Parliament returned Tuesday after one of the least active sitting summers in recent memory, and Mark Carney walked back into the House of Commons to face questions about the cost of living.

Tamara Ugolini and Lise Merle reacted to the first question period of the new session on Tuesday's Rebel Roundup livestream.

Pierre Poilievre opened with a promise to Canadians that the Conservative opposition would spend this session fighting to save them money — on rent, mortgages, gas, and groceries.

The Conservative leader pressed Carney directly: does the prime minister still believe, as he said in March, that affordability is the best it's been in a decade? He introduced the House to Lolita from Mississauga, who is now working two jobs — as a waitress and as an insurance broker — to afford groceries Carney promised to bring down.

"She can't eat speeches, summits, or signing ceremonies," Poilievre said.

Carney's answer was to blame three ongoing wars around the world. The trade war with the United States, the war in Ukraine, the conflict involving Iran.

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These are pushing up fuel and grocery prices, he said, and his government is responding with immediate support — the groceries and essentials benefit, tax cuts for first-time home buyers, childcare, dental care, the national school food program. Twenty thousand dollars in savings for Canadian families, he said.

Tamara Ugolini was not impressed with the Liberal leader.

"Forgive me for not trusting the Liberals with how they say they're going to help," she said, "because their help isn't help. It's never help." She pointed to a Blacklock's report from January revealing that the Liberal government's national school food program — a billion-dollar initiative — claimed to have helped 400,000 hungry Canadian children.

That number, according to Blacklock's, was not based on any research, data, or measurable outcome. It was invented and presented as fact. The government is now spending millions of dollars to study whether the program is actually doing anything.

"Why can't families feed their kids by themselves?" Ugolini asked. The answer, she said, is that their dollar is worth nothing, everyone is working overtime, and taxes have now outpaced the cost of all basic necessities combined — a reversal the Fraser Institute has documented and that would have been unthinkable to previous generations of Canadians.

"We're paying more in taxes than all of our basic necessities," she said. "And people can't afford life."

Lise Merle pushed the framing further. The national food program, the childcare subsidies, the dental program — these are not solutions, she said. They are mechanisms for inserting Liberal policy and Liberal administrators into every corner of Canadian family life, with the money skimmed at every layer before it reaches the children it was meant to feed.

The fix, she argued, is simple and immediate: add an emergency food stipend directly to the Canadian Child Tax Credit. Every child in Canada is already eligible. No new bureaucracy required. "The reason they don't do it is because all of their friends are in the middle," she said. "All of those dollars are going to be eaten up by the administrators, the consultants, the Liberal insiders."

Lise closed with a point that went beyond the budget. Poilievre's promise to "fight to save you money," she said, doesn't go far enough. "We need Conservatives to fight to save us — not save us money, but save us proper. This country bears very little resemblance to the Canada we knew 20 years ago."

Rebel Roundup airs Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 11 a.m. MT / 1 p.m. ET.