Rising Prices in Canada
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
161.83542
Summary
In this episode, Kelly McCauley returns to the show to talk about rising food prices and the impact it will have on the Canadian economy. We also talk about the impact of the carbon tax and how it will impact the Canadian energy sector.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello and welcome once again to The Blueprints. This is Canada's Conservative Podcast. I'm
00:00:07.300
your host, Jamie Schmael, Member of Parliament for Halliburton, for the likes Brock, with
00:00:10.940
new content every single Tuesday, 1.30pm Eastern Time. We do appreciate you joining us today.
00:00:16.880
If you can't watch or listen to it right this moment, download it later on on platforms
00:00:20.960
like CastBox, iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, you name it, it is out there and together
00:00:25.480
we can push back against the ever-moving Liberal agenda. If you help us, like, subscribe,
00:00:30.840
comment, share this program. And again, you will reach someone in your social media network
00:00:35.260
that might not be open, that might, sorry, be open to hearing the Conservative message that
00:00:39.320
might not be getting it from the mainstream media. And of course, with this new content,
00:00:43.540
we have some pretty important stuff to talk about. We're bringing back Kelly McCauley,
00:00:47.200
a good friend of the show, Member of Parliament for Edmonton West. Thanks for coming back.
00:00:51.240
Pleasure, Jamie. Thanks for inviting me. It's been a while since I've been here. I think the
00:00:56.160
last time I was here, we weren't doing videos, just pure podcast. Well, that's because you
00:01:00.060
overdressed for the occasion, but so we have to limit your appearances. I took my tie off when I
00:01:06.900
saw that you were wearing a hoodie. Well, you know. Listen, congratulations on your election
00:01:12.460
victory last month. Congratulations on six years anniversary today on your first election victory.
00:01:18.720
Well done. Likewise. You too, as well. It's been great serving with you as the newbie class once,
00:01:24.520
I guess, for the veterans now, I guess. That's pretty scary. But of course, you know, I have
00:01:29.960
enough. My hair's not going grave yet, but we're working on it. Pretty shocking news today.
00:01:36.440
Pretty shocking news today on the Black Locks Reporter. They did a comparison of food prices.
00:01:42.000
Of course, inflation is at 4.1%. It's highest in 20 years. And they compared food prices from
00:01:48.500
August of 2020 to August of 2021. I'll go over some of what they found. It's pretty shocking here.
00:01:55.500
Newfoundland and Labrador, the price of a whole chicken rose 35%. Absolutely incredible. Prince
00:02:03.020
Edward Island, chicken breast went up 29%. Broccoli, 25%. In Nova Scotia, butter, 42%. It's up. Beef strip loin,
00:02:12.420
up 12%. New Brunswick, hot dogs up 8%. We've seen pork loin, 13%. Apples, 15% increase. Quebec beef stew,
00:02:23.380
it went up 10%. A liter of cream went up 16%. Oranges, 17%. I can keep going if you want to. It just shows
00:02:30.680
hot dogs in Ontario, 15%. Bacon in Ontario, 19% increase. Manitoba, butter up 10%. Ground beef,
00:02:37.680
16%. Your province of Alberta. Yogurt up 6%. Bacon up 15%. Apples up 16%. Out in British Columbia,
00:02:46.020
we're looking at butter up 12%. Ground beef, 15%. Whole chicken, 16%. And the list goes on. That's
00:02:52.140
pretty incredible stuff. It's pretty depressing when you think about it. And what you have to keep in mind,
00:02:57.760
these are August numbers. Most updated inflation numbers are going to come out tomorrow, I think.
00:03:04.680
due out tomorrow. These are August. And this is before the energy shock has made its way through the
00:03:11.920
supply chain. So the high gas prices and high energy prices that add to every step of the production,
00:03:20.820
delivery, retail price has not made its way through the pricing yet. So I think we're going to be in for
00:03:27.740
a bigger shock tomorrow. And a month from now, as these things cascade through the pricing system,
00:03:35.160
if it's bad now, wait until truck drivers have to start paying, you know, $1.50 a litre.
