Tamara Jansen
Cloverdale—Langley City, British Columbia · Conservative · Canada
“We call on the government to accept the committee's recommendation and support Bill C-218 , which is already before the House and which would accomplish the policy objective the committee recommends. Conservatives are prepared to work collaboratively with the government to that end.”
“Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of the Conservative members of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying to table, in both official languages, our supplementary opinion.”
“Spending is increasing faster than inflation and faster than economic growth. He promised economic renewal. Canada remains the only G20 country in recession. He promised to build faster, yet despite his creating new offices, new agencies and new approval processes, Canadians are still waiting to see any results.”
“When a government finds $25 billion for a brand-new sovereign debt fund, only weeks after presenting a budget, Parliament should begin to wonder if perhaps these programs are not emerging from a coherent economic plan, but are being invented on the fly whenever the government finds itself in need of a new announcement.”
“What makes this particularly troubling is that all of this is happening while Canada stands alone among the G20 countries as the only one in recession. The government continues to insist that more spending is the solution, yet with all that spending, Canada is the only G20 nation that has managed to achieve this disastrous distinction.”
“At some point, governments must be judged not by the announcements they make but by the results they achieve. Now the government has asked Parliament to spend less time examining legislation at the very moment it is asking Canadians to accept more spending, more borrowing and more debt. That is backwards.”
The complete record
Every one of 417 lines we hold for Tamara Jansen, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 3 of 9.
“Mr. Speaker, the fellow I mentioned and his family definitely do not agree with the Prime Minister that affordability is the best it has been in over a decade. As a matter of fact, he admitted it has gotten so bad in Canada that he is wondering whether he should even stay. It is no wonder Canadians are talking about leaving. It now takes over half of median household income just to own a home in Canada, and food inflation is the highest in the G7. How many more hard-working Canadians have to leave this country before the Prime Minister wakes up and admits his housing and affordability policies are failing?”
“Mr. Speaker, I took an Uber last Saturday to the Vaisakhi parade in Surrey, and I got to talking with the driver. He told me he had lost his job to AI and now he is driving long hours just to make ends meet. He said that after all the costs of keeping his car on the road, he is making next to nothing. He hardly sees his little boy, who is in kindergarten, yet the Prime Minister told Canadians that affordability is the best it has been in a decade. Is this really what the Prime Minister thinks “better” looks like?”
“Mr. Speaker, I think that shows, very clearly, the bias against the lower-middle-class student. This policy hurts those students who can least afford it. Career colleges disproportionately serve lower-middle-income Canadians who need a faster, more direct path to employment. These are not students with a safety net. Many of them choose a career college specifically because it is the practical, affordable option that leads directly to a job. Removing grant access does not make that choice disappear. It just makes it harder to afford. It tells young Canadians from a working family that the path they chose to a good career is worth less government support than someone else's path. That is wrong, and this committee agrees.”
“Mr. Speaker, I would talk about the fact that instead of giving support, the government has actually put a barrier between the two types of training. Budget 2025 changed the eligibility for the Canada student grant so that students at many regulated career colleges no longer qualified. It is not because their school is unaccredited or because their program is substandard, but simply because of the type of institution they are attending. A student training to become a practical nurse or an electrician at a provincially regulated college now receives less federal support than a student at a public taxpayer institution. They have the same ambitions, along with the same hard work, but they get different treatment. The government has created two classes of Canadian students, and this motion asks it to fix that.”
“(1155) If we want to make work cool again and if we want to rebuild respect for hard work, skill and enterprise in this country, we should start by passing this motion and stop punishing the very students preparing to do the work at hand.”
“This is how wealth is created in the real world, which is why this policy strikes me as so short-sighted. Discouraging students from attending career colleges does not just affect individual students, but the future businesses they might have built, the apprentices they might have trained, the workers they may have hired and the opportunities they might have created for others. It narrows not just a training pathway, but an ownership pathway. In a country worried about stagnant growth, weak productivity and too few young people believing they can get ahead, it seems to me that the last thing the government should do is make it harder for young people to enter one of the clearest roads to becoming their own boss.”
“Many of the people doing what the culture calls dirty jobs are, in fact, examples of what self-reliance can produce. Many are entrepreneurs, many are employing others and many are creating opportunities, not just for themselves, but for the next young person looking for a start. This is not some footnote in the economy. This is the economy, yet in a strange twist, we celebrate the idea of small business while undermining the institutions helping people acquire the very skills that lead to starting one. This makes no sense, because the electrician who starts a company, the welder who opens a fabrication shop, the contractor who builds a crew and the mechanic who opens a service centre are the people taking risks, creating jobs, paying taxes, training others and strengthening communities.”
