- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Simcoe North
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $121,028.17
- Government Page
- Oct/23/23 2:36:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, maybe the government has not received the memo. Nobody cares about meaningless G7 comparative statistics. After eight years of prolific spending, the bills are finally coming due.
The government borrowing is driving interest rates. This year, the government has to borrow $421 billion. Next year, the government has to borrow over $350 billion. That pushes up mortgage costs for everybody.
Once again, will Liberals acknowledge that they need to rein in their spending and produce a plan to balance the budget so Canadians can keep their homes?
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- Oct/23/23 2:34:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, after eight years of the Liberal-NDP government, spending is out of control and inflationary deficits are pushing up mortgage costs. The Parliamentary Budget Officer says that the deficit this year will increase to over $46 billion. Everyone now agrees that spending is driving interest rates.
Every month, 70,000 households are renewing their mortgage and they are realizing that the Prime Minister is not worth the cost.
Will the government rein in inflationary deficits and put forth a plan to balance the budget so Canadians can keep their homes?
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- May/17/23 2:47:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it takes a hack to know a hack.
Last fall, the finance minister said that new spending needed to be matched with government savings. She said that the government needed to exercise restraint to not pour fuel on the fire. She also said that the debt-to-GDP ratio was the red line. That seems all pretty clear to me, except the government did not take the finance minister's advice.
Only one thing can be true. Either the finance minister is being overruled by the Prime Minister or another leadership contestant, or Canadians cannot take the promises she makes seriously. Which one is it?
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- May/15/23 2:47:18 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the finance minister and the government have quite a bad track record for making predictions. They told us interest rates would remain low, so we must spend. They told us that deflation was more likely than inflation. When inflation came, they said it would be here for just a little while. The minister assured us the economy would continue to grow, and now it has slowed to a halt. They are always playing catch-up, and Canadians are paying the price. We are now spending as much on interest on the debt as we are sending to provinces for health care.
How can Canadians afford any more of the Liberal government?
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- May/15/23 2:46:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, a year ago, the finance minister said that she had a red line. She said, “our debt-to-GDP ratio must continue to decline...pandemic debt must be paid down.... This is a line we will not cross.” What happened to that red line? The government has increased the debt by $4,200 for each Canadian family. Our debt-to-GDP ratio will increase this year, and deficits now extend as far as the eye can see.
Does the finance minister regret making this cast-in-stone, stone-cold promise to Canadians?
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- Mar/29/23 3:00:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Deputy Prime Minister also said, “The pandemic debt we incurred to keep Canadians safe and solvent must [and will] be paid down.” Even just a few months ago, the Deputy Prime Minister said that the budget would be balanced. That is another promise made and another promise broken.
Now the government is adding $4,300 in new spending and debt for every household in Canada, and there is no balance in sight. Why do the broken promises keep costing Canadians so much?
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- Mar/29/23 2:59:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, less than one year ago, the Deputy Prime Minister stood in the House and said, “We are absolutely determined that our debt-to-GDP ratio must continue to decline and our deficits must continue to be reduced.... This is our fiscal anchor. This is a line we will not cross.”
That is a promise made and a promise broken. The big spending budget yesterday would add $4,300 a year of spending and debt for every household in Canada, and it increases the debt-to-GDP ratio next year. Why does the government continue to make promises it has no intention of keeping?
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Mr. Speaker, I have only been here for a year, but I have been driving all over the city and I still cannot find the money tree. I do not know where it is, but the government spent $100 billion of added debt before COVID and spent $500 billion of debt during COVID. Forty per cent of the money spent during COVID was not even related to the pandemic. That is not from us. That is from the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer.
Annually, spending is now 30% higher than it was prepandemic. The only answer that this government has to any problem is to spend, spend, spend. Every six months, its members come back to the House and say they found fiscal restraint and do not worry. However, they just keep moving the spending line up; they just shift it up on the graph. Every time they do, they say, “Wait. From here going forward, we are only going to increase spending by 1% or 2%”, but when the real tally comes in at the end of the year, spending is up 6% or 7%, as it has been for every single year.
By the way, this spending profile, the 1% to 2% by which the Liberals are saying spending will grow, does not include new money for pharmacare. It does not include new money for the disabilities act we are passing in the House. It also does not include any new money for long-term health care. After a pandemic, one would think the government would want to give provinces additional money to spend on health care. We are seeing health care systems crumbling across the country, and the Liberals campaigned in 2015 on increasing health care funding long term.