00:03:42.360
Well, I think some reports, at least in the States and some in the Canadian media,
00:03:47.620
have already started to prepare people for higher natural gas prices this upcoming winter.
00:03:51.820
Yeah, well, it'd be good for Alberta's bottom line. But I've seen everything from a 400% to 500%
00:04:00.600
increase over last year. We've got shortages, of course, around the entire world. And the shortage
00:04:07.420
in Alberta, or sorry, shortage in North America. So we will see a big spike that way. People are going
00:04:13.700
to have to be paying a lot more to heat their homes, and paying a lot more carbon tax on that fuel as well.
00:04:18.640
And let's think about what we've done. Okay, so we've been spending. So the government of Canada
00:04:24.080
through the Central Bank basically printed $400 billion in the last year and a bit.
00:04:29.420
We're spending $424 million per day more than what we have. Couple that with the fact from 2015 to
00:04:37.960
almost the present, the federal government has done everything to stifle our energy industry,
00:04:45.640
one step after another. We're regulating our ports like none other. We've stopped the production of
00:04:52.020
pipelines, our ability to transport our energy from one end of the country to the other. All been
00:04:59.100
hampered one after the other. And now we're seeing the effects. We're seeing what happens when government
00:05:11.000
And when I think consumers are going to pay the price for this, whether it's lack of pipelines,
00:05:16.720
down to the states, lack of pipelines, east, west, it's adding to the bottleneck, adding to
00:05:25.100
our prices and adding to our pain. What is remarkable is the liberals have done everything with the help of
00:05:30.860
the NDP and their power to stop the growth of our energy industry, our ability to make money.
00:05:37.260
But at the same time, we've seen, you know, rocket, you know, skyrocketing exports of coal
00:05:43.740
out of Vancouver of all places to China. And despite everything they've done, you know, oil is the
00:05:50.620
industry of the past, et cetera. If you look at various websites, what has been driving
00:05:55.900
Canada's recovery right now from COVID? It is the export of energy. It's twice the size of car
00:06:05.100
manufacturing exports, more than all of our, almost all of our exports combined. The last four months,
00:06:12.220
we've seen surplus, you know, trade surpluses growing due to oil and gas exports. At the same time,
00:06:20.780
we've got a liberal government determined to destroy this industry and stamp it out. But this is
00:06:28.220
the industry that is creating the wealth, creating jobs for Canadians. It's mind boggling. At the same
00:06:35.660
time, of course, we're bringing in oil from the US or Saudi Arabia, prices exploding. But here we have
00:06:42.300
a government doing everything possible to add to the cost that Canadians are burdened with.
00:06:48.780
And we've also, I know during the pandemic, when it first started, Parliament unanimously supported a
00:06:55.900
lot of these relief packages. But what the Liberals have done, and you've done a lot of investigating on
00:07:01.500
this as well, they've also pushed a bunch of other spending into this kind of the language of COVID,
00:07:09.420
right, they think that has nothing to do with COVID, that that has just gotten out of control. Hence,
00:07:14.780
why we're having this big, massive problem on where we're going to get the money. Taxation,
00:07:21.660
borrowing or printing. You can do one or the other, you can do a combination thereof,
00:07:25.900
but they do have consequences. You could debauch the economy, the currency, probably both at the
00:07:29.900
same time. And we're starting to see that happen. Yeah, very much so. I mean, borrowing is just simply
00:07:35.820
creating a future tax. This money, despite what people will say, has to be paid back sometime. And
00:07:46.380
it's paid back in higher taxes. It also, of course, leads to our inflation, which is kind of a hidden
00:07:52.860
tax on Canadians. Four percent, we are not seeing four percent increase in OAS. Canadians aren't seeing a
00:07:59.820
four percent increase in wages, but we're certainly seeing a four percent increase across the board.
