthcare workers, builders, entrepreneurs, and farmers—also known as the capital gains tax increase. The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association calculated that for the riding of Calgary Shepard it could lead to the loss of 1,912 jobs. That’s just in one riding in Canada.
This is a short-sighted attempt to pay off the deficit they have created. At their current pace of spending, their budget indicates a total spend over 5 years of $2.8 trillion dollars. Interest on the national debt will rise from $26.6 billion in the last full year of the Harper government to today at $54.1 billion this coming year and topping out at $64.3 billion in five years if their interest rate calculations are correct. Interest payments now and through the five years will be more than Ottawa sends to the provinces for healthcare. Debt interest payments of $64 billion is twice what we spend on Canada’s national defense. There is a lot going wrong on the budget side and the NDP-Liberals are looking to more tax-and-spend.
Instead of governing through common sense policies, such as spending less than the revenue than you take in, the NDP-Liberals will tax more of the retirements of doctors, the profit of the risk taken by entrepreneurs and more of the estates of loved ones who are property rich but cash poor. Every year since this NDP-Liberal government came into power, the U.S. has received more investment from Canada than Canada has from America. Since 2019, Canada's GDP per capita has been down by 2%, while America's GDP per capita has increased by 8%. Moreover, when you divide the amount of business investment by the number of workers in the country, Canadian workers got 58 cents in investments for every dollar a U.S. worker got in 2023. Mind you, this was before the prime minister implemented this new job, killing tax increase. The result of this policy could likely see Canada lose top talent, businesses, investment, and doctors to our neighbors down south. This is simply NDP-Liberal economic vandalism. Canada cannot afford to lose more healthcare workers as we experience shortages across the country. To fix what the NDP-Liberal Government broke, Canada needs a new government to overhaul the system to make taxes low, simple, and fair for all Canadians. I voted against job-killing capital gains tax increase.
Conservatives oppose the job-killing Trudeau tax hike on homes, health care, farmers, and small businesses. Here's why:
I testified at the Procedure and House Affairs parliamentary committee on Thursday to about being a target of a China-based state-sponsored cyber attack. It was a bit strange as I am usually the one questioning witnesses during committee. To recap, I was targeted by a hacking group called APT31, known by its full name as Advanced Persistent Threat 31, for something called pixel reconnaissance. It is the first stage in what would be a progressively more advanced series of hacking attacks. The hacking attack thankfully failed. What was infuriating about this incident is that I was not informed of the attack until a couple of months ago. The group of parliamentarians affected was not told by the Canadian government and I and 17 other parliamentarians learned from the Federal Bureau of Investigations we had been targeted. Yes, that FBI, an American national security agency. As of this writing I have yet to received any briefings from Canadian agencies or contact from them. While testifying, I was asked if there were any recommendations to Canada's intelligence agencies in how they deal with parliamentarians who face threats of foreign interference. I responded by saying that Canada's intelligence agencies need to have a positive requirement in informing parliamentarians whether we are a target or are receiving threats. This has already impacted how I work, so our intelligence agencies must inform me if I am a target so that I can take proactive steps in the conduct of my parliamentary work. Lastly, I continue to believe that the Canadian government has a moral and ethical responsibility to inform parliamentarians targeted by foreign states for foreign interference and digital hacking attacks. So far they have failed in this duty.
Meeting the Philippine Ambassador to Canada, Maria Andrelita Austria, at the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations on Monday. The Philippines is an important trading partner for Canada and one of the few with which we have a healthy trade surplus, meaning we sell them more goods and services than they sell to us. In 2022, the most profitable goods Canada exported to the Philippines included sawn wood ($248M), pork meat ($199M), and wheat ($120M). There is a lot of opportunity to expand this trading relationship and away from China to ensure our farmers, manufacturers and fabricators have markets to export.
Toured Jacob Carter, a Calgary Shepard resident, in Parliament this past week. Jacob had the opportunity to tour the parliamentary precinct and attend Question Period, where we, the Conservative opposition, question the government on its record. If you are a resident of Calgary Shepard visiting Ottawa and would like a tour of Parliament, contact my office at Tom.Kmiec@parl.gc.ca, and they will be happy to make arrangements for you.
