Budget Implementation Act, 2023, No. 1
Date: 2023_04_27
Chamber: HOUSE OF COMMONS
Mr. Jeremy Patzer: it is always an honour and a privilege to be able to rise in the House of Commons on behalf of the great people from southwest Saskatchewan. I would be remiss if I did not start off by congratulating all the ranchers who have just made it through another calving season, or are at the very end of the season. I also mention our farmers, who are about to begin their spring plant, with the spring thaw that is going on. We have a bit more moisture this year than we have had in years past. I know a lot of folks are really excited about that and are also more than happy to wait a couple of days to start. I know everyone is anxious to get in the fields back home, so I want to wish everybody a safe and happy spring planting season. Here we are talking about budget 2023. The budget is a great opportunity for the government to take a step back, have a little self-reflection and really hone in on the needs of Canadians. That is something that has been lacking for the last number of years. Instead, we are seeing a continued coalition with the NDP, who are keeping the Liberals in power and helping them repeat scandal after scandal. We have seen the NDP bring up some of these scandals from time to time, but at the end of the day, it is still voting for them. We know the NDP will vote for this budget because it has to. We have heard some great comments from NDP members criticizing the government. At the end of the day, it is kind of useless and meaningless because they are just going to prop the Liberals up and vote for it anyway. The Liberals are running a government that is quick to announce massive amounts of spending without figuring out where the money is going to come from to pay for it. Most recently, we saw the government massively subsidize Volkswagen in Canada. We still do not know the upper reaches of the total compensation of the package, but we do know that it is going to be in excess of $13 billion. We still do not have a lot of information, but that is a ton of money, and it is appropriate for us to be asking a lot of questions about it. It gets even worse. Volkswagen is the only automaking company in Canada to be charged under CEPA for violations against the environment. There were 60 counts against it. What was its reward for that? It was $13 billion of taxpayers' money. This is from a government that says it prioritizes the environment. However, the only company to actually violate the Canadian Environmental Protection Act gets massive subsidization as a reward for its behaviour. The Liberals will go out of their way to defend all this spending. They will say they have to spend a lot of money so that we can get a bit out of it. Let us be real. There is no plan to get a complete battery industry here in Canada. We have heard many times in this place, in committee or in meetings with stakeholders, that Canada has all the resources and minerals required to have a very robust battery supply chain. However, we simply do not have the extraction and refining capacity to do what is required. To make matters worse, there is way too much red tape and over-regulation of the sector, preventing private sector investment into our country. Again, we have the raw materials to work with, but they are literally stuck in the ground. We would think that with all the abundance of natural resources that we have, private companies would be lining up at the door to invest their money in Canada. As it stands right now, if someone does not have massive government subsidies, there is nothing being built or done in this country. The investments of these companies would bring jobs, service companies and spinoff industries, such as restaurants and service-and-repair shops, not to mention the royalty revenue that builds our communities and invests in our rural communities. It still makes rural Canada a viable place to live. If it were not for rural Canada, urban Canada would not have all the luxuries it enjoys. If we think of the food that is eaten, it is all grown, harvested and produced in rural Canada. There is all the lumber and building materials required to build the housing that we talk about so much in this country. Where does it come from? It comes from rural Canada. We have to prioritize the rural areas. We are not seeing that from the government. We should also mention the opportunities that exist for the first nations people of Canada to be able to partner with these private companies, make investments and sign these partnerships. This will bring about opportunities for jobs and education for their people as well. That is missing because of government inaction. Natural Law Energy is a company from my riding. It tried to partner with TC Energy to invest in Keystone XL, and the government chased that off. That was an opportunity for six or seven partnering first nations to have jobs and opportunities, and the government said no. That is the terrible direction that we have been heading in. However, it is always possible to change course and direction. Budget 2023 presented the government with such an opportunity, but the government has a shocking level of disrespect for how it is handling Canadians' money. Here is a straightforward example: On page 223 of the budget