44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 18, 2024 10:00AM
- Apr/18/24 10:20:49 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, after nine years and nine deficit budgets, the Prime Minister has doubled the national debt. He has added more to our debt than all the other prime ministers combined.
He has doubled the cost of housing and forced two million people to rely on food banks. Now, he is presenting a budget with $50 billion in additional inflationary spending, while repeating the same election promises he has failed to keep for a decade. That is why this budget and this Prime Minister are not worth the cost. We will be voting against this budget to show the government that we have lost confidence in it.
The Conservative Party has a common-sense plan: axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime. Before I get into my common-sense plan, I would like to pay the Minister of Finance a compliment for asking Canada’s wealthiest some very good questions. She said, “I would like to ask Canada's 1%, Canada's 0.1%, to consider this: What kind of country do they want to live in?”
First, it bears mentioning that the minister and her leader do recognize that Canada's 0.1% are doing very well indeed after nine years of this Liberal government. They have benefited from enormous corporate handouts and grants—the biggest in the history of our country, in fact. They have received massive loan guarantees that protect them against losses from poor investments, which means that working class Canadians are left holding the bag. Millionaire businessmen like the GC Strategies contractors are surely part of the wealthiest 0.1% thanks to the gifts given them by this Prime Minister, such as the 100% increase in the number of outside contracts. In addition, by printing $600 billion of new money, this government made billionaires even richer. Lastly, the Prime Minister is a member of the 0.1%, since he inherited millions of dollars from his grandfather and placed the money in a trust that shelters it from taxes and protects it, just like those billionaires who invite him to their private island in the Caribbean. It was therefore a very good idea to put this question to the wealthiest 0.1% who are doing better than ever after nine years under this prime minister.
I am going to quote other questions that the minister asked them, including the following: “Do they want to live in a country where we can tell the size of one's paycheque by their smile?” After nine years of rising taxes, inflation and interest rates, Canadians are no longer smiling when they look at their paycheque, because it is disappearing. After nine years, Canada has the lowest personal income growth of any G7 country. Our GDP per capita is down from what it was five years ago. People have no reason to smile. Their paycheque does not buy them as much food or cover as much of their housing as it did nine years ago.
The minister also asked, “Do they want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry?” Obviously, the answer is no. However, that is the reality after nine years of this Prime Minister. According to the documents published by his own government, the Prime Minister admits that nearly one in four children go to school without food every day. After nine years of this Prime Minister, who taxes the farmers who produce our food and the truckers who deliver our food, a quarter of all children do not have enough to eat. We see today in the budget a promise to feed them. That promise was made in 2021, three years ago. How many meals have been provided since? Not a single one has been provided. After nine years of this Prime Minister, our children are going hungry.
The minister also asked, “Do they want to live in a country where the only young Canadians who can buy their own homes are those with parents who can help with the down payment?” That is the country we live in now, after nine years of this Prime Minister.
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- Apr/18/24 10:52:19 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am not finished.
I will continue in English. I want to share this great speech with English-speaking Canadians.
After nine years of the Prime Minister's deficits doubling the national debt and doubling housing costs and a new budget that brings in $50 billion of new unfunded spending on promises he has already broken, this budget, just like the Prime Minister, is not worth the cost, and Conservatives will be voting no.
Before I get into the reasons, and my common-sense plan to axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime, I would like to pay the Minister of Finance a compliment for a page in her speech I thought was extremely illustrative. She said, “I would like Canada’s one per cent—Canada’s 0.1 per cent—to consider this: What kind of Canada do you want to live in?”
Before I go any further, let us point out the incredible irony that, as she and her leader point out, Canada's 0.1% are doing better than ever after nine years of the Prime Minister promising to go after them. Yes, they have benefited from the tens of billions of dollars of undeserved corporate welfare handouts and grants, ironically supported by the NDP; of corporate loan guarantees that protect them against losses in cases of incompetence or dishonest bidding; of contracts, of which there are now $21 billion, granted to outside and highly paid consultants, many of them making millions of dollars a year in taxpayer contracts for work that could be done inside the government itself if that work if of any value at all; and finally, of those grand fortunes that have been inflated by the $600 billion of inflationary money printing that has transferred wealth from the working class to the wealthiest among us. That 0.1% is doing better than ever after nine years of the Prime Minister pretending he would get tough on them.
