Greg McLean
Calgary Centre, Alberta · Conservative · Canada
“Mr. Speaker, today we honour the life and legacy of Philip Roderick MacAulay, a long-time president of the Royal Canadian Legion Calgary No. 1 Branch, who passed away on June 11.”
“Mr. Speaker, last week, Calgary's Royal Canadian Legion Branch No. 1 hosted and was addressed by the leader of the Conservative Party on the importance of building a strong Alberta within a united Canada. It was exactly the right place for that message.”
“Mr. Speaker, it is great to be here, and I am thankful this debate is allowed to continue. I am surprised that it has to go through this last half hour of questions for the minister , but it is an interesting bill we are debating here today.”
“Mr. Speaker, I am going to ask the member if she can just tell us what the $1.7 billion would accomplish, because we have already thrown a lot of money at the situation. We have empty condos now that do not suit the market in Toronto.”
“Mr. Speaker, the minister knows this because I met him when he first got elected here on the floor of the House of Commons, and when he was named the housing minister, I told him that the first thing he had to do was to get rid of the people who have led us into this trap in the first place.”
“Mr. Speaker, I want to ask my friend from Quebec a question about government spending, because an additional $1.7 billion is to be spent on housing across the country. Quebec households are paying the cost of interest on both the federal and provincial deficits.”
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“imported 39 billion dollars' worth of natural gas last year. How much of that was from Canada? It is another big fat zero because we have not been prepared. We have not done anything for our resource development for the last 10 years. I should say that I am splitting my time today with a good friend of mine, the member of Parliament for Edmonton Manning . On that, I will yield the floor, with thanks.”
“It did not even put it on the horizon, yet I and many of my colleagues have written to the government to ask it to please include that and make sure the Government of the United Kingdom pays attention to this because it matters to our constituents. There are a bunch of other issues, but I am going to talk about something else here. I ask members to think about the United Kingdom's trade in energy products. I can tell members right now that, in 2024, the U.K. imported $19.5 billion of foreign oil from all kinds of countries, mostly Norway and the United States, all the way across the Atlantic to the United States. How much did it import from Canada? That is a big fat zero. Way to go. That is great negotiation and great availability of our product to our partners around the world. It is likewise with natural gas. The U.K.”
“United Kingdom pensioners are not treated the same way in the United States. Why not? It is because Canada seems to have weaker negotiators. I am going to ask the government about this again. I hear members pumping the tires of the Prime Minister , saying he is such a great negotiator and the man of the hour. Well, this seemed like a pretty easy asset to get over the line here, and he did not even accomplish that. This is about fairness for these pensioners. They have earned this after spending their entire working lives in the United Kingdom. They then emigrate to Canada, and they do not get to collect the cost of living increases that every one of their compatriots around the world, as well as those in the U.K., get as a result. This is a shame and something that the government clearly missed.”
“It is not good enough because there is a protective measure in place. The United Kingdom has to protect their industry at the expense of free and fair trading nations around the world, which we think includes Canada. This is one of the opportunities that the government has missed. I do not know what their negotiators got in return for leaving that off, but one of the other issues that my constituents have repetitively told me about is pensions. There are a number of U.K. citizens in Canada, and 100,000 U.K. citizens draw pensions from the U.K. For some reason, pensioners in Canada do not get their cost of living adjustments, like they do in most other countries around the world. It is prejudicial to Canadians who got their pension from the U.K. and then moved to Canada.”
“We have about 40 million people in Canada, compared to about 65 million in the U.K, yet the U.K. is exporting parts of a smaller cattle herd for our consumption in Canada, and the U.K. does not trade with Canadian cattle. Is something wrong with Canadian cattle? There is nothing wrong scientifically. We trade cattle with every other country in the CPTPP, so this something that should have been negotiated as part of the CPTPP agreement with the U.K. I will also give some statistics as to pork. Canada's pork herd, at any one point in time, is about 13.9 million head. The U.K. has about 4.7 million head, yet it does not accept Canadian pork. Is the U.K. going to tell Japan, Korea, China and every other jurisdiction that Canada trades with, about the quality of Canadian pork and why it is not good enough for U.K. consumers?”
