Marty Morantz

[The Budget, April 18th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, of course, the member is saying what all Liberals say, that Canadians have never had it so good. They think that everything is great.

It was not my advice. I do not expect him to take my advice. Bill Morneau does not like the budget. Paul Manley does not like the budget. Many of the other economists I mentioned in my speech do not like the budget. There has been a great deal of criticism over changes in tax policy that will actually penalize productivity growth in this country. He does not have to take it from me. He just has to open up a newspaper and read it for himself.

[The Budget, April 18th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, this budget is ironically called “Fairness for Every Generation.”

After nine years of the Prime Minister trying to make things fair, he sure has not done a very good job. Things are not fair.

Is it fair to every generation that every year life is less affordable? Is it fair to every generation that rents are sky-high? Is it fair to every generation that one in four kids cannot afford to eat? Is it fair to every generation that it takes almost 20 years just to save up for a down payment?

The Prime Minister is not worth the cost for any generation. This is the ninth straight year of deficit spending. In 2015, the federal debt was $616 billion, accumulated from 1867, when Canada began. Today, it is $1.25 trillion, double. The Prime Minister has borrowed more money than all other prime ministers combined.

The result is that, after 20 years of low inflation and interest rates, the Prime Minister's irresponsible inflationary spending has upended Canada's stable economy.

This year, Canada will spend $54.1 billion on interest to wealthy bankers and bondholders, instead of to doctors and nurses, to service the Prime Minister's debt. That is the same amount collected in GST. We should change the name of that tax from the GST to the DST, the debt servicing tax. It is also more money than the government spends on health care or on the Canada child benefit.

This is what happens when a Prime Minister does not want to think about monetary policy. The result is that mortgage payments have doubled, down payments have doubled, rents have doubled, the cost of gas, groceries and home heating have skyrocketed, and people cannot afford to eat, heat or house themselves.

Instead of reining in spending to bring inflation under control, the Prime Minister acts like a pyromaniac, throwing another $40 billion on the inflationary fire. This is despite warnings from economists, including Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem, who cautioned that government spending is at the upper bound. This will make it much harder for the bank to lower interest rates.

This is not a partisan point. Former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page expressed this yesterday, telling Global News, “We gotta get those interest rates down. So on a net basis, this is just not good for inflation.” Former Liberal finance minister John Manley also warned this government months ago that it was pressing on the inflationary gas pedal with its spending. Even former Liberal-appointed governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge said he believes that this will be the “worst budget” since 1982.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. After nine deficits and doubling the national debt, Canada is less fair and Canadians are worse off.

Now the finance minister says that what Canadians really want is a stronger government to make things fairer. By making government bigger, the Liberals have made citizens weaker. Conservatives believe that smaller government makes for bigger citizens.

This is not a government that gives people everything they want. It is a government that takes everything they have. Members do not have to take it from me. Just yesterday, in the Financial Post, it was written, “We’ve become a growth laggard and our living standards have largely stagnated for the better part of a decade.”

Part of our declining standard of living has to do with the fact that Canada has the worst productivity in the G7. Our GDP growth has been driven primarily by population and labour force growth, not productivity improvements. That may increase the total amount of goods and services, but it does not translate into increased living standards.

This is a real crisis. From 2000 to 2023, the growth rate of Canada's real per person GDP was 0.7%. That is meaningfully worse than the G7 average of 1% and the United States', whose GDP per person growth rate was 1.2%, almost double. Our country is facing a productivity crisis that threatens to erode this country’s standard of living and erase many Canadians' hopes for a more prosperous future.

Just a few weeks ago the Bank of Canada's deputy governor Carolyn Rogers said that we have a productivity emergency, and “in case of emergency, break glass.” Even former Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau says the budget is a threat to investment and economic growth.

It is time to take action by, for instance, reducing regulatory barriers to investment, celebrating entrepreneurship, bolstering the profit incentive for private investment and loosening the federal government's tight grip on the economy. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister does the exact opposite.

There has been one change, though. The borrow-and-spend Liberals are now the tax-and-spend Liberals. On top of gouging Canadians with their April 1 tax hikes, they have decided that they know better how to spend businesses' money than the hard-working Canadians who actually run those businesses.

This is not a partisan point. Dan Kelly, president of the CFIB, said, “What worries me the most about [these tax] changes is the potential to demotivate Canadians from getting into business in the first place or working hard to grow a small business to a medium-sized business”. He is not the only one.

Harley Finkelstein, president of Canada’s greatest tech company, Shopify, said:

We need to be doing everything we can to turn Canada into the best place for entrepreneurs to build.

What's proposed in the federal budget will do the complete opposite. Innovators and entrepreneurs will suffer and their success will be penalized—this is...a tax on innovation and risk taking.