Let me go on. I am interrupting myself. The Minister of Finance asked, “Do you want to live in a country where you can tell the size of someone’s paycheque by their smile?” Wow. How many Canadians are smiling when they look at their paycheque today? People are not smiling at all because a paycheque cannot buy them a basket of affordable food, according to Sylvain Charlebois, the food professor. He has said that the cost of a basket of food has gone up by thousands of dollars per year, but the majority of Canadians are spending hundreds of dollars less than is required to buy that basket. That means they are not getting enough food. We live in a country now where the average paycheque cannot pay the average rent, so nobody is smiling when they look at their paycheque.
The minister went on to ask, “Do you want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry?” According to the Prime Minister, one in four kids are going to school hungry after his nine years. I look here at a press release his government released on April 1, on April Fool's Day of all days, where he says, “Nearly one in four children do not get enough food”. In fact, it says that they do not get enough food “to learn and grow.”
No, we do not want to live in a country where kids go to school hungry, but according to the Prime Minister's own release, we do live in a country where one in four kids do go to school hungry. The Minister of Finance then said, “Do you want to live in a country where the only young Canadians who can buy their own homes are those with parents who can help with the downpayment?” No, we do not want to live in that country, but we do live in that country today.
According to data released by RBC Dominion, for the average family to afford monthly payments on the average home in Canada, the family would have to spend 64% of its pre-tax income. Most families do not keep 64% of pre-tax income because they pay so much in taxes. Therefore, most families would have to give up on eating, recreation, clothing themselves and transportation to be mathematically capable of making payments on the average home. For young people, it is even worse because they do not have a nest egg. They cannot afford a down payment that has doubled in the last nine years. That is why 76% of Canadians who do not own homes tell pollsters they believe they never will. Do we want to live in a country where the only young people who can afford a down payment are those whose parents can pay it for them? No. However, that is the country that we live in today.
“Do [you] want to live in a country where we make the investments we need in health care, in housing, in old age pensions, but we lack the political will to pay for them and choose instead to pass a ballooning debt on to our children?”
Are we living in the twilight zone here? These are the minister's words: Do we want to live in a country where we pass the bill on to our children with “ballooning debt”? She asks this as she is ballooning the debt by adding $40 billion to that debt. She asks this while giving a speech about the perils of passing ballooning debt to our children. She is the finance minister for the government that has added more debt than all previous governments combined in the preceding century and a half. It is worth noting that the Prime Minister has added his deficits as a share of GDP that are bigger than we had in World War I, in the Great Depression and in the great global recession of 2008 and 2009.
I should also note that the majority of debt that has been added under the Prime Minister was unrelated to COVID. The “dog ate my homework” excuse, of blaming COVID for all that is wrong in Canada, no longer works. I will add that we are now three years past COVID and the deficits and debt continue to grow, putting a lie to that entire endless, nauseating excuse that the government has made.
The Prime Minister has added so much debt that we are now spending more on interest for that debt than we are spending on health care; $54.1 billion in debt interest this year; more money for those wealthy bankers and bondholders who own our debt; and less money for the doctors and nurses whom we await when we sit for 26 hours in the average emergency room right across the country.
No, we do not want to live in a country that passes on a ballooning debt to our children, but after nine years of the Prime Minister, that is exactly the country in which we live.
The Minister of Finance asks, “Do [you] want to live in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury?” Who does that remind us of? Somebody who flies around in a private jet to stay on secret islands on the other side of the hemisphere, where they treat him to $8,000 and $9,000-a-day luxuries, and he pays for it with the tax dollars of Canadians and emits thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, somebody luxuriates in that way at the expense of everyone else. He shall remain unnamed because we cannot say the Prime Minister's name in the House of Commons, so I will not break that parliamentary rule. However, I do point out the irony.