The government initially said not to worry; it can spend because interest rates are so low. The Governor of the Bank of Canada said not to worry because interest rates are going to stay low forever. It was people on this side of the House who asked what happens if interest rates go up. Now we are going to spend more next year in interest on the debt than we do on national defence. We are going to spend almost as much on interest on the debt than we are transferring to the provinces through the Canada health transfer, which is what they spend on health care. Members can let that sink in. In 2024, the government is going to spend $24 billion more, for a total of $54 billion, on interest on the debt.
This is also a government that said inflation was not going to happen. It initially said that we would have deflation. The Deputy Prime Minister even went on TV and asked for people to please send her their ideas so Canadians could spend the cash they have in their bank accounts. I wonder if she still feels the same way.
The Liberals are now slowly sleepwalking us off a cliff. We are walking into economic uncertainty, and they refuse to admit that the world has changed. They are also committed to raising taxes. In the face of economic uncertainty, we are the only country in the world to raise taxes. We are going to raise the carbon tax and are going to raise EI premiums. By the way, I hope members do not like beer, because in June of next year, the excise tax on beer is going up 6.3%, which is incredible.
All the while, the government has also been growing the size of government. It has added 10,000 to 12,000 new full-time equivalent people every single year since 2015, yet services are going down. People cannot get a passport, cannot get immigration papers and cannot get a new pilot licence. Transport Canada will not even review medicals for people who want to become air traffic controllers. It is incredible.
What is the Liberals' answer? Well, it is okay; they will just spend more money. There is $400 million more in this economic statement for the CRA to hire more people, and I hope they are going to be answering the phone. In 2017, the Auditor General said that out of 50-some-odd million phone calls that went to CRA, 27 million got a busy signal. That is incredible. I hope those new individuals are not going to be auditing small businesses and middle-class Canadians across the country to make up for the spending hole that the government put us in.
Let me talk about the interest on student debt for a minute. The government is now going to give interest relief on the debt of students, which some might think sounds like an okay idea. However, here is the issue: We are in a deficit. The government is going to spend $500 million a year on taking interest away from the debt of students who are in post-secondary education.
The government's role should be making sure that additional students go to post-secondary education, not giving people a break who are already there. The government should be playing at the margins to increase the number of people, if they can go, who can afford to go to post-secondary education. It should not be giving that money to people who are already there, as this $500 million a year is money we will not have. Do members know who gets the economic benefit of going to post-secondary education? It is the student.
In fact, Alex Usher, who is a very well-known post-secondary education expert analyst, has tracked that students graduate with about the same amount of debt as they did in the early 2000s. That number has not gone up. It has been anywhere between $23,000 and just under $30,000 every year since the early 2000s.
This is not the United States. I know the government likes to import all of the U.S.'s problems here, but we do not have a student debt problem like they do in the United States. We can surely find better uses for this $500 million. Maybe we should give grants to low-income people who are not going to post-secondary education but who could afford it if they had more support. Instead, we are just going to give it to people who are already there for a problem that does not even exist. It is also expensive.
Dental care featured quite prominently in the House in a previous debate and also in the economic statement, so it is worth spending a couple of minutes on that now.
The government is going to spend almost $100 million in administrative costs to write cheques to people. It is going to use the same process that it used to give out the CERB, which relies on a self-attestation. Two results will occur: There will be fraud or there will be very little use of the program because people will be worried given what is happening now. They are getting calls from the CRA saying they need to give money back for the CERB.
The Auditor General is reviewing the process that the government used for the CERB and has not reported back her findings. I suspect that the government wanted to rush the dental care bill through this chamber before the Auditor General had a chance to tell us what she thought about the process for the CERB. Even the Parliamentary Budget Officer has serious concerns with the fraud that can happen.
I listened to a very good podcast called All-In. There is a guy on it, David Friedberg, whom I agree with maybe the least, who always says there is room for nuance in everything. He says that everything is not black and white, it is not elite or populist and it is not left or right. He is encouraging us to embrace nuance, but the government wants people to believe that if they are against the dental care plan, they are somehow against kids getting healthy smiles. If the government was really interested in that, it would have taken the same $100 million, given it to the provinces to increase the provincial programs' eligibility criteria and used the exact same funding mechanism that already exists.