“I ask because there are a whole bunch of holes here that should have been filled and a bunch of industries across Canada asking why we do not have free and fair trade with the United Kingdom in certain key industries. One of those, of course, is in Alberta, where I am from, and that is the cattle industry. The cattle industry has asked continuously for the cancellation of the trade continuity agreement because it puts Canadian cattle producers at a disadvantage to U.K. cattle producers. For relevance, as far as the size of the cattle industry goes, Canada has a cattle herd of about 11 and a half million cattle and the U.K. has a cattle herd of about nine and a half million cattle, yet the U.K. exports cattle to Canada. Does that make sense? Canada's population is much lower than the U.K. population.”
“The regulatory system here is more burdensome and more expensive now than the actual cost of the capital projects to invest in Canada. That has to change, and we know that. (1245) Getting back to the U.K., if I may, we are acquiescing to the United Kingdom coming here. It is a change from the trade continuity agreement to this new agreement, which we have with several other countries around the world, a comprehensive progressive agreement on trans-Pacific partnerships. That is important, but there were also negotiations. I do not know who does the government's negotiations. The government keeps bragging about the great Prime Minister and how he has great relationships with the United Kingdom, but what did we get from that trade negotiation?”
“Now, this is an important part, but Canada is so far behind as far as flowing money out. It is a net creditor to the United Kingdom, as far as money that has flown out of Canada towards safer investment jurisdictions around the world. The United Kingdom is one of those jurisdictions where Canadian dollars continue to find better prospects for investments around the world than they do in Canada. That is a fault of the government's policies. There are no good returns here. Everything the government participates in means it has to backstop it in order for somebody to put a buck in in Canada. It is a government that has to have friends in order to get investment into the country because the rules do not matter anymore with the government's manner of running the Canadian economy.”
“This is not because the U.S. dollar is doing well; it is actually doing poorly compared to most other currencies around the world. The Bank of Canada is acquiring U.S. dollars because it is manipulating Canada's currency. That is not supposed to be the goal, but I do not know the other goal. I was a former portfolio manager. The bank is buying dollars that are going down. It is buying U.S. dollars as they decline, which means it is failing as far as the value equation goes. There is another objective there, and the rest of the world knows that. The rest of the world is lightening up on the U.S. dollar purchases, and all their currencies are going up as a result. That is an aside. Let me get back to the trade agreement. One of the things we have in Canada, thinking about a trade agreement, is foreign direct investment.”
“The United Kingdom banking system has a long history with gold, including things like the gold fix. There were five banks around the world, five individual private banks, that more or less set the price of gold for over a century. Now that is shared somewhat with the United States, but gold is on a roll here. Gold is at almost $7,000 Canadian today as it trades, because it is in demand around the world. As governments like Canada's current government debase their currencies with larger and larger deficits, precious metals like gold become more valuable. We are exporting that in spades. Do members know what central bank around the world does not hold gold? It is Canada's central bank. The Bank of Canada holds no gold. It holds a bunch of U.S. dollars. It has increased its U.S. dollar sales by $60 billion already this year.”
“We are running such high deficits that the Canadian dollar will be worth less as far as the merchandise that trades around the world. That is an important factor. We can measure these things by deflated dollars, as the government is deflating dollars for all Canadians, and deflated dollars mean less trade at the end of the day. We have to get ahead of what the government actually means, as opposed to just putting a flag up on the wall about doubling trade to non-U.S. partners. Let us look at the trade we actually perform, trade actually exported from Canada to the U.K. The bulk of it is metals, and the biggest metal that we trade with the United Kingdom is gold. Canada produces a lot of gold and ships it. The U.K. is acquiring that gold. The U.K. is one of the world reserves where countries from around the world store their gold.”
“split from the European Union, we had the trade continuity agreement with the U.K., which has governed our trade between Canada and the United Kingdom since that point in time. Now, interestingly, if we go back 10 years, and I know the government always talks about doubling trade with other partners around the world, except the U.S., over the next 10 years, we will note that, in the last 10 years, inflation has gone up 30%. As much as it is a big flag that the Liberals have put on the wall, saying we are going to double our trade with people outside the United States, is that double in Canadian dollars? How much is inflation going to continue to increase so that doubling actually amounts to about the same volume of trade?”
“Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today on behalf of the residents of Calgary Centre to discuss this very important bill to acquiesce to the U.K. and Canada agreeing to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership. The U.K. is coming into this family of trading partners around the world, and we are, of course, at the lead. The Conservative Party of Canada, the party of free and fair trade around the world, has upheld that in so many ways. Part of free and fair trade, of course, is fair trade for Canadians. Let us discuss some of that in the House today. Before I do that, let us talk about what existed before the acquiescence to this new trade agreement with the United Kingdom. After the U.K.”