“It can be the first rung on a ladder that leads to ownership, independence and entrepreneurship. A young person starts as an apprentice, learns a craft, gains experience, builds a reputation, takes on contracts, buys a truck and hires a helper and then a crew. Before long, what began as learning a skill has become a small business. If that sounds ordinary, it is only because people have been building this country that way for so long that we have forgotten how remarkable it really is. We should not take it for granted, because there is something profoundly hopeful on that path. It is one of the few paths where a person can begin with almost nothing but a willingness to work and over time build something of their own. They do not inherit it, but build it.”
“It is reinforcing the old prejudice that some forms of learning lead to real opportunity while others do not, yet anyone who has looked at the pay stub of a successful tradesperson or has tried to hire one lately knows how ridiculous that is. In many parts of the country, a skilled trade is not merely a path to a good living. It may be one of the best paths available. At a time when young Canadians are struggling to see a future they can afford, it takes a special kind of blindness to put obstacles in front of one of the clearest paths to financial independence that we have. Perhaps the biggest thing we have gotten wrong is that people still talk about the trades as though they lead to only a job, when very often, they lead to something much bigger. This is because a skilled trade is not simply a paycheque.”
“Somewhere along the way, we got something backward. We made kids borrow heavily to push them toward jobs that, by the time they have their degree, may or may not exist, while neglecting millions of jobs that exist, pay well and are sitting open because too few people have been encouraged to pursue the skills required to do them. That is not just a mismatch, but a cultural failure, and now this policy threatens to compound that mistake, because when the government says students pursuing vocational paths should no longer receive the same grant support as others, it is doing more than changing an eligibility rule.”
“Out in the real world, there are countless skilled tradespeople making excellent incomes, raising families, buying homes, building businesses and doing it often with less debt, less delay and, frankly, more certainty than many young people who have been sold the promise that a degree alone is the ticket to security. (1150) There is something off about the way we have celebrated one kind of work while undervaluing another. Many of the people we are talking about, such as welders, electricians, millwrights, mechanics and heavy-duty technicians, are not merely getting by. Many are earning incomes that would surprise the very people who tend to look down on the trades. Why should that surprise anyone? Skill has value. Competence has value. Being able to do something difficult, useful and necessary has always had value. It always will.”
“It is like standing in front of a labour shortage, staring directly at it and deciding the sensible response is to make it harder for the next generation to learn these skills. Do we really want to sabotage the system? Canadians trying to hire skilled people right now need policies that will produce more skilled people, not fewer. There is another myth we have been telling for far too long, which is the notion that the surest path to prosperity is always the most expensive education, the longest credential and the most polished title on a business card. We have repeated that so often, it has taken on the status of common sense, even though the evidence is piling up against it.”
“We complain that homes are too expensive, but seem oddly reluctant to talk about the carpenters, electricians, pipefitters and heavy equipment operators without whom no home has ever been built. We talk about building the country as though a policy announcement will get it done, when, in fact, countries are built the way they have always been built, which is by skilled people who know how to turn raw material into something useful. Here is why this policy becomes so baffling. At the very moment when we need more skilled workers, more apprentices, more young Canadians learning practical, employable, in-demand skills, the government proposes to pull grants away from students attending career colleges that are doing exactly that training.”
“If we start treating the people who do that work as somehow less worthy of support, we are not just making a mistake in policy, but we are teaching a whole generation to undervalue the very work we desperately need to rebuild this country. One of the strangest contradictions in Canada right now is that we have an entire country talking about housing shortages, an infrastructure deficit, labour shortages in the trades and a generation of young people looking for a foothold in the economy. Somehow, the government can still manage to make it harder for those same young people to train for the very jobs we claim we desperately need them to fill. There is something almost comical about that, if it were not so serious.”
“We have spent too many years pretending that the only education that matters comes wrapped in prestige, as though a polished degree is inherently more valuable than a practical skill, or as though an Oxford education is the gold standard and everything else is a consolation prize. Well, with respect, the Prime Minister would be very wrong about that, because we cannot build a country with consultants alone. Somebody has to wire the house. Somebody has to pour the concrete. Somebody has to repair the truck. Somebody has to keep the systems working. Skilled work is not second-class work. It is part of the foundation of civilized life.”