Thinking that people on this side of the House are not interested in healthy smiles is not what this is about. This is about process. This is about efficiency. We are going to spend $100 million in money we do not have to set up a cheque-writing scheme that is going to be used for a few years. It is incredible. This is all happening while service levels are going down and employee and staff costs are going up. Canadians do not have any more patience with this high-spend, high-tax Liberal government.
In closing, I would like to say that the government seems more interested in wealth redistribution schemes than it does in growing the economy. That is pretty clear. Every program is taxed more, put in a pot and then given away to Canadians at their choosing. The Liberals hold strings over the provincial governments, which is very paternalistic, and meddle in a bunch of provincial affairs, saying they have to spend money on this and have to spend money on that, instead of just getting out of the way, giving more money to the provinces and letting them do their jobs.
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- Oct/31/22 2:59:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is Halloween and Canadians are spooked. They are spooked by having to pay 28% more for costumes and candy and spooked by the government's indifference about the inflation crisis, which the Liberals just wave away as being globally brought into this country. The central bank governor has said inflation is now more of a homegrown problem and Mark Carney, the former central bank governor, agrees with him.
Will the government show some compassionate, reduce its inflationary spending and put a pause on its tax hikes?
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- Oct/25/22 3:01:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, even the Parliamentary Budget Officer said half of the COVID spending was not even spent on COVID. The government said interest rates would remain low. It said there would be no inflation and then it said inflation would be temporary. Now inflation is out of control and the government is going to spend more on interest on the debt than we do on national defence.
The government's plan has not worked. How can Canadians afford any more of the government?
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- Oct/25/22 3:00:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, for seven years the government's mantra has been spend, spend, spend. It added $100 billion in debt before COVID and $500 billion of debt during COVID. It told us not to worry.
The Deputy Prime Minister said just over one year ago, “In today's low interest rate environment, not only can we afford these investments, it would be short-sighted of us not to make them.” However, now, in a leadership launch speech, the Deputy Prime Minister is distancing herself even from her own record, saying that now is the time for restraint.
How can Canadians trust the arsonist to put out the fire?
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- Oct/24/22 2:12:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, Canadians are bracing for a difficult period ahead. Winter is coming. Warnings about a slower economy and inflation resulting in higher food and energy prices are enough to increase the anxiety of all Canadian families.
On this side of the House, the Leader of the Opposition warned the government how drastically increasing the money supply could lead to inflation. Even a few months ago, when anyone raised concerns about the risk of a slowing economy, the Deputy Prime Minister called those individuals “economically illiterate”.
Do members remember when inflation was supposed to be transitory? The government spent years telling Canadians that deficits and debts were not a problem because interest rates were low. It added $100 billion to the debt before COVID, $500 billion during COVID, and now we are going to spend more in interest on the debt than we do on national defence.
Canadians are told not to worry because the Liberal government has found fiscal restraint, but how can they trust the arsonist to put out the fire?
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- Apr/4/22 2:34:27 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I guess if everything is so good, why do we need to keep spending?
The government's only answer to every problem is to spend more money, but now the chorus of warnings is growing. Just last week, Scotiabank said that spending commitments undermine the government's ability to tackle inflation. Even Stephen Poloz and a former Liberal finance minister agree that now is not the time for stimulus.
For a government who claims to listen to the experts, why is it burying its head in the sand when it comes to inflation, out-of-control spending and affordability?
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- Apr/4/22 2:33:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, last week, the former parliamentary budget officer indicated that this is not the environment in which we want to do deficit spending. The economy is in recovery, and unemployment is low, while the Bank of Canada is struggling to deal with inflation we have not seen in 30 years.
Does the Minister of Finance realize that additional spending risks making inflation worse, yes or no?
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- Mar/4/22 1:11:00 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-8
Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola. It is wonderful working on the finance committee, and I am learning a lot from him.
With respect to the interest charges on debt, we absolutely need to worry about this. One of the justifications for the government's spending using deficit financing early on in its mandate was that interest charges were so low. They told us not to worry. Now we see challenges with interest rates going up, and we know that they are going to continue to increase.
Now, as my hon. colleague has mentioned, we see that there is maybe a $6-billion additional cost that otherwise was not considered. Where is that $6 billion coming from? Of course, we could continue to borrow the money, but eventually my grandchildren, who are not even born yet, will be bearing that cost. I think that we need to consider this very closely.
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