Ottawa, ON – Let me just share my thoughts and prayers for the 66,000 Canadians who lost their jobs last month. They’re added to the 40,000 who lost their jobs the month before that.
A hundred thousand Canadians lost their jobs this summer alone, having to go home to their families, their little kids, and sit around the dinner table saying they don’t know how they’re going to pay rent or groceries. They might have to move out of their home and find a smaller place.
This is a terrible time for them, especially our youth. Think of our youth who were already going through hell. Their housing costs had doubled during the time the Liberals have been in power. Food prices were unaffordable, their streets were in danger, and now they wake up and find out they don’t even have a job.
To add insult to injury, while we lost 105,000 jobs over the summer, there’s 106,000 Temporary Foreign Workers filling those jobs. Mark Carney is on track to let in a record number of Temporary Foreign Workers this year because he says the corporate lobbyists tell him they want to keep wages low and their profits high. Once again, he sides with the wealthy Liberal corporate lobbyists rather than the hardworking Canadians who want to put in a day’s work.
Let’s compare everything to what Mr. Carney promised. He promised that he was going to make Canada more affordable, yet food prices are now rising faster than they were when Mr. Carney took office.
He promised that he was going to reverse Liberal crime policies, and yet five months into his term, he’s done absolutely nothing and crime rages out of control. Just yesterday, another horrific attack, this time on First Nations people by someone who is once again out on bail because Mark Carney gave himself a summer off instead of reversing the Liberal laws.
He said he would build at a pace once thought unimaginable because we were in an existential crisis. What has he built? Let’s start with housing. He says that one day he will set up an office and this office is going to do things that will one day mean that houses get built. This office still doesn’t exist after five months of his government, and it hasn’t obviously built a single home.
Meanwhile, the housing crisis worsens from just being too expensive to being impossible to build, with his own housing agency saying housing construction will be down by 13 percent over the next several years.
And then the national projects we were promised. We’re five months in; he has not approved a single national project. In fact, he doesn’t even have a list of projects he’s considering approving. Today, we got the dream list published in The Globe and Mail.
This is, to be clear, not a list of projects Mark Carney supports. It’s a list of projects that he wants to potentially consider looking at and potentially referring to an office that isn’t even set up yet, that might one day decide to approve them and that after that, they might one day begin construction. But so far, absolutely nothing is getting built.
Then we have his promise that he would spend less and invest more. Well, spending is up 8 percent with most of the new money going to bureaucracy and consultants, while investment is fleeing our country with a record $63 billion of investment leaving Canada in the five months that Mark Carney has been Prime Minister and our economy is cratering.
In fact, after Mr. Carney promised we’d have the best economy in the G7, what do you know? The latest quarterly data: we have the lowest economic growth in the G7. That adds to the second-highest unemployment in the G7, the worst housing costs in the G7 and the most household debt in the G7. Those are the results, not the rhetoric.
He said today he was going to buy Canadian, but in fact, he’s giving a billion-dollar loan to buy Chinese-made ships so that our workers don’t get that work. He is doing exactly the opposite of what he says.
And today he’s flip-flopped. After being a passionate advocate for banning gas-powered vehicles, calling for them to be banned by 2030 in his book Value(s), which, by the way, was much more aggressive than Trudeau’s plan to ban them in 2035. He’s finally admitted that the Conservatives were right, just like we were right on the carbon tax.
But he’s doing a clumsy retreat, saying that he’s going to delay this mandate, so now businesses who would otherwise consider investing in automaking here in Canada will have to put that investment on hold while Mark Carney dithers for another year to try and figure out how he can ban people from putting gas and diesel in their trucks and cars. Mark Carney can’t even get his flip-flops right.
This really has been, as I said yesterday, the Seinfeld summer from Mark Carney – a big show about nothing. I think specifically about George Costanza. You remember George Costanza? He was a legend. George Costanza had this great episode where he had this fancy high-paying job with a corner office and he didn’t do any work, like literally none.
But he wanted to look busy, so he would storm up and down the hallways carrying file folders, he would leave the lights on and his car in front of the office building on the weekend even though he wasn’t there, he would yell into the phone even though no one was on the other end of the line, and they kept paying him because he looked so busy.
I have to admit, Mark Carney has looked really busy this summer. He’s been flying off to Europe to sign “declarations of intent” that actually mean absolutely nothing. He’s been holding round tables with other politicians. You’ve seen politicians patting each other on the back, congratulating themselves on all the excellent meetings they’ve been holding.
There have been letters written to ministers that then get leaked to the media and are reported with great fanfare on front pages everywhere. My goodness, he’s almost as busy and as useless as George Costanza. It has been a big show about nothing. Nothing is getting done under Mark Carney. Everything is getting worse.
The American tariffs, which he promised to get rid of by negotiating a win, are worse. The housing crisis is worse. Food inflation is worse. Crime is worse. Unemployment is worse. Everything has been worse under Mark Carney and we’re offering him some help.
Conservatives are willing to work with any member of any party to turn things around for this country. Our priorities for the fall session are stronger take-home pay with lower taxes and lower inflation, securing our borders by ending out-of-control Liberal immigration, securing our streets by locking up violent criminals and a self-reliant Canada by opening this country up for business with a Canadian Sovereignty Act that will rapidly approve pipelines, mines, LNG plans and export terminals built by the private sector – without tax dollars – that make money, rather than take money.
That’s how we will make our economy strong, self-reliant and stand on its own two feet. That is how we will make this a country again where anyone who wants a job can find one, they can get a home, affordable food, meat and potatoes on the table and a safe neighbourhood with a nice Canadian flag hanging from the front porch.
That’s what we’re working for. Let’s make it happen.