“That thinking could not be more dangerous right now. Canada has lost 95,000 jobs this year. Youth have lost over 50,000 jobs. We have one of the highest unemployment rates in the G7, yet the government has chosen to make skills training harder to afford. Think of how upside down that is. We say we need more homes, but we make it harder to train the people who build them. We say we need more workers in health care, but we make it harder for students to train for practical care professions. We talk about growth, but we put roadblocks in front of the very people who know how to make, fix, build, repair and create. Behind it all is a deeper cultural problem.”
“Mr. Speaker, today's concurrence motion is about more than just student grants. It is about whether this country still respects the kind of work that actually keeps the country running. Buried in budget 2025 is a decision that says if a young Canadian chooses a public institution, such as UBC, McGill or U of T, they can receive a federal student grant, but if they choose one of many provincially regulated career colleges where they train to become welders, electricians, health care aides, mechanics or practical nurses, they will be cut off. It is the same taxpayer, same ambition and same hard work, but different treatment. That reveals something bigger than a budget line. It reveals a bias that says some education is respectable and some is not, and somehow the path that leads to a tool belt is worth less than a path that leads to a desk.”
“Mr. Speaker, I wonder if my colleague would talk about this idea of “Don't worry about it. Students can still access loans. They just don't qualify for grants.” Could he give me a bit of a thought on that?”
“Mr. Speaker, I held a town hall with business leaders in my riding, and I expected to hear about tariffs and red tape. Instead, the number one concern by far was this: Do we still even own our own homes? Decisions such as the Cowichan ruling and the Liberals' secret Musqueam agreement are shaking confidence in property rights. Investment is freezing, builders are backing off and uncertainty is growing. People are starting to wonder if we are drifting toward that “you will own nothing and be happy” mantra. Is that where the Prime Minister is taking us, or will he instruct his lawyers to defend the property rights of Canadian homeowners, yes or no?”
“It affects all of us, because when investment leaves, when builders leave, when opportunity leaves, we all feel it. However, the Prime Minister goes around saying Canadians have never had it so good. How does he sleep at night?”
“Mr. Speaker, if these programs were working, if they were truly delivering, we would not be here tonight. We would not see families spending over half their income just to afford a place to live. We would not see housing starts projected to fall. We certainly would not see something even more troubling, which is that a growing number of the very people who invest in this country, who create jobs, take risks and build businesses, are leaving. We are now facing a serious brain drain, with a troubling 40% of top earners looking elsewhere for opportunity, for a place where the cost of living is lower and the path forward feels more certain. When that happens, it does not just affect those individuals. It affects the families counting on those jobs and the communities depending on that investment.”
“Instead, what we have seen year after year is a growing list of programs, each one announced with great fanfare, each one carrying a hopeful name, each one presented as a solution, yet the homes do not get built. When people look past the announcements, they find more red tape and bureaucracy, more layers and more delays. The Conservatives have a plan to cut the GST on all the new homes under $1.3 million, tie the federal infrastructure dollars to homebuilding and cut development charges, not just for vote-rich Ontario but for all the provinces. Canadians are beginning to recognize what the Liberals' announcements are all about. It is no plan to build homes, but a pattern of smoke and mirrors. Is the government even trying to actually get something built?”
“It makes for a great headline, but even the government's own housing agency officials now say they will deliver just a fraction of that. In fact, they are warning that housing starts could drop by over 18%. Right in B.C., new home sales in Vancouver are down 56%. Across the country, CMHC officials are projecting housing starts to fall well below the 10-year average. Therefore, while the announcements get bigger, the results get smaller. Canadians feel that disconnect from what the Liberals promise us and what they actually do because the truth is, they cannot live on a promise, they cannot raise their children on a headline and they cannot build equity in a press release. At some point, the words have to become something real. They have to become walls and doors, foundations and keys and homes that people can actually afford.”
“When we look at the facts, it becomes painfully clear why. Today, it takes over half, 52.4%, of a family's pre-tax income just to afford a home in this country. In Vancouver, that number is nearly 90%. In Toronto, it is over 60%. At the same time, Canadians are carrying a record $2.6 trillion in household debt, mostly just to keep a roof over their heads. Let us think about that for a moment. How do people build a life when nearly everything they earn goes to keeping a roof over their head? One would think that with these challenges, we would see real action, real results and a plan that matches the scale of the problem. Instead, what Canadians have been given is announcements, big ones, bold ones. We were told there would be 500,000 homes built every year. That sounds so impressive.”
