The Conservatives are prepared to reign in the Liberals’ spending by whatever means necessary, its leader threatened Monday in the House of Commons.
“We will use all procedural tools at our disposal to block the budget from passing, including 900 amendments, lengthy speeches, and other procedural tools that are in our toolkit,” Pierre Poilievre said.
The Conservative leader is particularly incensed by the budget’s carbon tax increases, which he demanded the Liberals immediately jettison.
Moreover, he blames government debt for record inflation and soaring interest rates, arguing the only solutiom is a balanced government budget.
Citing John Manley, the former Liberal finance minister who blamed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fiscal policy for difficulty containing inflation, Poilievre says the Liberals’ two carbon taxes will conspire at gas pumps to surge the cost per litre by 61 cents.
Poilievre also warned low-interest mortgages originated between the Bank of Canada’s quantitative easing program and its rate hiking-regime could result in defaults when a torrent of terms come due in five years.
“We could have people with million-dollar mortgages that are hit with three and four percentage point increases in their interest payment on those mortgages that’s $30,000 or $40,000 a year, which could potentially lead to a meltdown in the mortgage market,” Poilievre said.
“[The government] could help the Bank of Canada by getting rid of the deficit, bringing down inflation and interest rates.
“This is already a crisis, but it will become a massive financial crisis in the next several years if we do not bring the inflation and interest rates back under control.”
However, according to Ron Butler, founder of Butler Mortgage in Toronto, a crisis is not looming for the reason the Conservative leader stated.
Preponderantly, Butler says, mortgage rates will have declined by 2025-26, when the bulk of mortgages come due for renewal.
“I don’t buy it, it’s not even reasonable. The crisis is sort of happening now,” Butler told True North. “We could have substantially lower rates than today when we get there. In 2026, when people are coming off their low fixed-rate mortgages, about 17 per cent will never make it because they’ll have sold the house—that’s just the way it goes.
“Rates could easily be in the threes, maybe high threes, like 3.79 per cent, for sake of argument. After five years, they’ll be fine with 3.79 because they paid down a lot on their mortgage and they will have 30 year amortizations.”
However, Butler says the real crisis is runaway housing prices and how a sensible solution has not been presented to curtail them.
Additionally, if banks endlessly reamortize mortgages, Butler says it is conceivable people in their 50s and 60s could still have at least 20 years of mortgage amortizations.
“If banks keep reamortizing endlessly, when the hell is anybody going to pay off their mortgage? In some ways, it’s more sinister because every time you reamortize for a longer term, the bank makes more in interest.”
