44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 10, 2024 10:00AM
- May/10/24 11:08:36 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, after nine years of this Liberal government and nine inflationary deficit budgets, this Liberal government is not worth the cost.
This is especially true considering that, unfortunately, it can rely on the Bloc Québécois's support. Yes, the Bloc Québécois voted in favour of $500 billion in budget appropriations. That means $500 billion in centralizing spending, and the Bloc Québécois said yes. It also means $500 billion in inflationary spending, and the Bloc Québécois said yes.
As a result, Quebeckers and Canadians are paying more for everything.
Yesterday, in the Quebec National Assembly, the leader of the Parti Québécois condemned the Liberal government's mismanagement of public funds. The Liberal Party's governance is so inept that it has become an argument in support of Quebec's independence. Things are not going well. I would like to remind the leader of the Parti Québécois, who forgot to mention it yesterday, that the Bloc Québécois voted for $500 billion in budgetary appropriations.
When will this Prime Minister, who is being propped up by the Bloc Québécois, stop wasting money? When will this government finally govern responsibly?
223 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 11:22:20 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, the Governor of the Bank of Canada has repeatedly confirmed that the Prime Minister's spending is keeping interest rates high.
Many mortgage holders will face large increases in their payments as their loans come up for renewal over the next two years. That is the direct result of this Prime Minister's $500 billion in centralizing, inflationary spending, backed by the Bloc Québécois.
When will the Prime Minister and the Bloc Québécois stop their out-of-control spending and give Quebeckers a break?
95 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 11:23:18 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, the minister has been repeating the same childish line for two weeks now, but does he know that, when the Leader of the Opposition was the minister responsible for housing, rent in Canada cost half as much?
Right now, July 1 is shaping up to be a disaster for those who are looking for housing. The housing director for Vivre en ville, Adam Mongrain, has said that “the current numbers from the municipalities and the Tribunal administratif du logement show that we are currently headed for the worst July 1 of our lives”.
The government, with the support of the Bloc Québécois, has created catastrophic economic conditions for people who are looking for housing.
Will the Prime Minister get his act together and stop his inflationary spending that is just putting pressure on the economy and Canadians?
148 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 11:30:59 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, a lot of that spending does not kick in until after the next election, so I do not think that promise is worth the paper the minister has written on.
This week, the Bank of Canada warned, “Higher debt-servicing costs reduce a household’s financial flexibility, making them more financially vulnerable if their income declines or they face an unexpected material expense.” Considering that the Prime Minister has doubled our debt and borrowed more money than all Canadian prime ministers combined, could he please explain how this warning does not equally apply to his government?
101 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 11:32:13 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, after nine years of the NDP-Liberal government, deficit spending caused skyrocketing inflation, which caused higher interest rates, which are causing higher mortgage payments. The Bank of Canada confirmed that the Prime Minister's wasteful spending is keeping interest rates higher for longer. Now the Bank of Canada is warning, when compared with origination, that the median mortgage payment will rise more than 20% in 2025 and 30% in 2026. Families cannot afford this.
Will the government stop its deficit spending so families can keep their homes?
89 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 11:35:52 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, after nine years of this Liberal government, Quebeckers have had nine years of misery: budget chaos, criminals on the loose, unaffordable food and housing. Instead of thinking about fixing the budget, the Bloc Québécois is voting for $500 billion in wacko, inflationary spending.
The more this Bloc Québécois-backed government spends, the more Quebeckers suffer. The Bloc Québécois and the Prime Minister are not worth the cost.
Can this Prime Minister and the Bloc Québécois start thinking about Quebeckers and stop wasting their money?
103 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 11:46:01 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, it is National Caregiver Month, and 50% of women are taking care of their elderly parents or loved ones with a disability. One in five of those caregivers reports spending more than $1,000 a month to take care of their loved one. These costs are only going up.
The Liberals keep letting women down. For years, the Liberals promised families a simple, refundable caregiver tax credit. They have not delivered. When will the Liberals give women the respect they deserve and finally make the caregiver tax credit refundable?