“They are asking for something far more basic than that: a home they can afford, a good job they can rely on and a safe neighbourhood where they can raise their family. That is it and yet, even something so simple and so reasonable is slipping further and further out of reach. I think about two of my own daughters who moved out of B.C. just to afford a home. They want to come back, but prices are worse now and new home sales in Vancouver are down 56%. We see the huge problem in those numbers. However, more important, we hear, in the community and in people's conversations, young families wondering if they will ever own a home, parents watching their kids move farther and farther away just to afford a place and grandparents like me worried that the next generation will not get the same chances we had.”
“Mr. Speaker, there was a time in this country when the path to owning a home felt clear. If one worked hard, showed up every day, did their job, raised their kids and tried to put a little aside they could build a life. They could buy a home, they could plant roots in a community and they could look at their children and believe with confidence that their children's future would be just a little bit better than their own. That was not a dream reserved for the wealthy. It was not something out of reach. It was just Canada. However, under the current Liberal government, that simple promise has rapidly slipped away. Here is the thing. Canadians today are not even asking for luxury. They are not asking for mansions or vacation homes. They are not even asking for the so-called American dream.”
“Mr. Speaker, what makes this worse is that the government makes more money the higher gas prices go. Every time the price at the pump rises, the GST rises with it. More pain for Canadians means more revenue for Ottawa. This is not just about high prices. The government is profiting from them. Families are cutting back. Farmers are warning food prices will climb again, and the Liberals are quietly taking in billions more. If they can collect billions extra from higher prices, why not give it back by taking taxes off gas and diesel? Will the Prime Minister finally give Canadians relief at the pump?”
“Mr. Speaker, affordability has gotten so bad that farmers in my riding are taking to social media begging the Liberal government for gas tax relief. This is planting season, which is one of the most fuel-intensive times of the year. Tyler Heppell, a very popular Cloverdale farmer, said it plainly: When fuel costs go up, food prices go up. It is that simple. Families are already struggling at the grocery store, yet the government keeps collecting billions in extra as prices rise. The Prime Minister says that he is looking at options. Farmers do not need looking; they need action. Will the Liberals remove federal taxes on gas and diesel before these costs hit every dinner table in Canada?”
“Let us act with the seriousness this moment demands and ensure that when the warning signs are there, as they so often are, we do not look back once again and say that we knew and did not act.”
“It would be a safeguard built for moments like Bailey's, where the history is already there, the pattern is already documented and the ordinary process of release is simply not enough to meet the gravity of what is in front of the court. Bailey McCourt should still be here. That is the simplest, most honest thing that can be said. Her children should still have their mother. Her family should not be carrying this weight, nor should they be the ones who must now stand before us and ask that we do what should have been done already. We cannot give Bailey back to her children, but we can decide here and now that her story will not end in silence and that from it will come a measure of protection for those who are still, even today, waiting for the system to recognize the danger they are living with. Let us pass this bill.”
“To name that act as first-degree murder would be not merely a question of punishment but a statement of clarity and a refusal to look away from what intimate partner homicide truly represents. The law has long recognized that killing in the context of other serious circumstances warrants elevation to first-degree murder. This bill would extend that same principle to the killing of an intimate partner where coercive or controlling conduct is present. That context is not incidental to the crime; it is the crime. This bill would ensure that when a person has already been convicted of an intimate partner offence within the past five years, or is already at large on a release order related to a prior intimate partner offence, a peace officer could not simply release them at the scene. The decision would have to go before a judge.”
“This bill asks us to finally align our legal response with what we already know to be true. It asks us to recognize in law that violence within an intimate relationship is not the same as violence between strangers, carrying with it a level of risk and proximity that makes it more dangerous, not less. This bill would begin to correct that by naming the reality for what it is. It would create a distinct offence that acknowledges the nature of intimate partner violence. The bill would go further still. It would recognize that when the ultimate act of violence is committed within a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct, when a life is taken by someone who has used that pattern of control and fear as a weapon, it must be treated with the full weight of the law.”