Our policy failures are America's gains. At a time when our country is facing critically low productivity and business investment our political leaders are failing our country's entrepreneurs.

For nine years, the Prime Minister has told Canadians that the rich would pay for the cost of his spending, but the truth is that it has been everyday Canadians who have been the ones paying. The Prime Minister has already raised his punishing carbon tax by 23% on April 1, and with $40 billion in new inflationary spending, Canadians will continue to pay the inflation tax that hurts the poorest among us the most. Whatever the Prime Minister says, it will not be him and his billionaire friends who pay for new spending. It will be single moms, workers and small business owners.

We cannot tax our way to prosperity, and no government program can increase productivity better than the power of the free market, spurred on by Canadian entrepreneurs. We need to celebrate entrepreneurship in this country, not punish it.

Conservatives had three simple demands for the budget: axe the tax on farmers and food by immediately passing Bill C-234 in its original form; build the homes, not bureaucracy, by requiring cities to permit 15% more homebuilding each year as a condition for receiving federal infrastructure money; and cap spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down interest rates and inflation. The government must find a dollar in savings for every dollar of spending.

The Prime Minister did none of those things, and for those reasons, Conservatives will not be supporting the budget.

[The Budget, April 18th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I want to take the member back to the Liberal platform of 2021, called “Forward. For Everyone.” In that platform, the Liberals' promise was not small; it was a major promise of $4.5 billion for the Canada mental health transfer, which would be implemented over five years. That was almost three years ago. Why has it not been dealt with in this latest budget? Is this another broken Liberal promise?

[Committees of the House, April 15th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, it is because they are a bunch of weak appeasers. The Liberals want to make friends with our enemies and treat our friends as enemies. It is shameful.

This is a time for moral clarity. We need to be standing with Israel, one hundred per cent.

[Committees of the House, April 15th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, the first words that come to mind when I think about what my colleague just expressed are these: It is Neville Chamberlain-level appeasement.

We cannot say that we stand with Israel or that Israel has a right to defend itself with credibility when we then say that we are not going to sell Israel weapons after it was attacked by Iran's proxy, Hamas, and after it got attacked directly by Iran. That decision cannot stand. It has to be reversed. It has to be reversed right now.

[Committees of the House, April 15th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I want to take this opportunity to say one thing that I did not have the chance to say in my main speech.

It was published today that the foreign affairs minister was speaking with her counterpart in Israel. She said to him, “Take the win.” Imagine that.

I wonder what my friend from Winnipeg North would say if this happened in Canada, around Winnipeg. Should we de-escalate? Should we just take the win? We happen to have the technology to knock them down.

With friends like these Liberals, who needs enemies?

[Committees of the House, April 15th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise today to speak to this important motion. The motion we are dealing with is a concurrence motion that calls for a number of things, but the one I mainly want to talk about today is the first part of the motion, which calls on Canada to designate the IRGC as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code and expel the estimated 700 Iranian agents operating in Canada.

I wish I could say that to do this was obvious and that it had been done already. Many people watching this debate tonight may not realize that Parliament actually voted to do this exact thing six years ago. Sometimes I wonder what we are doing in this place. We are elected. We are spending billions of dollars renovating Centre Block. These places are supposed to mean something. They represent the will of the common people. When we vote as a Parliament to do something, it should be done. If there is a good reason for it not to be done, I am all ears.

I keep asking myself this: What will it take for the Prime Minister to actually list the IRGC as a terrorist entity? The Liberals are now using Liberal speak. They are saying they have to responsibly list. I have never heard those two words put together in my life, responsibly list, unless one is making a grocery list or something. What do they mean by that? What will it take for the Prime Minister to act responsibly?

The IRGC has been a bad actor in the region and throughout the world for decades. It is not a secret. The IRGC does not hide it either. We know that there are 700 agents wreaking havoc on Persian and Jewish communities. Who knows what else they have gotten into?

What if, for instance, the IRGC shot down an aircraft and killed Canadian citizens? If that were to happen, would the government register the IRGC as a terrorist entity? The answer is no, because it happened. That was done. It pains me to have to say it again. PS752 was shot down, killing 55 Canadians and 20 permanent residents. The call came after Parliament already voted and the democratic will of the Canadian people had been expressed. The call came again from the House to please ban the IRGC and list it as a terrorist entity. Apparently, it fell on deaf ears.

Would it take the IRGC murdering “woman, life, freedom” activists, such as Mahsa Amini, to finally bring in a ban on the IRGC? I always thought, because I heard the Prime Minister say this back in 2015, that the government had a feminist foreign policy. Where is it? The IRGC murdered activists in cold blood. The calls came out again from this democratic institution to ban the IRGC and do the right thing. The government said we have to responsibly list, whatever that means.