“We need to debate this very clearly. I hope the government takes this on and makes it an even better bill. (Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)”
“I am here to correct that today by putting it on the page and making sure that we debate in the House of Commons how we can attain more efficiency in our energy production in Canada and reduce our emissions for that power that is already being produced. With waste heat to power, an industrial process, we lose 30% to 50% of the heat in the process. Having an investment tax credit to capture that heat would capture about 30% of what is lost and effectively give more power to Canadians with no new emissions, which is the main thing here. It would be a strict win all the way along. The fact that it has not been included, at this point in time, in the government's approach to investment tax credits is purely because most of these industrial processes involve hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are a part of our present and a part of our future.”
“Bill C-269. Introduction and first reading moved for leave to introduce Bill C-269, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act (heat recovery tax credit) . He said: Mr. Speaker, I am introducing a bill today that would fill an oversight that the government has left open in its latest investment tax credits for clean energy production and also for emissions reduction. We have to take the two hand in hand. Waste heat to power is the most important method we have to make sure we have emissions-free power coming forward. It is low-hanging fruit, quite frankly, and the fact that it has been missed by the government in its investment tax credits is a shame.”
“It is a vast fraud, and I would like the government to explain how much it has lost through Export Development Canada in this electrification fiasco.”
“Mr. Speaker, I heard my colleague on the other side say “responsible risk-taking”. Well, this was not responsible at all. It pushed a whole bunch of money into their friends' pockets along the way. However, I am going to bring up one thing in particular. Export Development Canada will guarantee BMO loans to companies working to lower emissions. The Bank of Montreal, BMO Capital Markets, threw a whole bunch of money behind these companies, with zero risk. This is what is known as privatizing profits and publicizing, or making public, all the losses that these companies have, so profits are going to their friends and profits are going to the insiders, and the people bearing the cost at the end of the day are, of course, Canadian taxpayers. I am asking the government again. EDC, Export Development Canada, funded all of this mess.”
“The third leg of that stool is that the Government of Canada gave an unwritten and unquantified guarantee to the lenders to Lion through Export Development. I have asked, through an Order Paper question, to find out how much Export Development has underwritten lenders like BMO Capital Markets, which provided part of the pump up on this in its reports to get this over the line. This has cost Canadians an enormous amount of money. We need to find out how much it is. Will the government please indicate how much it has lost on this—”
“In the process of raising half a billion dollars on public markets that benefited a whole bunch of insiders, including people who are well-connected with the Liberal government, they cashed in their own shares. The president of Lion, Marc Bédard, took out $33 million and put it in his pocket before it went bankrupt. This is, like I say, a pump and dump financial arrangement. Investors became very poor in the process and all the management became very rich. The problem here is with the Government of Canada, because it assisted in this by giving $50 million to this fraud from the strategic innovation fund. It gave $480 million to arrange these vehicles through the Canada Infrastructure Bank.”
“The buses had to be bought in Quebec, so 1,200 of those were bought. After going through more than half a billion dollars of investor funds, Lion Electric entered into CCAA protection last year. This was enough of a failed vehicle electrification experiment that the Government of Quebec scrapped its whole experiment. This is an indication that it was bad policy, but here is where the Government of Canada was involved in that whole scam. The problem with it is that it is actually a financial crime called a pump and dump. Some promoters in the financial industry got a hold of this flavour of the day and that the Government of Canada was in on the green technology. They got a hold of a marginal production company in Quebec.”
“Nevertheless, if we talk to the people who were actually involved in arranging these vehicles, people like Andrew Jones, they say that the problem with these buses was that an electric bus costs triple what it would be for a diesel equivalent for insurance, costs a whole bunch more in maintenance and is not worth it at the end of the day. More costs were going to be visited upon society, and not just for the purchase price, which went from $175,000 per vehicle to $230,000 per vehicle just because they cost so much more than the vehicles they were replacing. The government could subsidize the initial part of it, but it did not subsidize anything further. The Government of Quebec lost a significant amount of money, but being the local champion is, of course, the only reason Lion Electric received the contract.”
“Mr. Speaker, in September 2025, the Government of Quebec ordered the removal of 1,200 so-called zero-emission buses from Quebec roads. These were school buses, and it was because one had caught fire. The company involved was a local champion called Lion Electric. It was the poster child, if we will, of a government program that the Government of Quebec said it needed a local company for to provide the electric buses to transition its bus fleet from diesel to electric. It was a failed experiment, a rushed transition, but it was something that cost the Government of Quebec over $230 million. This past spring, the Government of Quebec undid that requirement because of the failed experiment.”