I will start again. The Minister of Finance asks:
Do [you] want to live in a country where those at the very top live lives of luxury but must do so in gated communities behind ever-higher fences using private health care and private planes because the public sphere is so degraded and the wrath of the vast majority of their less-privileged compatriots burns so hot?
She says that the wrath of the majority of less privileged compatriots burns so hot. She is right that some people do not have the ability to live in gated communities, behind armed guards. Those people are told that they should leave their keys next to the door so that the car thieves can just walk in and peacefully steal their cars.
Communities across the country are being ravaged by crime, chaos, drugs and disorder. What she has described is exactly what is happening after nine years of the government. We have nurses in British Columbia hospitals who are terrified to go to work because the Prime Minister, in collusion with the NDP Premier of B.C., has decriminalized hard drugs and allowed the worst criminals to bring weapons and narcotics into their hospital rooms, where they cannot be confronted. We have 26 international students crammed into the basement of one Brampton home. We have a car stolen every 40 minutes in the GTA. We have 100% increase in gun killings across the country.
We have communities where people are terrified to go out. We have small businesses across Brampton and Surrey that are receiving letters weekly, warning them that if they do not write cheques for millions of dollars to extortionists, their homes will be shot up, and their children will have bullets flying through the windows as they are sleeping.
That is life in Canada today. Do we want to live in that country? No, we do not want to live in that country. After eight years of rising costs, rising crime and rising chaos, the Prime Minister is not worth the cost. We will replace him with a common-sense Conservative government that will bring home a country we love.
What does that country look like and how will we get there? Fortunately, we have a common-sense plan that will axe the tax, build the homes, fix the budget and stop the crime.
Let us start with the carbon tax that went up 23% on April 1. Now we see the raging gas prices at the pumps across Ontario. There is chaos as people are desperately trying to get to the pumps and fill up before the latest hikes go ahead.
The Prime Minister celebrates, saying that high gas prices are his purpose, and he has the full support of the NDP leader on most days, when the NDP leader can figure out what his policy is. The NDP leader has voted 22 times to hike the carbon tax. Both parties, along with the help of the Bloc, have voted for future increases that will quadruple the tax to 61¢ a litre, a tax that will also apply on home heating bills and, of course, a tax that applies to the farmers who produce the food, the truckers who ship the food and therefore on all who buy the food.
That is why common-sense Conservatives will axe the tax to bring home lower prices. We take exactly the opposite approach of the Prime Minister when it comes to protecting our environment. His approach is to raise the cost on traditional energy we still need. Our approach is to lower the cost on other alternatives. We will green light green projects, like nuclear power, hydroelectric dams, carbon capture and storage, mining of critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt, copper and others. We will do this by repealing the unconstitutional Bill C-69 so that we can approve these projects in 18 months, rather than in 18 years.
Here is the difference, the Prime Minister wants taxes, I want technology. He wants to drive our money to the dirty dictators abroad, I want to bring it home in powerful paycheques for our people in this country.
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- Apr/18/24 11:33:41 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, there will be no conditions. There will be results. I will simply tell the municipalities that they will be paid for the number of homes built. That is not interference. That is results.
The Bloc Québécois agrees that the government should make housing transfers. We simply disagree on the formula. The Bloc Québécois is proposing that money just be injected in building up local bureaucracies. I am proposing to pay the municipalities for the number of homes that they allow to be built. They can do that in several ways: fast-tracking permits, selling land, using any strategy that works for them.
What we want to fund is the result. For its part, the Bloc Québécois wants to fund bureaucracy, especially the federal bureaucracy that it voted for in order to finance the spending of this Prime Minister's centralist government.
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- Apr/18/24 11:36:53 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, the government gave the oil and gas industry $18.5 billion in corporate handouts last year and $65 billion over the last four years alone. This is an industry whose top five companies made $38 billion in record-breaking profits in 2022, while fuelling the climate crisis.