book, the Liberals have a graph showing that we will not be on track to balance the budget until 2060. How can they possibly pretend that it is a responsible plan for the national finances to be left like this if it is going to be a few decades before they even have a plan to get it back into fiscal balance? It is a complete mockery of all the people who work hard and pay taxes in this country. How are they choosing to spend this money, the millions or billions of dollars at a time? The Liberals continue to give massive subsidies, as I mentioned earlier, to such things as a battery plant for giant companies that, quite frankly, could afford to pay for and do this on their own. However, as I said, the Liberals will also decide to spend millions and billions of dollars without worrying where that money is coming from, which is from the taxpayers and ratepayers of this country. The Liberals' policies are preventing us from developing our natural resources across the board, but they save their worst treatment for demonizing the oil and gas sector here in Canada. In the budget, it says that the government is forecasting the price of oil to be around $82 a barrel. That is actually not too bad. At that price, if the government could choose to support the idea, Canada could balance its budget within a couple of years and not a couple of decades. The Liberals would still be able to invest in all the social programs that Canadians have grown to like, enjoy and appreciate and be able to afford to do so by supporting natural resources development in this country. We have even had a few countries come to Canada looking for LNG, but the Prime Minister said no, that there is no business case for it. However, other countries around the world continue to beg for our resources. Instead, we are driving them off to other countries, such as Qatar. Therefore, we miss out on those opportunities to grow as a country while making the world a better place because of the high standards that we have here in Canada for human rights and for environmental protection. I proudly represent a rural riding where we have our own way of life, and the government does not understand it. Rural Canada is far from having the majority of our population, but as I was saying earlier, we produce all the things that people in urban Canada need to have the luxuries that people enjoy there. In return, too often, the Liberal government leaves us behind and forgets about us. Sometimes, the Liberals impose things on rural areas. They will make it harder, if not impossible, to continue to live there. Has anyone heard of the carbon tax? That is one of the biggest issues that people talk about that is driving up the cost of living in urban Canada, but predominantly in rural Canada, the place hardest hit by the carbon tax. For right now, the Liberals have been busy talking about a so-called just transition for oil and gas and for coal, even though they are still failing to make a just transition happen, whether they are located in the Prairies or the Maritimes. That is something that we also learned from a recent audit done by the Environment Commissioner. Since then, not much has been moving. We do not even see a budget item yet for the just transition for these communities. We are only seven years away from the end date for some of these coal mines and some of these coal power plants that the government is going to force off coal, and yet the government does not even have a plan or an allocation for how to deal with that. It is shameful. For the Liberals, it is not on their radar. I asked the minister what he planned to do with the people from coal-producing communities like Coronach and Rockglen in my riding, as well as in the Souris--Moose Mountain riding. As much as the minister tried to sound as if he would support rural areas, his answer and his examples actually suggest that rather than staying in the communities and working where they are, people are going to end up moving to other places, such as Regina, northern Saskatchewan, Calgary, Edmonton or the east coast. The Liberal minister might think that Regina is part of the rural area, even though it is the capital city of Saskatchewan. Regina is a great place. It is a fantastic place, but that is not where the people from Rockglen, Coronach, Willow Bunch or Assiniboia want to be. They want to stay in the places where they currently are, in their communities. The government is doing absolutely nothing to make sure that happens after it has mandated away the number one industry in their communities. I will just quickly mention that there is one thing I definitely appreciate in this budget, and that is the tax credit for tradespeople when they purchase their tools. Again, we are talking about a housing crisis in this country. How are we going to get there? We have to build houses. We need more workers. We need to incentivize people to be able to go to trade school and to want to work in these industries. That tax credit is going to help a lot of people as they enter into the trades. The Liberals also could have supported a Conservative private member's bill, Bill C-241 . It has passed this place, but the government could have been proactive and provided that in the budget. However, it did not do that. The Liberals missed an opportunity there.