“Mr. Speaker, my colleague spoke a lot about the problems with the budgeting for the train, and that is the capital budget alone. I wonder if he could educate us a bit as well about the subsidy the government would have to give, on an ongoing annual basis, in order to run that train, and how much it would cost per Canadian or per rider in order to have a high-speed train with no passengers on it.”
“Madam Speaker, many of my colleagues on this side of the House know that I used to be the policy adviser to the minister of transport back in the early 1990s. We were looking at this project at that point in time, and it was too expensive then. It was massively expensive, and now, of course, the country is awash in debt. When we have bills to pay, we have to pay our bills first, rather than getting the bright, shiny, new toy on the horizon. We have to make sure that we take—”
“Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for mentioning my mother and her hometown, Jonquière. My mother says hi to him. Sometimes she watches what is happening in the House. Alberta's oil and gas sector is important for the country. It is Canada's most important sector, and it is important for exporting oil overseas via the new pipeline that will run from Alberta to Vancouver. It is important for everyone. It is important for tax revenues and our standard of living, but it is also Canada's most internationally competitive sector. We produce oil here that costs more than $40 a barrel, but the oil produced in the Middle East costs $6 a barrel. We are competitive here, it is—”
“Every level of government has to pay attention to it and look at what they are getting at the end of the day. There are many benefits that happened in that, which were things the Government of Canada had to accomplish anyway.”
“Madam Speaker, I thought we were limited to one question, but I get to answer two questions. I hope we get some time for that. The first one is on the memorandum of understanding between the Government of Alberta and the executive here in Parliament. I would submit to all Canadians, and all Albertans in particular, that they should read that document, because it is a document full of false starts. It is full of, “A is a prerequisite to B, and B is a prerequisite to A.” They have already admitted this week that their April 1 deadline on many parts is unworkable. Talk to the companies that have to invest in that. They are saying this is uninvestable. When we have a memorandum of understanding that every private sector organization says does not work, we have to pay attention to that.”
“It had prorogued the House, and the government issued warrants, which is what they are called, to pay for unauthorized work with one of their favourite companies, AtkinsRéalis, which used to be SNC Lavalin, which was awash in corruption. Members will recall that very well, I am certain. Something this country has to be ahead of is the fact that there is a lot of money going into hands behind Canadians' backs that has nothing to do with the House of Commons. This is something we have to get ahead of. We are a democracy. Let us uphold our democratic country here. Let us build a stronger Canada. Let us make sure we expose this budget and understand it so that Canadians can have the transparency they require.”
“It is our job to legislate here, and I will stand with my colleagues and make sure the government does not walk over our rights in the House. There is one other thing I want to talk about, because it is important: the high-speed rail. We are country awash in debt. I think I pointed that out several times in the House. One of the reasons I ran here was to get our fiscal house back in order, and for us to actually plan on spending perhaps $90 billion on a new train that would serve a small geographic portion of this country at this point in time is a stretch. It is a gross stretch, but I will also point out that the start of the spending on this happened while the government was not even here.”
“As a matter of fact, I put a bill forward in the House of Commons five years ago that said that is exactly what we should do because we are losing technology and businesses to the United States. We needed to do this a long time ago, but why on earth would the government pass a budget saying it was not going to do that and then sign a document with one of the provincial governments in Canada, the Government of Alberta, saying it is going to do exactly that? It is no wonder the Liberal Party's own members do not trust the executive on the other side, and I would ask those backbenchers on the other side who do not support this, and half of them on the other side do not support this, why they are going to continue to push forward to give this executive even more power so it does not have to bring these kinds of issues to the House of Commons.”
“The government must get on to the real issues that should be addressed in the budget. I am going to address a few other things here. One of the issues that we talk about is the memorandum of understanding that happened between the government and the Government of Alberta, the province where I live. The interesting thing is in the budget itself. I am going to read directly from the budget, which was passed on November 17 in the House. The budget says, of carbon capture, utilization and storage, “Eligible uses include dedicated geological storage and storage in concrete, but not enhanced oil recovery”. Ten days later, the government had a memorandum of understanding with the Government of Alberta that said it was going to extend federal investment tax credits and other policy supports to encourage enhanced oil recovery. I am all for that.”
