44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 30, 2024 10:00AM
- Apr/30/24 11:11:28 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, how does my colleague across the way feel about the GST being now dubbed the DST and that, every time a Canadian goes to the till to buy anything, every cent of the GST that goes to the government would pay for debt servicing?
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- Apr/30/24 11:26:49 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the government has a long track record of announcements of budgets, etc. Often that leads to more spending, but it does not lead to the good outcomes. Every family and every business knows that they have to make priorities and have to sacrifice some things, even though they might be good measures, for long-term health and to bring about balance. This is what the government has not done. It has been phenomenal at photo ops and announcing good intentions.
I am a numbers guy. I come from business. What do the numbers say? The numbers tell me we are spending $54 billion now on servicing a debt built on good intentions and poor outcomes. We have ballooned the public service. There are so many places where priority decisions need to have been made, and the government has not done that. It is the very people the government purports to help who are being hurt the most.
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- Apr/30/24 11:31:38 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the people of Edmonton Manning have been very clear in the emails I have received in the past two weeks.
Franks says, “Stop spending our money like a drunken sailor, we cannot afford the debt.” Trevor tells me, “It is absolutely ridiculous as to how much tax Canada is being charged, where does it stop?” David asked me to “Please put pressure on the P.M. to start cutting Canada's debt and balancing the budget.” Mariette says, “This budget puts our kids further into debt.” Michael writes of his “utter disgust with the latest Federal Budget.”
The feelings are unanimous: This budget is a disaster. I can only conclude that no one in the government actually considered the contents. Maybe they were too busy watching television to think about managing the country.
I must confess that I do not watch much television. When I do, I watch documentaries or live sports events. Two of the things that I avoid completely are reality television and game shows. To me, there is very little reality involved, and the games do not seem to be all that real to me.
As a result, I have to admit that I have never watched the show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, which aired more than 15 years ago. It was a short-lived program with only five episodes made. The idea was to have a panel ask questions from elementary school textbooks to see if the contestants were smarter than a fifth grader. The top prize was a million dollars, tax-free. The idea probably offends the Liberal members opposite. They do not believe that anything should be tax-free, ever.
Contestants on the show have to answer questions about Canadian history, Canadian geography and Canadian culture. However, history, geography and culture were not the only categories covered on the show. There was also mathematics, which may be the reason no Liberal MP ever appeared on the program. When it comes to math, budget 2024 shows very clearly that the Liberals are nowhere near as smart as a fifth grader.
When children are in fifth grade, math is pretty simple: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It is not rocket science. Fifth graders know that if they receive a weekly allowance from their parents, they must spend that money wisely. Common sense tells them that they cannot spend more than they have. There is no such thing as deficit spending to a ten year old.
If they spend all their money, Mom and Dad will tell them that they have to wait until next week to get any more. They are not made of money. They have to live within their means and they expect their children to learn how to do that also, especially as they feel financially stressed by all the extra taxes the government has piled on them.
If children want some shiny toy that costs more than their weekly allowance, then they have to learn to save until they can afford to buy it. Stores are reluctant to extend credit to a ten year old, especially one who has not learned the value of saving.
As I look at this budget, I wish the Minister of Finance could go back in time and become a fifth grader once again. It is apparent that she and the Liberal Party failed to learn some important lessons in childhood, and now it is all Canadians who are paying for their inability to understand basic math.
A fifth grader could tell us that money does not magically appear. It does not grow on trees. We cannot just pick up loose bills on the sidewalk. A fifth grader could tell us that spending more money to pay the interest on the national debt than we have for health care is a recipe for disaster. Adding more debt does not fix the problem.
I will not delve deeply into economic theory here. However, the Prime Minister has asked Canadians to forgive him for not thinking about monetary policy, and it would probably be wrong of me to expect his caucus to have any more interest in such matters.
I must say, though, that there have been some changes over the past eight years in the way the government approaches its responsibility to manage the nation's finances. No longer does the government think it is possible to pluck numbers out of thin air, put them in a spreadsheet and magically produce a budget that balances itself.
Fifth graders could tell us that a deficit is not just a line on a piece of paper. It is a debt, borrowed money that has to be repaid at some point. They would also tell us that until that debt is paid interest will be charged.
In simple terms that even a Liberal could understand, running a budgetary deficit costs money. If interest has to be paid on a debt, then there is less money for the things that government is supposed to do for Canadians, things like health care.
Where does the government find money to pay its debts? It raises taxes. In other words, it charges Canadians for something they did not ask for and for some reason expects them to be happy to pay.
Parents who explain to their fifth graders how important it is for individuals and families to live within their means are being undermined by a government that spends and spends, while expecting someone else to pay its bills.
This budget would increase government spending and taxes and would bring us no closer to a balanced budget than we have been at any time in almost nine years of Liberal fiscal mismanagement. Apparently the Liberals' coalition partners in the NDP approve of this highway of economic ruin. This budget would bring in $40 billion of costly new spending that Canadians cannot afford.
In 2022, the finance minister said that the budget would be balanced by the year 2027. In 2023, the date was revised to 2028. Why do the Liberals not just admit that they have no idea how to balance the budget, since magic is not working?