91 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 11:56:29 a.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, rents were half as expensive then. It took nine years for this government to get its act together.
After nine years of this Bloc Québécois-backed government, they voted for $500 billion in centralizing, inflationary spending that is driving up prices across the board, pushing more people into homelessness across Canada. The Liberals' inability to control their spending is the cause of all these problems. Add to that a carbon tax, and we can see where that got us.
When will this Prime Minister, supported by the Bloc Québécois, stop his wasteful spending so Quebeckers can afford decent food and shelter again?
113 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 12:01:53 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I will take no lessons from the Conservatives when it comes to defence spending.
The Conservatives let defence spending drop below 1%. They voted against a salary increase for our members. They voted against funding for Ukraine. They voted against Operation Unifier. They voted against $40 billion for NORAD modernization. They badly mismanaged our procurement for years.
Today in the House, I have no lessons to take from that side.
72 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 12:43:21 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today in the House of Commons and speak to this motion, the fall economic statement.
I will note it is May 10 and we are debating the fall economic statement here in the House of Commons. Earlier this week, we debated the budget implementation act. Nothing shows the government's lack of control over an agenda more than debating the fall economic statement on May 10, three weeks after the budget address, which is the main financial statement made by the Government of Canada.
There is a problem here. There is a pace that has to happen in the House of Commons for legislation to get through and become law so that Canadians understand what their economics are going to be going forward. Today, once again, we are debating the fall economic statement, which is something that was delivered in the fall that we have not implemented into Canadian legislation. However, the government is acting as if that legislation has passed. Everything we see is the government pretending that there is no debate to be had here, that it has already been instituted into law and it expects this to be had going forward. Likewise, it put the budget on the table three weeks ago, and we debated the budget implementation act for the first time in the House in the last few days.
I am going to note for the sake of Canadians that the budget implementation act has very little to do with the budget that was delivered in the House of Commons three weeks ago. A number of measures in the budget implementation act, which was debated earlier this week, are from the fall economic statement. Somebody needs to explain to Canadians how these things do not match going forward. There is a litany of all kinds of virtue on paper but no plans to implement what is going forward here. The problem with understanding the budget implementation act is this: If the government is going to put the fall economic statement into the budget implementation act, people are going to have to understand what their budgets will look like. There is no detail or announcement of any of the government's tax increases in the budget implementation act; there are no details at all, so Canadians are still left guessing about the details it is putting forward here in the budget.
Budgets matter to Canadians and to businesses across Canada, but it is my job here in the House of Commons to try to bring some financial discussion about what is in these budgets, so let me talk about some of the issues the government talks about.
In Canada, real GDP is down. The government talks about an economy that is going well, but real GDP continues to decline. GDP per capita continues to go down. That means the amount of economic output per person in Canada is continuing to decline at a steady rate. The government uses a ratio here called the debt-to-GDP ratio. I know I have gone on about it previously, but I will go into some detail here because I hope that people will understand it a little better.
Canada's debt right now is approximately $1.3 trillion. That is the federal government's accumulated debt. Canada's GDP last year was approximately $2.1 trillion. If we take $2.1 trillion divided by $1.3 trillion, it gives us a debt-to-GDP ratio equal to 62%. That is our debt-to-GDP ratio, yet our government pretends it is in the 40% range, at 42%. Although 40% was the number it said it would not cross several budgets ago, it continues to cross that and let it grow.
How did the government get to this number of around 42%? It added back the pension fund assets of Canadians. That includes about $600 billion from the Canada pension plan, which is money that is deducted directly off the paycheques of Canadians. Those contributions by Canadians into the Canadian pension plan fund were raised again this year, so there is about $600 billion sitting in Canada's pension savings to distribute to Canadian pensioners when they retire.
The Quebec pension plan, similarly, has about $100 billion of savings in it for Quebeckers alone. In total, it is $700 billion, but this is not a $700 billion pool for the government.