I understand that the Leader of the Opposition, if I am hearing him right, wants to reduce government spending. He also seems to like yes or no questions, so my question for him, yes or no, is this: If he were in government, would he end this $18.5 billion in corporate handouts to an industry that is already making record-breaking profits?
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- Apr/18/24 11:38:36 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, we know that Canadians are going to be footing the bill from this massive Liberal spending. We are now going to be paying more in debt servicing charges than we pay on health care. How does the hon. Leader of the Opposition propose that we fix the budget?
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- Apr/18/24 1:39:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member claims that no investments have been made in infrastructure. We know that the Canada Infrastructure Bank invested in the REM project in Montreal, a fantastic project. The Champlain Bridge was rebuilt using federal funds. That is why I am struggling to understand what he means. In other words, is that money down the drain?
The member seems to be saying that all of this spending is money down the drain. I would like to hear his thoughts on those two projects.
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Mr. Speaker, after nine years of the NDP-Liberal government, Canadians are struggling to make ends meet. This year, Canadians will spend over $46 billion to service the Prime Minister's debt, but the Prime Minister's costly coalition does not stop there. On April 1, the NDP-Liberals increased the federal carbon tax by 23%. This increase affects the cost of living for all Canadians, including by a major increase in gasoline prices. This Prime Minister is simply not worth the cost.
It is not just Liberals like David Dodge and Bill Morneau who think the Prime Minister's spending is out of control; former finance minister John Manley said that his spending balloons inflation and interest rates.
Conservatives will vote non-confidence in this budget unless the Liberals cap the spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down inflation and lower interest rates. For every new dollar spent, the government must find a dollar in savings, and it must immediately pass Bill C-234, in its original form, to axe the tax on farmers and food.
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Mr. Speaker, this budget is ironically called “Fairness for Every Generation.”
After nine years of the Prime Minister trying to make things fair, he sure has not done a very good job. Things are not fair.
Is it fair to every generation that every year life is less affordable? Is it fair to every generation that rents are sky-high? Is it fair to every generation that one in four kids cannot afford to eat? Is it fair to every generation that it takes almost 20 years just to save up for a down payment?
The Prime Minister is not worth the cost for any generation. This is the ninth straight year of deficit spending. In 2015, the federal debt was $616 billion, accumulated from 1867, when Canada began. Today, it is $1.25 trillion, double. The Prime Minister has borrowed more money than all other prime ministers combined.
The result is that, after 20 years of low inflation and interest rates, the Prime Minister's irresponsible inflationary spending has upended Canada's stable economy.
This year, Canada will spend $54.1 billion on interest to wealthy bankers and bondholders, instead of to doctors and nurses, to service the Prime Minister's debt. That is the same amount collected in GST. We should change the name of that tax from the GST to the DST, the debt servicing tax. It is also more money than the government spends on health care or on the Canada child benefit.
This is what happens when a Prime Minister does not want to think about monetary policy. The result is that mortgage payments have doubled, down payments have doubled, rents have doubled, the cost of gas, groceries and home heating have skyrocketed, and people cannot afford to eat, heat or house themselves.
Instead of reining in spending to bring inflation under control, the Prime Minister acts like a pyromaniac, throwing another $40 billion on the inflationary fire. This is despite warnings from economists, including Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem, who cautioned that government spending is at the upper bound. This will make it much harder for the bank to lower interest rates.
This is not a partisan point. Former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page expressed this yesterday, telling Global News, “We gotta get those interest rates down. So on a net basis, this is just not good for inflation.” Former Liberal finance minister John Manley also warned this government months ago that it was pressing on the inflationary gas pedal with its spending. Even former Liberal-appointed governor of the Bank of Canada David Dodge said he believes that this will be the “worst budget” since 1982.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. After nine deficits and doubling the national debt, Canada is less fair and Canadians are worse off.
Now the finance minister says that what Canadians really want is a stronger government to make things fairer. By making government bigger, the Liberals have made citizens weaker. Conservatives believe that smaller government makes for bigger citizens.