Before the Liberals were elected in 2015, their leader suggested that perhaps his government would run modest deficits, about $10 billion annually before returning to the balanced books that he inherited from the previous Conservative government. We all know what happened. Record deficits followed record deficits to create a national debt never seen before in the history of Canada. With this latest budget, the Liberal-NDP government is farther than ever from doing so.
What we have now is a government that will spend more money next year servicing the debt than on health care. There is no sense in that, except perhaps to the members opposite.
Canada's per capita GDP is now lower than it was six years ago. While other countries have grown their economies, Canadians are poorer. The government's solution is inflationary spending and more taxes. It needs to go back to the fifth grade.
There is a glimmer of hope. Soon we will have a Conservative government with members who are indeed smarter than a fifth grader. Conservatives will balance the books, making the spendthrift finance minister and her fiscally unaware boss a bad memory.
The common-sense Conservative plan will axe the carbon tax, balance the budget and build homes, not bureaucracy, to bring lower prices to Canadians. Even a fifth grader knows that the Liberal government is not worth the cost.
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- Apr/30/24 11:46:53 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have also received many letters from my constituents about the same issues. They talk about how disgusted they are with this budget. The reality is that they see it as unfair. Part of what they talk about is how the government is promoting fairness, yet the Liberals have failed to mention that when they came into power, the national debt was $600 billion. Now, it is $1.2 trillion, and when looking at the budget, it says that in five years the national debt will be up another $280 billion. That does not seem fair to the gen Z and the millennial Canadians as they progress five years down the road because they are going to have to pay for it.
Could my colleague comment on that?
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- Apr/30/24 12:14:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the government will now spend more money servicing our debt than it does on health care transfers.
Our hon. colleague spent a lot of time in her speech talking about youth. The leading cause of death for youth in my province of British Columbia is overdose. Would the government not be better off fighting overdose and the opioid crisis than spending billions on its failed drug policy?
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- Apr/30/24 1:17:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my esteemed colleague for her remarks. For nine years, the government has been pumping money into programs and constantly driving up the debt. Moreover, productivity is in free fall in Canada. The government spends, spends, spends, but we see that people are lining up at food banks, that grocery costs have doubled, and that people are unable to put a roof over their head or pay their mortgage.
I have a question for my colleague. When are we going to see results?
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- Apr/30/24 1:34:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, we have seen over the last nine years that our country cannot afford the Prime Minister's budget. I am wondering if the member has any comments on the deficit spending. The Conservatives have noticed that all of the GST that will be collected in the coming year will go only to pay down the interest that is being accumulated on our national debt. I wonder if the member has any thoughts on that.
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- Apr/30/24 1:35:12 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, during the pandemic, we had to help all sectors, however imperfectly, to prevent them from collapsing. Where were the Conservatives when these expenditures were incurred? They were sitting around the table with Minister Morneau, spending tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. If I were the hon. member, when he talks about the nine years of the current government, I would be a bit embarrassed.
He is right about one thing, though, and that is that the federal government will be looking for additional revenue. For me, it is not so much the debt servicing that bothers me, although that is problematic, it is the fact that they are using these revenues to violate Quebec's jurisdictions, to violate the Constitution, to trample on Quebec and interfere in just about everything and nothing, rather than transferring the money to Quebec and letting Quebeckers be responsible for their own programs. That is what the members of the official opposition should be outraged about.
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- Apr/30/24 1:57:43 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, while I share my colleague's concern about the government's colossal deficits and the fact that it may not have a plan for returning to a balanced budget, that does not necessarily make the debt-to-GDP ratio more frightening.
I can understand why my colleague is concerned, but I am more concerned about seeing federal money used for things that are not federal responsibilities and spent in areas of jurisdiction that are not those of the government. Ultimately, my concern is that Ottawa will keep tightening its stranglehold on us and that Quebeckers will not get more for their money.
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- Apr/30/24 3:21:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I do count the hon. member as a friend and colleague, and I always enjoy chatting with him.
I will say that the IMF statistics are there, and the member can look at gross governmental debt and the net debt bases. The standards are developed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. They are commonly accepted standards. They are principles.
Canada's fiscal situation is measured by the rating agencies. I worked for a rating agency for a number of years before I went into the bond side of the business. I understand it quite well. Our AAA credit rating, which has been there since finance minister Martin's years, is there for a reason. We have a solid balance sheet, which is something we should all be proud of and something that I know Canadians hold near and dear to their hearts.
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- Apr/30/24 3:57:25 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, absolutely, I talk to small business owners from my community and across Canada all the time. In particular, when I was home last weekend, it was the number one topic that I heard. Many business owners, especially in the tourism and hospitality sector, have not gone back to their prepandemic levels. Many of them incurred a lot of debt during that time and are still not able to pay it off. They are seeing just a continual increase in costs. They have the carbon tax, which is increasing the cost of everything that is transported. I am in a region where we have wineries and breweries. The excise tax is affecting them. Payroll taxes went up. Overall, it is not a good-news story.
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