“I will contradict my colleague on the other side who said earlier that there is lots of investment coming into Canada. The only investment coming into Canada currently is government spending, which is more or less putting us deeper and deeper into debt. We are billions upon billions of dollars behind as far as investments in Canada go. Our pension plans are investing elsewhere. Everybody is investing elsewhere, because they do not see the path forward in Canada at this point in time. This is something we need to change, and if the government wants to change it, my colleagues and I will be behind them all the way making sure we make changes to things, like the Impact Assessment Act and like the tanker moratorium on the west coast, that would actually encourage us to have an economy that works in this country again.”
“(1105) That is what the government is doing here with the budget implementation act. The estimates will confirm what we are going to let it spend. However, it is Parliament that decides that, and the government cannot get around the laws of Canada or Parliament in that respect. It reminds me of Bill C-5 . Members will recall Bill C-5. It was the Building Canada Act that happened in the summer, and we passed it subject to Conservative Party changes at committee that effectively said we are putting a whole bunch of borders around what the government can exempt itself from here, because we are still a country governed by laws. Those laws are important, of course. People expect those laws to continue. If we are not going to be a country of laws, we have lost something very important, and investors around the world see that.”
“We want executive power in ourselves and not to have to answer to this House of Parliament.” We know there are 343 members in the House, and I have no idea why half of them on the other side want to make themselves irrelevant. If they want to make themselves irrelevant as a party, I would say to the Liberal Party, do not run, because we have a country to run here. This is Parliament. If they think Parliament is just the executive, I would submit that they are wrong. Democracy requires that we have three stools to democracy. That includes an independent judiciary; a legislature, which we are here; and an executive. We empower that executive to get things done, but members of the executive have to bring all kinds of issues to the House to get the authority to act, including to spend money.”
“The exemptions that the government members were seeking were that “Subject to subsections (3) and (7), a minister may, by order, for a specified validity period of not more than three years and on any terms that the minister considers appropriate, exempt an entity from the application of (a) a provision of an Act of Parliament,” except the Criminal Code, “if the minister is responsible for the Act”. What the Liberals are doing here is trying to say, “All those laws that are passed that are part of the law of Canada, part of the regulations, we get to go around them. We do not care what they say. We want an exemption from all those laws because we think Parliament is a bit of a hurdle we have to get over.”
“I know some of my colleagues in the financial services industry have probably seen them in the way regulators look at bringing in new financial products, but the government wanted exemptions from everything. Effectively we call them King Henry VIII laws. This is what the finance committee of the House of Commons had to deal with. The Conservatives brought forward some part-way solutions on this in order to get this over the line in a way that did not more or less emasculate Parliament.”
“I remember when the previous prime minister talked about piling on debt by the Government of Canada so that Canadians would not have to pile on that debt themselves. Canadians are the highest personally indebted people in the G7. It is double in Canada. We have a very indebted federal government and indebted provincial governments, but very indebted consumers as well. Therefore, when things happen badly, they are going to happen very badly as this debt spiral unfolds. I am going to switch now to some of the things that we have talked about. The government mistakenly put forward in the budget implementation act what it calls “regulatory sandboxes”. I am going to talk about these regulatory sandboxes because many of us have dealt with them before.”
“My colleagues on the other side will say, “We still have a AAA credit rating.” I would ask them if that is because they have fooled the financiers who are providing the rating, like they do in the budget documents they provide where they say that Canadians' pensions and the Quebec pension plan are actually part of the dollars they use as collateral against the debt. They are not. They are Canadians' pensions and they should not be putting those at risk, or at any conception of risk, in the marketplace. That would be a fundamental mistake. Take it out of there, and they have the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in almost the entire world, save for one or two countries. Canadians are also personally in debt.”
“We have central bankers writing cheques at this point in time thinking there is no problem and just pushing out the payments for what we are doing today onto future generations. Well, there is a problem. That problem is already being witnessed across the country in higher inflation, in higher food costs, in higher housing costs and in higher costs for Canadians in general, which are leaving a generation of people behind who will need to catch up to make sure they have great futures, not more expensive futures but futures where they can build families, have housing and feed their families really well. However, we are a country awash in debt and not just at the federal level. We look at the $1.3 trillion in debt that the country has right now, and it is going to continue to get higher.”