This is not a government that gives people everything they want. It is a government that takes everything they have. Members do not have to take it from me. Just yesterday, in the Financial Post, it was written, “we’ve become a growth laggard and our living standards have largely stagnated for the better part of a decade.”
Part of our declining standard of living has to do with the fact that Canada has the worst productivity in the G7. Our GDP growth has been driven primarily by population and labour force growth, not productivity improvements. That may increase the total amount of goods and services, but it does not translate into increased living standards.
This is a real crisis. From 2000 to 2023, the growth rate of Canada's real per person GDP was 0.7%. That is meaningfully worse than the G7 average of 1% and the United States', whose GDP per person growth rate was 1.2%, almost double. Our country is facing a productivity crisis that threatens to erode this country’s standard of living and erase many Canadians' hopes for a more prosperous future.
Just a few weeks ago the Bank of Canada's deputy governor Carolyn Rogers said that we have a productivity emergency, and “in case of emergency, break glass.” Even former Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau says the budget is a threat to investment and economic growth.
It is time to take action by, for instance, reducing regulatory barriers to investment, celebrating entrepreneurship, bolstering the profit incentive for private investment and loosening the federal government's tight grip on the economy. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister does the exact opposite.
There has been one change, though. The borrow-and-spend Liberals are now the tax-and-spend Liberals. On top of gouging Canadians with their April 1 tax hikes, they have decided that they know better how to spend businesses' money than the hard-working Canadians who actually run those businesses.
This is not a partisan point. Dan Kelly, president of the CFIB, said, “What worries me the most about [these tax] changes is the potential to demotivate Canadians from getting into business in the first place or working hard to grow a small business to a medium-sized business”. He is not the only one.
Harley Finkelstein, president of Canada’s greatest tech company, Shopify, said:
We need to be doing everything we can to turn Canada into the best place for entrepreneurs to build.
What's proposed in the federal budget will do the complete opposite. Innovators and entrepreneurs will suffer and their success will be penalized—this is...a tax on innovation and risk taking.
Our policy failures are America's gains. At a time when our country is facing critically low productivity and business investment our political leaders are failing our country's entrepreneurs.
For nine years, the Prime Minister has told Canadians that the rich would pay for the cost of his spending, but the truth is that it has been everyday Canadians who have been the ones paying. The Prime Minister has already raised his punishing carbon tax by 23% on April 1, and with $40 billion in new inflationary spending, Canadians will continue to pay the inflation tax that hurts the poorest among us the most. Whatever the Prime Minister says, it will not be him and his billionaire friends who pay for new spending. It will be single moms, workers and small business owners.
We cannot tax our way to prosperity, and no government program can increase productivity better than the power of the free market, spurred on by Canadian entrepreneurs. We need to celebrate entrepreneurship in this country, not punish it.
Conservatives had three simple demands for the budget: axe the tax on farmers and food by immediately passing Bill C-234 in its original form; build the homes, not bureaucracy, by requiring cities to permit 15% more homebuilding each year as a condition for receiving federal infrastructure money; and cap spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down interest rates and inflation. The government must find a dollar in savings for every dollar of spending.
The Prime Minister did none of those things, and for those reasons, Conservatives will not be supporting the budget.
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- Apr/18/24 4:01:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, everyday Canadians are paying for the exorbitant interest costs generated by the irresponsible deficit spending of the government, $54.1 billion. That is over a billion dollars a week on the backs of Canadian taxpayers going to wealthy bankers and bondholders and not to health care or child care. It is shameful, absolutely shameful.
It was not like this before the current Prime Minister and it is not going to be like this after he is gone.
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- Apr/18/24 4:42:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I would never cast negative aspersions on the member's community, and I thank him for spending time in my community and supporting local businesses in my community. He mentioned the last four years that he has been here. Almost three of those years were during the pandemic and that, indeed, had a huge impact on our community as it did across the country. It created a lot of hardship for people. We have seen increased homelessness.