00:08:05.420
And I don't believe that four percent actually includes the increase from energy costs. I think
00:08:11.500
that four percent is outside of that bread basket. So we have kind of a hidden tax of inflation caused
00:08:17.580
by these liberal policies, but also a future tax that's going to be borne by our children and our
00:08:23.820
grandchildren, either in higher taxes or a much lower standard of living. We've seen, you know,
00:08:30.300
some decent job numbers come out recently that our employment's back to where we were pre-pandemic,
00:08:37.020
but we still have the Bank of Canada planning on printing, basically, or buying government bonds,
00:08:43.340
a hundred billion dollars worth a year. They've talked about maybe reducing it from two billion a week
00:08:51.020
to billion a week, but that still, even if they do reduce it, that's still an extra 52 billion dollars
00:08:57.420
that they're putting into the market or into the economy that, according to maybe some of these
00:09:04.700
job numbers, is not all required. Certainly, some industries haven't required fully, the restaurant
00:09:10.220
industry, hotels, some tourism, but by and large, just opening the floodgates that the liberals have been
00:09:16.540
doing for the last while, I don't think it's the solution. It wasn't the conference, it was Bank of
00:09:22.620
Canada did a survey and the experts, they said they've priced in into the bond market, they're
00:09:29.820
expecting three rate hikes over the next 12 months. Do you think what that's going to do to any mortgage
00:09:37.340
holders, anyone trying to buy a house, anyone who's paying for a house or a car, addicted to the low
00:09:43.100
interest rates? Well, this inflation is going to force rate hikes, and the Bank of Canada survey
00:09:49.020
shows people are expecting three rate hikes in the next 12 months, and even if they're going to pay.
00:09:55.740
Absolutely. I think there's some on the left that believe that if you just print more money,
00:09:59.420
you have more money, and life is good. Yes, of course, right? But it is, like you mentioned,
00:10:04.940
the backdoor tax that some people don't see until it's too late. When we went through the list
00:10:09.660
at the beginning of the program, of some of the inflationary pressure, and like you mentioned,
00:10:14.860
the natural gas, the energy that hasn't, but every dollar that's in circulation, it buys less.
00:10:22.300
Like your savings aren't worth as much. It really is something that you don't really see at the
00:10:29.340
beginning, but once it gets there, you all of a sudden realize that my shopping cart isn't as full
00:10:35.340
as it once was, and it costs me a lot more. Yeah, no, very much. And who is it that can least
00:10:43.740
afford all of this? Our lower income folks, people on fixed incomes, are going to the grocery store,
00:10:51.020
going to the gas station, getting their cell phone bills. Everything is going through the roof,
00:10:56.540
but not their wages, not their pension money, not their support. It's not a recipe for
00:11:09.820
So, we have parliament going back, I guess, November 22nd, which is absolutely incredible.
00:11:17.660
It almost seems like Justin Trudeau does not want to work at all. November 22nd. We have crisis after
00:11:24.300
crisis in this country. And Justin Trudeau just does not want to get back to work. We should be
00:11:30.060
dealing with this in parliament on a strategy forward. In my opinion, it doesn't include more
00:11:35.500
government or more regulations or trying to cure cancer with more cancer. We should be coming up
00:11:41.180
with solutions that can bring down the affordability levels, get the spending under control and restore
00:11:47.900
some sanity to Ottawa. Yeah, very much. I think parliament should be sitting.
00:11:51.820
And you said November 22nd, but keep in mind, that's only for one day to choose a new speaker
00:11:57.500
and then a phone speech. Then the Liberals will probably break again for maybe one day in December.
00:12:03.500
So, we won't be really meeting in the House probably to the end of January. So, that could be
00:12:10.940
six, seven months between the election and we're actually sitting. And by delaying this, it also stops
00:12:16.940
the committees from reforming. So, the Finance Committee, the Ethics Committee that has spent so
00:12:22.140
much time studying the corruption within the Liberal government, whether it's the We scandal,
00:12:27.260
the SNC scandal. None of those committees will be working until the House sits properly,
00:12:34.220
which we could see maybe till February. So again, yes, we've got an inflation crisis on our hands. We've got
00:12:41.580
fourth way of COVID going on. We've got international problems, whether it's Afghanistan,
00:12:48.140
dealing with Chinese aggression. And here we have the priority of the Liberal Party is sending the
00:12:54.380
Prime Minister off to Tofino to go have play in the water instead of actually working for Canadians.
