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Mr. Luc Berthold (Mégantic—L'Érable, CPC)

Mar/31/22 10:32:10 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on April 7, the NDP-Liberal government will table its first budget. This is happening at a time when Canadians are facing the highest rate of inflation in the past 30 years and when groceries are going to cost Canadian families an average of $1,000 more a year. As my colleague from Abbotsford mentioned in his excellent speech, the cost of gas is at $2.09 a litre in the Victoria area. The cost of living is hitting record highs and families are having trouble making ends meet. Today, the Conservatives are going to ask the NDP-Liberal government to present a fiscally responsible budget, a concept that the Liberals may have forgotten about. The Conservatives are asking the government not to impose new taxes and to propose meaningful fiscal anchors to return to a balanced budget. That is what Canadians need right now. They need solutions, a serious plan from the NDP-Liberal government, in order to fight against the inflation that is affecting families, young people, seniors and workers. Everyone knows that Canadians are tired of paying and that 60% of them are worried about not having enough money to feed their families. Seven out of 10 Canadians say that their finances are a source of stress and frustration, but this government has not yet presented any real solutions to address the inflation crisis. In fact, the NDP-Liberal Prime Minister is only making the crisis worse. I remember the 2015 election campaign very well. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government likes to bring up the Conservatives' election promises. Well, I would like to remind him of the election promise that the current Prime Minister made in 2015 in order to get elected. He said that his government would run only small deficits of merely $10 billion and then return to a balanced budget when the 2019 election rolled around. That was the first big promise that was broken. Who would have believed that Canada's deficit in 2015 would surpass the trillion-dollar mark? One trillion dollars, that is 1,000 billion dollars. As my colleague from Abbotsford so aptly said in his speech, not even a year ago, the mandate letter for the Minister of Finance indicated that no new permanent spending would be introduced in the budgets. Perhaps it became clear to the Prime Minister that spending was going through the roof. The Prime Minister changed that requirement in the minister's most recent mandate letter. There is nothing about introducing new permanent spending. Since the last election, this government has held meetings behind closed doors to reach an agreement with the NDP. The meetings must have started very early on, most likely before the ministerial mandate letters were written, so we are worried that next week's budget will include many new spending categories and a record number of encroachments on areas under provincial jurisdiction. As a matter of fact, the Minister of Health announced as much during a press conference last week, when he talked about the five strings the federal government is attaching to higher provincial health transfers. That confirmed the fears of Quebec's premier, François Legault. In response to the NDP-Liberal coalition announcement, he said: “The federal government has no jurisdiction over how much money we should be spending on long-term care, how much we should spend on mental health, how much we should spend on hiring more nurses.... They have no jurisdiction over health care management.... We have two very centralist parties—the Liberal Party of Canada and the NDP—that want to impose their vision on all the provinces. I think they will run into a wall”. The provinces said where they stood beforehand, and the government was aware of their position. Even so, on Friday, the government set out five conditions for talks with the provinces about provincial health transfers. That is not surprising from an NDP-Liberal government. That is why we have concerns about the upcoming budget. Canadians need real solutions. The Prime Minister is only making the crisis worse. He has racked up debt and increased the tax burden on Canadians. He is going ahead with a new tax on alcohol. On top of that, the government is coming at us again with a 25% increase in the carbon tax, effective tomorrow. This means that gas will cost more. If gas costs more, then everything that is transported by gas-powered trucks will cost more. If everything costs more, then the government will collect even more taxes. Yes, if things cost more, Canadians will pay more taxes. The government has created an inflationary spiral in order to have additional revenues to supposedly cope with the looming crisis. What is it going to do with the additional revenues? It is not going to relieve any of the pressure on Canadians' wallets. The government's alliance with the NDP means that it will further increase spending. It will spend even more using money belonging to Canadians who are struggling to make ends meet. Putting any money back in the pockets of Canadians will therefore be impossible. This is unbelievable. How many young professionals have given up their dreams of owning a home, as their parents and grandparents did? The cost of inflation has driven housing prices up by more than 32%. This makes owning a home almost impossible. The dream of young families to become homeowners has turned into a nightmare. Rather than addressing Canadians' concerns, the agreement between the Prime Minister and his NDP deputy prime minister has had the opposite effect. While businesses and consumers expect inflation to continue to rise, some experts have said that the new coalition could further undermine Ottawa's credibility in its commitment to fight inflation. That is a fact. The Liberals are tied to the NDP. What is more, if I may say so, the days of financially responsible prime ministers, the days of Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin, are over. Today's Liberals are not the same. For years, Liberals made it their duty to do everything they could to return to a balanced budget and responsible management—we can give them that—but that is no longer the case now. How many Liberals were consulted on drafting the next budget or on the agreement with the NDP? Not a lot of them were. I am sure that there are a lot more financially responsible Liberal MPs than we might think, than the Prime Minister might think. It is not for nothing that he had to find some new backers through his government coalition with the NDP. He needed support. Indeed, given the budgets he wants to table, he would have surely lost the support of many of his backbenchers. Ultimately, Canadians are the ones who will foot the bill for this alliance. After years of deficits and fiscal imbalances, the Prime Minister will have to resort to taxes to fund his excessive spending. The perfect example is that he is refusing to remove the carbon tax, which will go into effect tomorrow. The motion moved today is calling on the government to present a federal budget with a meaningful fiscal anchor and to limit government spending. Instead of spending money on partisan projects, it is time for the Prime Minister to invest in important sectors such as broadband connectivity in the regions. This will make it possible to accelerate the arrival of foreign workers and help our economy. I am asking all my colleagues to vote for the motion moved by my colleague from Abbotsford.

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