That is why I, as a local member of Parliament, am working so hard along with many community partners, who are excited about the measures in this budget because they are going to address very specific needs. I had hoped that not only would he support this budget, but that he and the members of his party would have supported all of the anti-poverty measures that we have brought in over the last several years that have helped many members in our communities.
The measures outlined in this budget are going to help make my community and, I am sure, his community, a better place to live for many people.
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- Apr/18/24 4:46:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my hon. colleague and friend, the member for Simcoe North who we actually meet out in the middle of Lake Simcoe in rural Ontario.
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to the 2024 budget on behalf of the hard-working residents of Bradford West Gwillimbury, the soup and salad bowl of Canada; East Gwillimbury; Georgina; and the Chippewas of Georgina Island.
After nine years of the Liberal government, Canadians are worse off than ever before. Sadly, this failure of a budget will only make things even worse. The Prime Minister and finance minister have refused to listen to common sense and have presided over a shrinking middle class and record-low levels of national productivity.
Prior to releasing this budget, the finance minister promised it would be a plan to unlock pathways to the middle class for the next generation. Wow, can members believe that? The Liberal government used to brag about its ambition to grow the middle class. The first chapter of the Liberal Party's 2015 platform was entitled “Growth for the Middle Class”. The 2019 platform emphasized “Forward: A Real Plan for the Middle Class”. Now, here we are in 2024, and instead of looking to grow the middle class, the Liberals are admitting that because of them, the middle-class lifestyle, which used to be a reasonable and attainable expectation for living life in this country, is now something that few Canadians will ever enjoy. It seems that, over nine years, the promise of Canada is gone.
This is the day-to-day reality facing Canadians. Two-thirds of young Canadians have resigned themselves to being worse off than their parents. Can members imagine that? With this budget, instead of restoring that promise for our citizens, the Liberals are sending a clear message to millennials, to zoomers and to everyone else left behind, saying that it's tough luck and that they should have been born sooner or in better circumstances. However, Canadians, both young and old, are well aware that it is the punishing taxes and the high-spending agenda of the Liberal government that are to blame, and the policies have locked Canadians out of so many of those pathways that people used to join the middle class.
The cost of living is out of control. It has left half of Canadians living paycheque to paycheque. After paying for their everyday expenses, Canadians just do not have money left over to save, and others are resorting to charities and food banks just to get by. It did not need to be this way. Common-sense Conservatives have been calling on the Liberal government to restore the promise of Canada and to bring home lower costs by axing the tax, building the homes and fixing the budget. Unfortunately, the Liberals did not axe the tax. In fact, the Prime Minister increased it by 23% on the first of the month, making it so that families, rural residents, farmers and small businesses suffer even more.
For months, I have been calling on the Liberal government to address the unfairness that has excluded rural communities, like York—Simcoe, from the rural top-up. The Liberals insist on classifying them as Toronto, making them pay more in carbon taxes than other Canadians. After ignoring this problem for years, budget 2024 finally says that the government will look to better define rural areas, but it only commits to put forward a proposal to do so later in the year. Let us talk about a day late and a dollar short. This is just further proof of why we have to axe the tax for everyone everywhere.
The Liberals also have not built the homes, after nine years of the Liberal government. The government promised to lower the price of housing, but now rents and mortgages in Canada have doubled, and middle-class Canadians are forced to live in tent encampments in nearly every city across Canada. Even small towns like mine are seeing the impacts, as all forms of shelter have become unavailable and unaffordable.
Budget 2024 will not make things any better. It will certainly give more opportunities to Liberal ministers to pose for photo ops, but it will not help Canadians who cannot buy a home or who cannot afford to renew their mortgage.
With $40 billion in new spending in budget 2024, it is obvious that the Liberal government has failed to fix the budget. The Prime Minister has failed to put a stop to the inflationary deficits and has failed to rein in spending. He will continue to make life worse for Canadians. The Liberals are now spending more on interest and more on the debt than on health care. There is more money for bankers than for nurses. It is no wonder there is still no hospital in York—Simcoe.
To protect our social programs and to lower costs, Conservatives have called on the government to cap the spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down interest rates and inflation. That would require the government to find a dollar in savings for every new dollar in spending.