“It has created a network that responds in real time, connecting women to shelters, legal help and counselling, often at the very instant that they are reaching out. What The Kaur Movement is seeing day after day reinforces what we know: These are not isolated stories but part of a pattern that continues to unfold in communities across the country. Tragedies are playing out time and again due to a lack of laws that protect these vulnerable women in their moment of need. We can place these stories side by side: Bailey's life and loss; the careful work of women like Dr. Aujla who study these patterns; and community voices like The Kaur Movement, rising from what they see in reality every day. When we do, it becomes impossible to pretend that we do not understand what is happening.”
“What I heard that evening has stayed with me because it was not abstract or theoretical. It was story after story of women who have lived through violence, who have tried to seek help and who, in many cases, have found themselves navigating systems that were slow or difficult to access at the very moment they needed them the most. What struck me was not just the severity of what women endure but the common thread running through their experiences, which was the sense that they were often left to carry the burden of their safety on their own shoulders while feeling helpless and afraid because their lives were not as valued as those of the men who perpetrated the violence. The Kaur Movement has built something remarkable in response to this reality.”
“While research like Dr. Aujla's helps us understand the pattern, it is often outside the government and in community spaces where we see just how real and immediate this issue is for women living through it. (1145) Last year, I attended a fundraiser on behalf of The Kaur Movement, founded by Gurpreet Kaur and supported by leaders like Manjot Kaur. The Kaur Movement is a survivor-led network that supports women facing abuse by connecting them to real-time help, such as shelters, legal aid and counselling, while also working to break the culture of silence around domestic violence, especially in the South Asian community. I went to the fundraiser expecting to hear about advocacy, awareness and the kinds of work many organizations are doing in this space to support women.”
“They reported, they sought help, and they tried to leave, but just like with Bailey, risk was not considered in the context of what had already happened and what was increasingly likely to happen next. For many women in the South Asian community, the path to even reaching that point is far more complex than the system is designed to recognize. Their particular cases are often complicated by family honour, language barriers and coercive control inside the home. A system like ours that is seemingly built to protect the perpetrator of intimate violence is very dangerous, especially for women of vulnerable minorities. When we consider what happened to Bailey, we cannot look at it in isolation. It fits into a pattern that has already been identified and already been studied. The knowledge is there. Our laws are ignoring that knowledge.”
“Was this truly an isolated failure, or is it part of something that we have been seeing for far too long and are just not willing to make the necessary changes to to protect women at risk? Dr. Wendy Aujla, assistant professor of criminal justice at Athabasca University, has spent years listening to women, many of them particularly vulnerable as new immigrants, who have walked this very path, not in theory but in lived experiences, in stories that, when placed side by side, begin to look far less like exceptions and far more like a pattern we can no longer ignore. What she hears time and again are stories not of women who failed to act but of women who did exactly what Bailey did.”
“When we look back at that day, the question is not simply how this happened, but why there was no legal mechanism strong enough to interrupt it. Why, after a conviction, was there no ability for the court to say that it needed to take a closer look at this individual, needed a proper risk assessment and needed to determine whether releasing this person put a woman's life at risk? Bailey's case is not just a tragedy. It is a clear example of a gap in our law, a gap between what we know about intimate partner violence and how our system is currently structured to respond to it. When we step back from Bailey's story, difficult as it is, we are forced to ask ourselves a larger question.”
“This is because under the law as it stands, we do not distinguish in any meaningful way between a violent act against a stranger and a violent act against someone in an intimate relationship, a relationship built on trust, proximity and, in many cases, vulnerability. When we fail to make that distinction, we fail to recognize the very real and documented risk that comes with intimate partner violence, particularly when it escalates. Just hours later, Bailey was in a parking lot going about what should have been an ordinary part of her day. It was there, in that ordinary place, in broad daylight, that her attacker found her and murdered her. She knew this could happen. She had begged to be protected, but the law, as it is written, ensured that the warning signs were ignored, and the inevitable happened.”
“At one point, there was strangulation, which is one of the clearest indicators that the risk had escalated to a level that should never be ignored. On the morning of July 4, Bailey's former partner stood before a court and was convicted of assaulting her. The system had, in that moment, all the pieces in front of it. It had the history, it had the violence, and it had the pattern that had been building over time, yet despite all of that, he was released. There was no requirement to step back and ask whether this was something more than a single offence. There was no mechanism that treated violence against an intimate partner as fundamentally different from any other assault. There was no tool that required the court to fully assess whether Bailey was still in danger even after a conviction had just been entered.”
