Hon. Pierre Poilievre Dec. 16, 2024

Hon. Pierre Poilievre Dec. 16, 2024

The media is full of the unfolding chaos for the Liberal government in Ottawa.  In the minority Parliament, the deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister resigned her position.  The overdue financial report suddenly had no Minister of stature to deliver the traditional speech supporting the scheduled statement.  After much consternation, it was simply tabled in the Commons chamber.  Sadly, it revealed a much worse financial picture than anticipated, including a monstrous record-breaking deficit.  The media is full of commentary on the instability of this government, as well as economic analysis.

However, what won’t be reported is what I reveal here.  The Leader of the Official Opposition rose in response to the report tabling, and gave an amazing impromptu speech without notes, that accurately reflects the view of most Canadians.  These words are more important than all the talking heads growling in the legacy media.

Hon. Pierre Poilievre (Leader of the Opposition, Conservative Party of Canada) 

Mr. Speaker, I must admit that I am shocked to be rising in the House of Commons to announce this government's deficit.  Usually, the Liberals would be the ones to announce the deficit in their economic update.  However, they came to the House of Commons to table an economic update without even wanting to give a speech about it.  They do not even have a finance minister who is brave enough to talk about it.  He is hiding at Rideau Hall rather than doing his job.

There were three finance ministers today.  The former minister of finance and deputy prime minister stepped down.  Right after that, the Minister of Industry automatically became the finance minister under cabinet's system of delegation.  He immediately announced that he, too, was resigning because he did not want to take responsibility for the country's finances given what he had just learned about them.  The Minister of Public Safety, who was responsible for securing our broken borders in light of the U.S. president-elect's tariff threats, has now become the Minister of Finance.

However, he is nowhere to be found.  His whereabouts are a great mystery.  What is no longer a mystery, however, is the staggering size of the deficit.  We were promised that the federal deficit would not surpass the $40-billion guardrail.  The reality is that the deficit has reached $62 billion.  That is 55% higher than promised eight months ago.  It is out of control.

I will give the former finance minister credit for seeing, a few months ago, just how dangerous this government's deficit was.  It was threatening to increase inflation, slowing interest rate cuts, jeopardizing our social programs and slowing our economic growth.  That is why she said there would be a red line to prevent the deficit from going beyond $40 billion.  It was a guardrail.  Guardrails prevent buses from falling off cliffs.

Then the Prime Minister took the wheel.  He pulled to the left.  He hit the guardrail.  The bus is now falling off the cliff and is at the bottom of the ravine in a big pile of debt that threatens the future of Canadians.  That is why, today, we are announcing that we are going to vote against this plan.  We are calling on the NDP do its job, for once, and vote in favour of a non-confidence motion on this out-of-control, corrupt and costly government.  We need an election.  That is what we need.

Here is an astonishing fact.  My grandfather came to Canada from Ireland.  Why?  Because Ireland was poor.  Today, Ireland is twice as rich as Canada.  It has a GDP per capita of $100,000.  Ours is $50,000.  Although they have no oil or natural resources and lack the huge advantage of living next to the United States, which has the largest economy in the world, the Irish are now twice as rich as we are because they made good decisions.  I was told that there are only two kinds of people in the world: Irish people and people who want to be Irish.  From an economic perspective, that is true.

Ireland reduced taxes, cut the red tape to speed up big projects, and opened its economy to give entrepreneurs economic freedom and to reduce the size of government.  The Government of Ireland costs 23% of the country's economy.  Here, it costs more than 40%.  When the Irish government was cut in half, the wealth of its citizens doubled.

We know what to do.  We need to break down all the barriers that governments have put in place.  We need to cut back on bureaucracy, consultants and corporate nonsense, which is a big waste of money.  We need to reduce deficits and taxes, eliminate red tape, and allow freedom of competition and open-mindedness.  This will let us generate bigger paycheques that people will bring home to invest in their communities.  That will let us lower inflation and taxes and have a dollar that keeps its value.

That is what we are going to do to fight the threat that future President Trump and his tariffs pose.  We are going to bring investment back to Canada to build things and to become the freest economy in the world and the richest people in the world.  That should be our goal.

Enough with the chaos, division, poverty, homelessness and misery caused by the NDP-Liberal socialist government.  Now we need to get back to the principle of common sense, the basic principle.  We are going to bring home the promise that anyone, no matter where they come from, can work hard and fulfill their dreams, that people can earn a big paycheque or pension so they can pay for affordable food and housing in a safe community.  That is what common sense means.  That is what we are going to do to put Canada first.

I rise today, flabbergasted by the news that has just been made public.  The government has finally revealed its true deficit number.  Let us remember, the finance minister, this outgoing and now former finance minister told the world that she was putting in place guardrails to limit the damage that her deficits could do.  Her deficit plan was $40 billion, a mind-bogglingly large number, that was already contributing to rekindling inflation, again.

This $40 billion was too big.  It was out of control, as it was.  However, at least to her credit, she said, “No more than that.”  She decided she would have a guardrail.  We know a guardrail is meant to stop vehicles from flying off cliffs.  She was trying throughout the year to avoid going off the cliff.

There were two people on the bus who had other ideas, the Prime Minister and carbon tax Carney.  The two of them went to the front of the bus, they grabbed the wheel, they pulled it sharply to the left, smashing into that guardrail, and she tried to resist.  They pulled even further to the left, and they stepped on the gas.  The bus flew off the cliff, and now Canadians are at the bottom of the ravine in a big pile of debt.