Instead, the Liberals are misleading Canadians, pretending that the rich would pay for the Prime Minister's spending. We all know that it is the everyday Canadians, the extraordinary Canadians, not the Liberal bigwigs and Bay Street billionaires, who have been paying the price. The government even admitted in its response to Order Paper question 2407 this week that it does not even know how many wealthy Canadians have fled the country and no longer paying taxes.
When Canadians look around at what this country has become, they see abysmal failures of the Liberals to address the problems that the Liberal government created. It is more clear now than ever that the Prime Minister is just not worth the cost.
I recently received a letter from a constituent of mine, Laura. I will read it into the record so that the government can finally understand the pain it is inflicting on Canadians.
She wrote that her family lives in Pefferlaw in a small bungalow. They are a single-income family. She is a stay-at-home mom of two, and her husband works 60 hours a week, just so they can survive financially. They received their gas bill, and over the months, the carbon tax has steadily increased up and up. Now, it has officially become more than their actual usage. They, like so many others, are struggling after the bills are paid and the groceries are purchased. Her grocery shop one day was $167 for just four bags of groceries. They have nothing left over.
She does not pretend to know the intricacies of big government, but she is also not a fool. She really feels like they, and everyone else, are being cheated by the Liberals, who rob from the poor to feed the rich because they lack the ability to budget taxpayers' money. They do not go on vacations. They do not eat out or take their kids to the movies. They live like that, apparently, because the Liberals need their money more than her family does.
The Liberals can choose to keep ignoring the common-sense proposals put forward by Conservatives, but it is shameful that they continue to ignore the plight of everyday Canadians like Laura. Every Canadian knows what a budget is and what it is supposed to do. By definition, it is a means to determine financial goals. With budget 2024, it is evident that the Liberals have no financial goals, no vision, no plan to bring back balanced budgets to our country and affordability to the people. Their only objective is to spend as much of Canadians' money as they can before they are sent packing. The needs of ordinary Canadians be damned.
Canada is broken. Canadians are broke. I will be voting, alongside my common-sense Conservative colleagues, against this budget.
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- Apr/18/24 4:57:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, to bring this back to York—Simcoe, it is the farmers, the working class and the middle-class people who are paying for these deficits. Let us look at this. There is $50 billion in new spending. That is more than we bring in through GST alone. I alluded to the fact that York—Simcoe does not have a hospital. We still do not have a hospital. To my NDP colleagues, I would say that we are spending more on the debt than we are on health care. It is unbelievable.
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- Apr/18/24 5:15:27 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, a year and a half ago, the government tabled a fall economic statement that showed a balanced budget in five years. Now the deficit is $20 billion. Since everyone started telling the government to slow down its spending, it has added $103 billion of new spending. That is net. The gross number is $156 billion. What I would like to have seen in this budget is some kind of plan.
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- Apr/18/24 6:39:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise on behalf of the Canadians in the frugal riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke.
Recently I asked the NDP-Liberal coalition if they would adopt a dollar-for-dollar rule for this week's budget. It is a common-sense rule where a government finds a dollar in savings for every new dollar of spending. It would allow government to focus resources where they are most needed without stoking inflation. The response from the President of the Treasury Board was embarrassing. More than embarrassing, it was sad and pathetic.
Her response was the parliamentary equivalent of the classic schoolyard taunt, “I know you are, but what am I?”
There is something about this so-called feminist Prime Minister's government that takes smart, accomplished, professional women from the private sector and turns them into shallow, glib bobble-head dolls in Parliament. If they are lucky, like Jane and Jody, they get out before the Prime Minister demands they shred their integrity. If they are unlucky, they work hard in a given portfolio, only to be demoted when they start getting better press than the Prime Minister.
I imagine that is why the President of the Treasury Board decided to ignore a policy question and reply with a lazy partisan attack. She needs to get back into the good graces of the inner circle. Any display of independent thought by any minister in the government risks bringing down the wrath of Katie, but falling in line and following orders is something the minister is especially skilled at. How else could we explain that someone could serve as defence minister, receive a first-hand look at the dire state of military readiness, then go on to cut billions from the defence budget?