“Mr. Speaker, it is a strange and troubling thing in a country as prosperous and progressive as ours that a woman at risk can do everything she has been told to do, to seek help, speak truth and place her trust in the law, and still find herself dead at the hands of her own partner wielding a bloody weapon, in what can only be considered a completely avoidable murder. Bailey McCourt is one such story. She was not a statistic. She was a young mother with two young children, right in my community of Cloverdale. To those who loved her, she was not a headline. She was the centre of a home, a woman trying to build a safe life for her family. Like so many others, she found herself in a relationship that became dangerous over time. There were threats. There was violence.”
“Mr. Speaker, it is not just the abuse of our refugee system that has people in my riding shaking their head. They are hearing about situations like this: a young woman going about her life, when a stranger violated her by groping her not once but twice. He was charged, he was convicted and then he was given a discharge by the judge, and no criminal record, because without a record he can stay in the country and fight deportation. After years of decisions like this, will the Prime Minister fire the ministers responsible for creating this out-of-control immigration system?”
“Mr. Speaker, I have been hearing something troubling from people in my community. They tell me that the international students whose visas have expired are being told by immigration consultants, “Just claim asylum. You'll be able to stay.” Now people are gaming a system that was meant for people fleeing real danger, and this is clogging the line for genuine refugees who actually need protection. The Prime Minister says that claims are down, but since 2015, the backlog has exploded from 10,000 to 300,000 asylum claims. Will the Liberals finally admit this is happening and fix it before the entire immigration system loses its integrity?”
“Mr. Speaker, there is a deep irony in the heart of the bill. The government claims it is about protecting Canadians from harm, yet the first thing the Liberals did was remove the good-faith protection that ensured Canadians could express their religious beliefs without fear. I would ask my colleague why he thinks the government is so determined to remove good faith from the law and from this debate.”
“Therefore, the petitioners call on the Liberal Government of Canada to protect religious freedom, to uphold the right to read and share sacred texts, and to prevent government overreach into matters of faith.”
“Mr. Speaker, I rise to present a petition regarding Bill C-9 . The Canadians who have signed this petition want to remind the government that it has no authority over sacred texts or teachings of any faith community. That boundary is not negotiable. Bill C-9 would overstep the boundary, stripping away long-standing protections that have allowed Canadians to speak and live their faith in good faith. This is what the petitioners have said. Canadians are concerned that Liberal-Bloc amendments to Bill C-9 could be used to criminalize passages from the Bible, the Quran, the Torah and other texts. The state has no place in the religious texts or teachings of any faith community. Freedom of expression and freedom of religion are fundamental rights that must be preserved.”
“Mr. Speaker, what we are seeing today did not come from one mistake. It came from years of mismanagement by multiple Liberal immigration ministers. One opened the floodgates without oversight. Another failed to enforce the rules, and now the current minister is continuing with more permits, with millions of visas sitting expired or unchecked. Even Liberal MPs have said this minister is not up to the job. Through you, Mr. Speaker, I would ask the Prime Minister this. Why are three of the most ineffective immigration ministers in Canadian history still sitting around the cabinet table while Canadians face the consequences of their failures?”
“Mr. Speaker, I spoke with a man in my riding who works at a local cabinet manufacturing shop. He works hard and pays his taxes, but his hours were cut because students with expired visas take his shifts for cash under the table. This is the direct result of a system the previous Liberal immigration minister let spiral out of control, where international students came without proper oversight and thousands overstayed their visits. Will the Liberal Prime Minister admit that this mess started under his previous minister? Canadians, like my constituent, are now paying the price.”
“People in my riding do not want to have to rely on food stamps. What they want to know is why decisions are being made in Ottawa that keep driving up the price of Canadian food.”
“Mr. Speaker, the families and seniors in my riding who are carefully studying grocery flyers deserve a straight answer about why food keeps getting more expensive. We often hear the government members say it is a global problem, but if that were true, every country would be feeling it equally, and they are not. Canada now has the highest food inflation in the G7. When we look at where Canadians are being hit hardest, we see that it is not on imported luxuries. Ground beef is up 22%; whole chicken, nearly 13%; pork, more than 13%; and even romaine lettuce has jumped 17%. These are not imported luxuries. These are foods raised and grown by Canadian farmers, yet families and seniors in my community are paying more for them every single week. Food prices are 27% higher than five years ago, and food bank use has doubled since 2019.”