“Madam Speaker, it is my first time speaking to this budget, so I am happy to rise in the House today. The first thing I would like to deal with, and all the time, of course, is the balance that we are talking about here. This budget projects a balance of $78.3 billion, and that was delivered not so long ago. Since then, we have accumulated billions of dollars more in program spending that the government did not foresee when it initially brought the deficit out at $78.3 billion, and the budget was significantly late. I know my colleagues will find me to be a broken record on that, but the ability to plan and spend requires having some focus, not just a blank cheque. There is no foresight. There is no planning. Now, we are dealing with parts of the budget and spending money as if we have money when, in fact, we do not as a country.”
“Mr. Speaker, I do not know how much proof they need in order to see that this is actually not working—that money is going off the table and nothing is being accomplished. The president of Lion Electric, Marc Bédard, sold $33 million of his shares prior to its bankruptcy. In what is known as a “pump and dump” stock play, the Liberal government acted as the pump for millions of taxpayer dollars. Mr. Bédard and his friends then orchestrated the dump, and they walked away with millions of dollars. The former minister did not include a share lock-up with the grants. This is at least gross incompetence. It is a financial crime, the victims of which are Canadian taxpayers. Will any minister finally do the right thing and call in the RCMP?”
“Mr. Speaker, yesterday, at the finance committee, the president of the Canada Infrastructure Bank stated that none of the funds loaned to electric bus makers were written off. Despite the bankruptcy of Lion Electric, which had at least $470 million allocated to it, the strategic innovation fund also committed $50 million to Lion. That is a writeoff. Export Development will not disclose how much it lost. Lion Electric was always a funding scheme that enabled insiders to profit from the government's transition narrative. Will the responsible minister provide some transparency and show taxpayers how much this scam has cost them?”
“Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. During question period today, the Secretary of State for Labour referenced Canada's having the best economy in the G7, but every economic institute says exactly the opposite, including the Bank of Canada, so I would ask—”
“Mr. Speaker, I must apologize, as I did not fully understand the question from my Bloc Québécois colleague. I think he asked what we intend to do about the increase in household debt, which is significant. For the moment, I think it is important to give more money to people who need it to feed themselves. However, we also need to fix the federal government's funding system, which is causing inflation, and food inflation in particular. That is impacting Canadians. These two issues go hand in hand, and it is important to address them together.”
“However, what I noted in my speech is that we need to address the underlying cause of why this is happening, and to get ahead of it, because otherwise we are going to be in a constant cycle of just putting more cheques out, putting more fuel on the inflationary fire and causing more problems down the road.”
“Mr. Speaker, that is an important question. Working in the House, getting things done for Canadians, is important. The bill would ease food costs for a portion of Canadians. Of course we are going to get behind that, because we see the policies that have driven up those costs. We need to make sure we address that. People's ability to eat is a very important part of what we have to address. We agreed to one day of debate. We will be moving this forward, as my House leader indicated earlier. This is about a constructive Parliament and getting good things done for Canadians.”
“Mr. Speaker, my colleague is right. The government is targeting 12 million Canadians here with more rebates going out the door. The issue, of course, is that the government's role is to take taxes in through a whole bunch of forms, including hidden taxes, and then redistribute them to people they think deserve that money. The question is, can we not just have a better economy if we do not pull those taxes out in the first place? That would benefit all Canadians, and they could afford food much better. The Liberals need to stop taking with one hand and giving out a little more with the other hand. That would be a huge solution for all Canadians.”
“It is hard to believe it is not a design of the government's actual policy direction. The government is debasing our currency. That means our dollars buy less. The agenda of managing decline is not the answer. We need to turn this around and make Canada a more prosperous nation again. Canada is borrowing money excessively. We are borrowing money from foreign money managers, Canadian taxpayers are leaking billions per year to these international moneylenders, and now it is obvious we are borrowing more from foreigners so Canadians can afford to eat. If the path we are on is not clear yet, it should be. I will tell the government to get its fiscal house in order. The path it has put this country on is not sustainable.”
“If someone is not feeding their family, they are resorting to anything to get them fed. No wonder Canadians are increasingly turning toward food banks, with 2.2 million Canadians accessing food banks every month. That is astonishing. That number has doubled since 2019, yet the Liberal government refuses to address the direct cause, which is its own fiscal policies. On the one hand, the Canadian dollar buys less; on the other hand, the government's policies ramp up the cost of Canadian food production and delivery increases with the industrial carbon tax, a hidden tax that makes Canada less competitive and adds a cost burden on consumers. In addition, the clean fuel tax and taxes on food packaging add more to Canadians' food bills. It is hard to believe this food inflation is unique to Canada, but it is.”