That is right, the President of the Treasury Board is leading a program review. They are cutting spending from national security priorities so they can increase spending on Liberal re-election priorities. It is not quite a dollar-for-dollar policy. It is more of a “borrow $10 for a dollar” policy or, more accurately, a “borrow a trillion dollars” policy. They have borrowed so much money that the cost to finance their mountain of debt is more than what we spend on health care. The interest payments are more than all the tax collected through the GST. Incredibly, as if to fulfill the prophecy of Oedipus Rex, the Prime Minister has done in nine years what it took his father 16 years to accomplish.
Pierre Trudeau left Canada in such an economic hole, it took another 16 years to dig us out. Because of the government's historic levels of secrecy, utter lack of transparency and deceptive bookkeeping, Canadians do not know how deep this hole is. That is because, more and more, it appears as if this socialist coalition has adopted a kamikaze strategy.
They know Canadians want a change. They know Canadians are tired of the corrupt, arrogant, preachy, self righteous Prime Minister. They know no amount of new spending is going to improve their poll numbers. They know this, yet their strategy is damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. The socialist coalition started us on a slow run to insolvency, but now they are in a full sprint. This reckless spending is not achieving positive results. The more they spend, the less Canadians can afford.
Before the parliamentary secretary rises to read Katie Telford's latest talking points, I just want to remind them that the question I asked was not a partisan question, but a straightforward policy one. All the experts Liberals love to quote said that more spending fuels inflation, so I ask this again: Will the government cap spending with a dollar-for-dollar rule to bring down inflation?
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- Apr/18/24 6:43:07 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member opposite for the very entertaining diatribe she went on. The member opposite claims that she is not being partisan, but every part of her comments today seemed like a partisan attack. I know she specializes in conspiracy theories on her nightly news show, but I will endeavour to answer her question. Before I do, I will just clarify something on the defence spending. Obviously the member has not taken the time to read the document yet, but budget 2024 includes considerable increases to defence spending.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak about the work our government is doing to address affordability issues in Canada, while continuing to manage our country's finances responsibly. First of all, I would like to remind my hon. colleague that Canada has the lowest deficit and net debt-to-GDP ratios in the G7, which is recognized in our AAA credit rating. Canadians know how important it is to manage a budget responsibly in the face of rising costs, and that is exactly what we are doing. As noted by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance when she tabled the budget earlier this week, we are maintaining our fiscal anchor. Our federal debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to decline over the medium term.
In budget 2024, our government is moving forward with measures that foster the kind of economic growth that will enable every generation of Canadians to reach their full potential. For example, budget 2024 includes many ambitious measures to address the housing crisis. We want to ensure that people, especially young people, are better able to pay their rent or mortgage. To do this, we are investing in building more rental apartments and more affordable housing from coast to coast to coast. We are topping up the housing accelerator fund and making it easier for Canadian homeowners to add a basement suite or a laneway house so middle-class Canadians can be part of the housing solution too.
For first-time home buyers, we will be extending the maximum amortization period of a mortgage to 30 years on new builds, including condos. We are also making changes to ensure that renters who pay on time can have the rent payment count toward their credit history when it comes time to get a mortgage. This means lower monthly payments and greater opportunity for young people to buy their first home.
We are also moving forward with measures to make life in Canada cost less. Inflation is now way down, and in fact, it now has been back within the Bank of Canada's target range for three months in a row. We said we would continue to invest in Canadians, reasonably manage our finances and control inflation, and that is exactly what we are doing.
We understand that many Canadians, especially younger people, need support. That is why we are making transformational enhancements to Canada's social safety net. That social safety net is being increased through $10-a-day child care, the Canadian dental care plan, a national drug insurance plan and, now, a national school food program, which I am very proud to see in the federal budget.
These are just a few of the measures we are putting forward to help Canadians.
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