00:13:02.700
I find it frankly disgraceful. And I don't think there's a kinder word for it than that. The
00:13:10.220
country, you know, we just went through an urgent election that had to be called right away. And now
00:13:17.260
we're happy just to sit with a basically a caretaker government with bureaucrats behind the scenes,
00:13:24.220
playing away instead of the government. And heaven forbid when the government does get back,
00:13:28.620
we've got a Prime Minister who says he's not interested in monetary policy. Well, it's not
00:13:34.940
true about inflation out of control. He was very clear about that on the campaign. The Bitcoin people
00:13:40.300
are probably ecstatic, but you know, everyday Canadians, you know, are in for a rough time.
00:13:46.220
Yeah, those trying to run away from government's manipulation of the currency are rushing to
00:13:50.140
different sources of currency like the cryptocurrency. But it does go to what we talked to, you mentioned at the
00:13:57.100
beginning, from 2000 to 2015 to 2019. When the government had a balanced budget, and immediately
00:14:05.820
turned on the tap started spending, what did we spend most of the time on? Hey, by the way, you don't
00:14:10.460
need to, you know, fire up the credit card yet. Bad times might come, because they always do. We should
00:14:15.980
be saving, paying off some debt and preparing for this. Of course, Justin Trudeau had no, no looks at
00:14:23.980
that kind of avenue. But I just started firing up the credit card piling on the debt. And of course,
00:14:29.180
the pandemic happened. And, and we were caught off guard. We're in our wiggle room went down. And here
00:14:35.260
we are, as you mentioned, issuing bonds, the Bank of Canada buying them with basically printed money.
00:14:39.500
And here we go. Yeah, well, it's it's continued lack of seriousness of this government. I believe
00:14:47.900
everything they're doing is former virtue signaling, they're happy to go and make an announcement,
00:14:53.740
but actually getting things done. Oh, we'll leave that for other people. And nothing seems to be
00:14:59.500
getting done like billions and billions of spending. If we were building hospitals with it, or this and
00:15:05.820
that. Yeah, it'd be all for that. But it's money that just seems to blow the door without any,
00:15:13.820
you know, oversight, we heard billions $20 billion of wage subsidies went to companies who market
00:15:21.420
capitalization increased half a trillion. Like one of my favorites was taxpayers gave Lululemon hundreds
00:15:29.500
of millions of millions in wage subsidies. At the same time, their market capital or capitalization,
00:15:34.380
their stocks went up so much, they're up to $45 billion of value. We subsidize communist Chinese
00:15:42.380
state-owned banks, communist Chinese state-owned airlines. We subsidize hedge fund managers.
00:15:49.100
Instead of finding those really in need, perhaps the small restaurants or hotels,
00:15:54.460
whose staff were struggling to stay open. Oh, no, we're not going to help them. But they
00:16:00.780
throw the money out to all these others. And it's, it defines logic, you know, what they're doing.
00:16:05.580
Well, it does, but it just comes back to they're not as serious. They're just not serious.
00:16:10.460
But I think they actually define success as the amount of money they're spending.
00:16:14.220
Very much so. It's funny, one of their own independent senators had commented about that on their
00:16:21.820
infrastructure spending, the historic once in a generation, $120 billion infrastructure that
00:16:29.180
they talked about so much. The report came out, their only measurement of success was how much
00:16:35.020
money they could spend, not how many roads built, how much productivity was improved, how many jobs
00:16:41.020
created. Their measurement for success was how much money could they spend, which is great if you're
00:16:46.380
a drunken sailor. But if you're a government handling taxpayers' money, well, you know, it's not such a
00:16:53.580
great thing. Well, even the infrastructure minister, the former infrastructure minister,
00:16:58.220
Catherine McKenna, didn't her department lose track of tens of thousands of infrastructure projects,
00:17:02.540
couldn't figure out where the money actually went?
00:17:04.460
Very much so. The parliamentary budget officer couldn't figure out where it went. Auditor general's
00:17:11.260
trying to find the money. The Senate committee couldn't find where it went. You know, one of
00:17:16.220
my favorite examples is start of COVID, the government gave an untendered
00:17:24.140
contract to SNC-Lavalin. They have the lab scam fame, $150 million to build field hospitals.