However, instead of taking responsibility, the Prime Minister told her that she should take all the blame.  That when the ambulances, the police cruisers and the fire department arrived, she should take the blame for running the bus off the cliff, and that carbon tax Carney and the Prime Minister could innocently sit back.  The Prime Minister could then put carbon tax Carney in charge of driving the next bus.  The good old boys in the back room would protect themselves and make the then-finance minister take all the blame.

It reminds us of the way they treated the former Attorney General, (Jody Wilson-Raybould) a brilliant and brave first nations woman who refused to kowtow to corruption.  It reminds us of the way the Liberals treated Jane Philpott and so many other brave women who have dared question the self-described feminist Prime Minister.  Indeed, some feminist he is, throwing the bus off the cliff and throwing women under the bus.  That is his real record.

His real record on finance is yet another $62-billion deficit.  For context, outside the current government, no government in the history of Canada has ever run a $62-billion deficit.  Not even in the nineties, when The Wall Street Journal said we were a third world basket case, and not even during the massive global economic crisis did the deficit come anywhere close to that, yet here we are.

With the global economy growing, with the American economy booming in stable times, this deficit is 100% at the feet of the irresponsible Prime Minister and his personal economic adviser, carbon tax Carney.  Now Carney says he does not even want the job of finance minister.  He does not even want to try to drive the crashed-out bus after he helped run it off the cliff.  The Liberals could not find anyone all day.  In fact, no one will appear today to defend this incredible disaster of a budget.

We can look at the consequences in human terms: We have 1,400 homeless camps in Ontario and 35 homeless encampments in Halifax alone.  Two million people are lined up at food banks.  Scurvy is making a comeback.  The government admits that one in four children is going to school hungry every single day.  Unemployment is rising and, according to the budget, expected to exceed 7% by the end of next calendar year.  The gap between per capita GDP in Canada and the U.S. is now 30,000 Canadian dollars, although it was equal 10 years ago.  This is the worst gap since at least the Second World War, and some say it is the worst gap in a century.

Canadian workers are only getting 55¢ of investment for every dollar an American worker gets.  A half a trillion Canadian investment dollars, which works out to almost a quarter of our economy, has left, net.  It has gone to the United States to build pipelines, factories, warehouses and business centres; Canadian investment dollars are paying American wages while our workers go starving for investment and for salaries to pay their bills.

When I travel across this country, I consistently meet two types of people.  There are those who are a little better off.  I will be very blunt about this.  They tell me that if I do not win, they will leave the country.  They are very numerous.  I do not worry about them as much.  Do members know whom I worry about?  I worry about the ones who cannot leave.  Using very blunt language, they are the ones who tell me, "I don't know what the hell I'm going to do.  I have no idea how I'm going to pay my way."

I met a waitress at a restaurant not long ago.  She came up to me, grabbed me by the hand and said that I have to win.  I thanked her and said that I appreciated her support.  She said, no, it was not a compliment.  Then she told me her story.  She was working one full-time job and two part-time jobs just to pay her bills.  This is a single woman in her late fifties, and she was tired of working all the time.  She had cut everything out of her budget, every creature comfort and everything she enjoyed about her life, so that she could drop one of those part-time jobs.  One morning, she woke up, walked outside and her car was gone.  She called her insurance, and they said they were not going to cover the replacement value.  She had to take that job back because she simply cannot live her life without a car.

Colleagues can bet their bottom dollar that the guy who stole the car was probably out on bail.  This was not his first job.  This woman's taxes and heating bill have gone up.  Her wages have not gone up.  She is scared to go out in the streets, in places where they did not even lock the door not long ago.  These are the people we are fighting for.

These silly games over here are very entertaining, as is the soap opera that everyone is seized with today.  That is all fine, but there are real people whose lives are on the line.  We have a duty to work for them.

Quite frankly, this woman does not see me or any of us as any kind of saviour.  They see us all as a last hope.  In fact, she does not want to be saved; she just wants her life back.  She was taking care of herself just fine before her tax, her heat and her grocery bill went through the roof and her car went missing.  She was doing everything right.

I met a guy at the Labatt brewery a few days ago, and members can watch the video of me talking with him.  He walked up to me and said he works three jobs, but his family cannot make it.  They are renting.  They have no hope.  They have given up on ever owning a home.  They can barely make it.  He said to me that he feels ashamed when he talks to his kids because they ask why he is never around and why they can never have a house.  He feels like a failure.

He did not fail.  He has been failed.  He has been robbed of the promise of Canada.  It was a very simple promise: If we worked hard, we got a good life.  It was not fancy or extravagant, but we got a house with a yard, where we could have kids playing safely.  We could have a nice dog that we could afford to feed, along with the kids.  Our kids could play safely in the streets.  That was the promise.

Politicians break promises all the time, but do we know what was bad about this promise?  This promise did not belong to the Prime Minister.  It was not his promise to break.  It belonged to all of us.  Our purpose is to bring home that promise for that young man, that young father, and that older female worker, so that they can take back control of their lives once again and live in a safe country where their hard work earns them a good wage, where the rent and food are affordable and where, when they go to bed at night, they know that they will be safe throughout their sleep and that they will have their car in their driveway in the morning.  Our purpose is to have a country where people are proud to fly the flag again, where they know that the government is a servant and not a master, and where they understand that the Commons, this place, works for the common people every day, not for the ego of one man desperate to cling to his job.

We must remember that we are servants in this place.  We have a job to do on behalf of the people who sent us here.  Our personal dramas are not important.  The dramas that should seize all of our concern and imagination are the daily dramas of the working women and men who build this country.  We are in it for them.  We are going to give them control of their lives back in the freest country on earth, Canada.  Let us bring it home.