What will it take for the Prime Minister to act responsibly? Would it take Iran and the IRGC orchestrating a terror attack in Israel in which 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians were killed and 250 others were kidnapped? Our friend, democratic ally Israel, gets attacked and its people slaughtered in their own homes. I know this because I walked among those homes.

When I was in Israel in November, I walked through the burned, shot-up and blackened homes of Kibbutz Kfar Aza and saw the devastation that Hamas, the Iranian IRGC proxy, wrought on the innocent civilians of Israel. Would it take something such as that for the Liberal government to finally decide to ban the IRGC? Apparently, it would not.

How about 700 IRGC agents across the country harassing Persian and Jewish communities? Mr. Speaker, imagine a circumstance in which Iran decided to send 170 armed drones from its territory directly to Israel. Such a scenario seems unimaginable. Would it make the government finally realize that it is time to ban the IRGC?

What if Iran sent 30 cruise missiles or 120 ballistic missiles? What if such an eventuality took place? What if it did something so heinous to our friend and ally Israel?

However, Iran did do it. It did it on Saturday night, on Shabbat in Israel, because it wants to kill Jews. It wants to do that directly and indirectly, through proxies such as Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas. That is Iran's goal, and Canada, as an ally of the only democratic state in the Middle East, has a moral obligation to stand up and do the right thing.

Again, what is this “responsibly list” business? Some will say there are some low-level IRGC conscripts who are living in Canada now; surely we should not do anything that would hurt them. What about the fact that our own citizens and our allies are being hurt? I have my doubts that this is the issue, because all they have really said in the last six years is that we need to look out for these poor conscripts who really had nothing to do with the conflict other than the fact they spent a year in the IRGC. However, if this is actually the reason, then let us find a solution to that problem, but not doing anything at this point is simply not an option.

I also want to briefly talk about the horrendous motion the Liberals and the NDP in the House gave a standing ovation to themselves for a couple of weeks ago. It did not punish the IRGC. We can imagine punishing the IRGC, which would make sense. It did not punish Hamas. The motion punished Israel. There was a motion passed by the House that actually punished Israel and rewarded Hamas.

It punished Israel by reinstating funding to UNRWA, which is a subject of a whole other debate, but UNRWA employees were complicit and acted directly in the slaughter of Israeli citizens on that day. We should not be funding organizations that fund terror. What else did the motion do? It banned arms sales. What foresight. What a brilliant move that the House of Commons would vote to ban arms sales to our friend and ally Israel.

We ban arms sales to Israel and now Iran shoots cruise missiles, drones and ballistic missiles at Israel. The Prime Minister says that we stand with Israel and that it has a right to defend itself, but we are not going to sell it any arms. What a hypocrite. Such a level of hypocrisy has never before been seen in the House, and it cannot stand.

I would like to ask for unanimous consent for the following motion: “That, notwithstanding any standing order, special order, or usual practices of the House, the motion to concur—

[Questions on the Order Paper, April 8th, 2024]

With regard to what the Minister of Finance and officials in the Department of Finance knew about the allegations contained in a February 6, 2024, report from Sam Cooper that, since 2015, more than 10 Toronto-area branches of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) had issued at least $500 million in home loans to diaspora buyers claiming exaggerated incomes or non-existent jobs outside of Canada: (a) were the minister and Department of Finance officials aware of these allegations prior to approving the acquisition of the HSBC by the Royal Bank of Canada in December 2023, and, if so, what impact did these allegations have on the approval decision; (b) was the government aware that these fraudulently obtained mortgages facilitated a large money laundering operation, and, if so, when did it become aware; and (c) what action, if any, is the government taking in response to these allegations?

[Finance, April 8th, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, what is keeping interest rates so high is Liberal deficit spending. That is what. Now we can add Scotiabank to the long list of economists saying that after eight years, the NDP-Liberal government is not worth the cost. Record-high deficits are keeping housing, food and fuel at record-high prices.

Will the Prime Minister fix the budget and adopt our common-sense Conservative policy by bringing in a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down inflation and interest rates?

[Foreign Affairs, March 21st, 2024]

Mr. Speaker, Iran shot down flight PS752, killing 55 Canadians and 30 permanent residents, yet today, 700 IRGC terrorists still operate on Canadian soil, terrorizing Persian and Jewish communities. Five years after Parliament voted to ban the IRGC, the Prime Minister seems more concerned with punishing our democratic ally Israel, and rewarding Hamas terrorists, than going after the IRGC in Canada.

When will the Prime Minister finally stick up for Canadians and ban the IRGC?