The thing about pension accounting is that it is about assets and liabilities, as is all accounting. Although there is a balance on their financial statements, there is also the liability of paying that to the people who paid into it for years. Last year, Canada's chief actuary determined that, all things going well, the Canada pension plan system is sustainable to pay the pensions that Canadians expect for 75 years.
What that means is that it is okay; it is balanced. However, the assets and the liabilities are in balance; everything collected in there is going to be paid out to the people that put the money into it. Therefore, if I may say, it is not the government's financial asset. It belongs directly to Canadians, from money that was deducted from their paycheques, and it should not be used in their debt-to-GDP ratio.
I am also going to talk about where we are going with this, because pensions are a major part of Canada's sustainability going forward. Pensions matter in many respects. The government is moving in a direction to try to change that pension management system; it wants to oversee the system through its regulatory arm, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. That has to stop.
These are organizations that need to manage one thing, and that is the outcome for the people whose money they are saving. That is what they should be doing. Whenever anyone asks a regulator to go in and change what is happening at an organization, such as a pension, they are effectively saying, “Take your eye off the ball about what is supposed to be done here, and put your eye on something else.”
Let me tell the House what that leads to. That leads, as in the United States, to bank failures. There were bank failures at smaller banks, where they were not matching their assets and their liabilities. As a result, when interest rates changed, a whole bunch of smaller banks had a run on their capital and could not meet their liabilities. They went under.
That is an example of where people in the financial industry are distracted by other regulations being put on their plate by governments and regulators. This takes away from what they should be doing for their client base, which is managing their money effectively. Every pension manager, every money manager in the world has one mandate, which is to make sure that they are not losing money for their clients and are actually making money, hopefully at greater than the rate of inflation. We are not doing that in Canada right now. This is the reason we have falling GDP per capita. We have more Canadians coming into the country, and they are not keeping up in the economy.
Now let us look at and tear down what actual gross domestic product is. It includes the contribution of everybody. It also includes the contributions of governments. Government spending goes into GDP. I am going to suggest that, if the government's spending going into the GDP increase was not there, we would actually be in a very negative scenario. Pardon me, Madam Speaker, I should say overspending; again, the planned overspending is $40 billion this year.
The problem is that these things have to balance over time. We are a productive economy. We had a good economy before the current government monkeyed around with it and decided that it could replace private sector investment with direct public sector investment. It is wrong.
We continue to run deficits. There is a cliff we are going to hit at some point in time here, where we are no longer able to meet our needs going forward, because everything that we put into our savings is going to be whittled away into interest payments on our debt. This coming year, that interest payment is $54 billion. This is the government's number of what that is going to be. I suggest it might be higher, as the debt is going to be higher than it realizes.
That is $54 billion from Canadian taxpayers to pay bondholders, and it is going up. Even the government's documents say that ratio has doubled in the last few years. That is a significant increase, a significant weight on the pockets of Canadian taxpayers, who need to make sure that they are sustainable going forward here. It is madness.
I am telling the few people that I see actually taking notes on what I am telling them here that we have to get back to balance. This budget, every budget, should be about getting to balance. I request that they go back to the drawing board and look at what they can do here to get our economy back to balance and actually sustain this country going forward.
1556 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- May/10/24 1:55:01 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity today to speak against Motion No. 110, a national strategy to reduce food waste and to combat food insecurity. This is another example of the Liberals rushing in to save the day, to solve a problem that they themselves created and have been creating over the last nine years they have been in office.
According to a recent report by Food Banks Canada, in March 2023, there were almost two million visits to food banks across Canada, representing a 32% increase compared to March 2022, and a 78.5% increase compared to March 2019, which is the highest year-over-year increase in usage ever reported.
Why is that? Conservatives have been raising the alarm bell for some time about the Liberal government's ever-increasing carbon tax and its out-of-control deficit spending, which is only serving to increase the cost-of-living crisis that Canadians are facing every day in this country.
164 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