00:17:33.500
None of the hospitals got built, but they got the money. And we were asking, well,
00:17:37.740
who asked for it? Was it the provinces were asking for help? Nope. Did public health agency
00:17:44.060
ask for them? Nope. Well, who asked for these hospitals to be built? And the answer came back,
00:17:49.980
well, public works. Well, who in public works? Well, it wasn't anyone. It was just public works.
00:17:55.660
And it's like, well, I didn't realize that the Department of Public Works was some sentient being.
00:18:01.180
I think, perhaps like from the Terminator movies, but $150 million gift to a very liberal-friendly
00:18:08.940
company that was convicted for donating over $100,000 illegally to the liberals for field hospitals
00:18:17.180
that no one asked for and never got built. But you can multiply this by a thousand times when you
00:18:22.620
look through the liberal spending. It's frightening. Well, during the height of the pandemic, I think they
00:18:30.220
paid a liberal-friendly firm for ventilators, something they had not actually even made before.
00:18:35.820
It was new to them. Yeah. The famous Frank Bayless, money was given to his company for
00:18:43.580
ventilators as companies never made before, but also for a design that had not been approved in
00:18:49.660
any jurisdiction in the Western world or the civilized world. That's amazing. And I think just
00:18:58.220
recently, I remember reading, this is by memory, but I believe he, Todd Bayless, actually sold his
00:19:02.860
company for, I think it was well over a billion dollars. Sold it to a US company for over a billion
00:19:07.580
dollars. That's absolutely incredible. Your money at work, folks.
00:19:12.620
That is absolutely incredible. This is a thing we talk about so much as
00:19:16.860
liberals looking after insiders. And that's very much what we're fighting against and very much why we
00:19:24.700
need the committee sitting and why we need parliament sitting and very much why Trudeau doesn't want
00:19:30.860
parliament sitting. Of course, there's the issue of the Winnipeg lab where the two Chinese scientists
00:19:39.820
had been fired and walked out of the building, the investigation of that, where parliament ordered
00:19:46.220
the documents released. And I think that was one of the big reasons Trudeau forced the early election.
00:19:52.140
It killed, you wanted a majority of parliament so you could override that parliament's ruling that
00:19:57.980
they released those documents of what happened in the Winnipeg lab. They actually went to court,
00:20:04.540
first time in commonwealth history that government has gone to work or gone to court and basically sued
00:20:12.380
the House of Commons to prevent the will of parliament. And good for Speaker Anthony Rodebeck standing up and
00:20:18.620
saying, no, that parliament is supreme, or at least it should be.
00:20:24.460
Well, Kelly, we've gone a bit over time, but this has been a very interesting topic. I always
00:20:28.460
give the guests the last word. I'll turn the floor over to you.
00:20:33.020
Great. Well, I would just say to the folks in Edmonton West, thanks for trusting me again,
00:20:38.780
and it's an honor to serve. And I have to say, it's been an honor to serve with you, Jamie. You're one of the
00:20:44.380
brightest, best members of parliament outside of Alberta.
00:20:49.100
Somebody wants to return to the show again. All right. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you.
00:20:53.020
Next time, don't dress as well. We hope you've enjoyed the program. That was Kelly McCauley,
00:20:59.580
member of parliament for Edmonton West. We do appreciate your participation and wealth of
00:21:03.340
knowledge and the amount of work he has done in committee. He has uncovered some pretty scary stuff
00:21:08.540
that the Liberals are up to, lots of corruption. Just follow Kelly's work.
00:21:11.580
Now, if you do like the content you just listened to or watched, please like, comment, subscribe,
00:21:18.860
share this program. You're not getting this information out in the mainstream media, folks.
00:21:22.860
We need your help to reach someone in your social media network that might be open to this. And of
00:21:27.340
course, if you can't watch it all now, download it later on platforms like CastBox, iTunes, Google
00:21:31.740
Play, Spotify, you name it. It is out there. We do appreciate your time. And because of that,
00:21:36.060
new content every single Tuesday, 1.30 PM Eastern time. Thank you so much. And always remember,
00:21:41.260
low taxes, less government, more freedom. That is the Blueprints.